In this paper, a hybrid method for embedding a meshfree smoothed particle hydrodynamics into mesh-based ALE hydro schemes is presented. The method relies on the embedded mesh framework presented in Puso et al. (2015, 2012) and utilizes SPH (Owen, 2010) in the solid foreground; when an appropriate damage or failure model is used with SPH, it becomes a natural way to model material fracture and cracking in high-explosive driven experiments. We provide various examples which validate the coupling between SPH and the embedded mesh method. •Foreground SPH particles with immersed type coupling to the background ALE mesh.•Proposed a simple scheme to form an airtight surface around the SPH particles.•Extending the semi-explicit coupling using a stabilized Lagrange multiplier approach to handle the SPH equations.•Verification of the method with previous embedded mesh calculations of a plate blast problem.•Validation of the method on hypervelocity impact and high explosive experiments with fragmentation.