Such weapons, he said, can “reverse the paradigm” for potential adversaries who are now spending heavily on capabilities to deny U.S. forces access to key areas and battlefields and who may have control of the airspace above certain future battlefields, Mr. McCarthy said.

Indeed, China has put a heavy priority on a strategy known in military circles as anti-access and area denial (A2AD). Such a policy — a combination of defensive systems, artillery, radar and other tools — seeks to deny an enemy the ability to occupy or move through a specific area of land, air or sea.

The strategy, specialists say, would be vital if Chinese forces mount a full-scale invasion of Taiwan and need to keep American forces from coming to the island’s aid. If executed correctly, the A2AD approach could keep U.S. ships, planes, drones and ground forces away from the fight.

Col. Rafferty last year suggested the SLRC could involve a scaling-up of the existing arsenal, perhaps the use of new, rocket-boosted shells that could be fired from the M109 howitzer.

Still, the Army’s long-range cannon program is years from delivering a prototype. In addition to the technological challenges of firing projectiles accurately at targets 1,000 miles away — roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Topeka, Kansas, the Pentagon also must ensure that the cost of the advanced weapon doesn’t become prohibitive.

Officials said research is underway at the Center for Army Analysis and the Research and Analysis Center at White Sands Missile Range, key hubs for Army research and development.

Mr. McCarthy, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and a host of other top Pentagon officials have stressed the importance of long-range precision weaponry and how it is a critical piece of the nation’s 21st-century security strategy.

If the long-range cannon comes to fruition, Mr. McCarthy said, it will represent a massive step forward.

“We have run all the simulations that shows the feasibility we’ve procured, the material to start this,” he told The Times. “That capability, in particular championed by Gen. Milley personally, is one that we think … can yield the outcome [that] would be a game-changing technology for us.”

(Excerpt from The Washington Times. Article by Ben Wolfgang and Lauren Meier.)