While available documents did not detail how many ARRW missiles the Air Force intends to buy, the request officially transitions the hypersonic weapon from its troubled development and testing phase and into formal procurement and production. The move comes after the Air Force considered cancelling the program last year after it completed its rapid prototyping effort in August 2024.

Made by prime contractor Lockheed Martin, ARRW is one of the two types of hypersonic weapons the Air Force’s is pursuing — the other being the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM), under development by RTX-subsidiary Raytheon.

ARRW is a boost-glide missile that can be launched from larger aircraft such as the B-52 Stratofortress bomber, and like all hypersonics can fly at speeds of Mach 5 or faster and maneuver during flight.

The fate of ARRW has been up in the air since March 2024 when the Air Force announced it didn’t include any funds to procure the missiles in its budget request for fiscal 2025. The decision was not a surprise, as the program faced a series of setbacks during its development phase — including at least one failed all-up-round flight test that occurred in 2023.

At the time, Air Force leadership said they would pause the ARRW program to analyze the data gathered during its flight test campaign, while also shifting focus to the development of HACM.

But news that ARRW was no longer on the chopping block was first hinted at by Gen. David Allvin, the service’s chief of staff, earlier this month during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

“I will tell you that we are developing — and you’ll see in the budget submission, assuming it’s what we put forward — two different programs. One is a larger form factor that is more strategic [and] long range that we have already tested several times — it’s called ARRW. The other is HACM,” Allvin told lawmakers June 5.

The Air Force first awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth up to $480 million to design and develop ARRW. Since then, the service has spent roughly $1.4 billion in research-and-development funds on the hypersonic weapon.

As for HACM, the Air Force is requesting $802.8 million in fiscal 2026 to continue the missile’s development, according to budget documents. The service received $466.7 million in FY’25 appropriations, and the increase in funds for this year are likely due to the program entering its flight test phase in the near future.

The Air Force intends to conduct five flight tests for HACM — two less than the service originally planned for — before the program begins rapid fielding efforts in fiscal 2027. The reduction in tests was caused by delays in nailing down the weapon’s hardware design, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. 

Development of hypersonic missiles is considered a top priority for the Defense Department, especially as adversaries continue to advance their own weapons. Overall, the DOD is requesting over $3.9 billion in FY’26 across a number of programs at different stages of development, a defense official told reporters Thursday during a briefing at the Pentagon.

Along with the Air Force’s programs, those funds would also contribute to fielding the first operational battery of the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) — also known as Dark Eagle — by the end of FY’25 and continued development of the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) system.

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Air Force officials overseeing HACM told the Government Accountability Office that the program’s first design review was held in September 2024 — six months later than expected — because more time was needed to nail down the missile’s hardware design. As a result, the service will only have time to conduct five flight tests for HACM before it begins rapid fielding efforts in fiscal 2027.

“Program officials said that the delays will reduce the number of flight tests the program can conduct during the 5-year rapid prototyping effort from seven to five,” GAO said in its annual assessment of the Pentagon’s acquisition programs, published Wednesday. “These officials said that the program will still be able to establish sufficient confidence in the missile to declare it operational and to meet all the [middle tier of acquisition pathway’s] objectives with the reduced number of tests.”

Led by RTX subsidiary Raytheon, HACM is an air-breathing scramjet missile and one of the Air Force’s two main efforts to develop hypersonic weapons, which can fly at speeds of at least Mach 5 and are highly maneuverable mid-flight. Northrop Grumman is also on the program as a subcontractor that’s developing the scramjet engine.

Raytheon received a $985 million deal from the Air Force in 2022 to develop HACM under a middle tier of acquisition (MTA) contract, an alternative procurement pathway that requires systems to complete a rapid prototyping effort within five years. The company was later given a $407 million award in 2023 for additional work to enhance the HACM’s capabilities — bringing the contract’s total value to nearly $1.4 billion.

According to its budget request for fiscal 2025, the Air Force planned to mature HACM’s design and initiate flight test activities — including integration on the F-15E Strike Eagle and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, as well as all-up-round free flight testing of missile prototypes. The service intended to build 13 missiles during the rapid prototyping effort to use as “test assets, spares, and rounds for initial operational capability,” the GAO report noted.

Program officials told GAO that HACM’s first design review was delayed to allow for more time to finalize the missile’s hardware design and “validate an initial configuration of the system for use in the first flight test,” the report stated. Another review to certify the system’s “fully operational configuration for use in the final flight tests” was scheduled for sometime in 2025. 

An Air Force spokesperson declined to comment on the current status of HACM’s development, citing “enhanced program security measures.” Raytheon did not respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment.

Furthermore, GAO said that Raytheon is now “projecting that it will significantly exceed its cost baseline” for HACM, although Air Force officials told the watchdog that removing two flight tests could offer some savings. The program’s development cost as of January 2025 was estimated at close to $2 billion — a two percent increase from the watchdog’s 2024 assessment of $1.9 billion, according to the new report.

HACM would not be the Air Force’s first hypersonic missile to face challenges during development. Its other program — the Lockheed Martin-developed AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) — had a rocky test campaign. At least one of the weapon’s flight tests was deemed unsuccessful, prompting the service to shift priority to HACM’s development.

Issues during ARRW’s testing led the service to axe the weapon’s procurement in FY’25 so the Air Force could reassess the program for future budget requests, casting doubt on ARRW’s future. However, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin recently revealed that the service has included funds to buy ARRW missiles in its upcoming fiscal 2026 budget request.

“I will tell you that we are developing — and you’ll see in the budget submission, assuming it’s what we put forward — two different programs. One is a larger form factor that is more strategic [and] long range that we have already tested several times — it’s called ARRW. The other is HACM,” Allvin said last week during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

Although both ARRW and HACM are hypersonic weapons, they each have different propulsion systems that give them different characteristics. ARRW is a large boost-glide missile that uses a rocket motor to achieve hypersonic flight and is thus limited to being carried by bigger platforms, such as the B-52 Stratofortress bomber. On the other hand, HACM is a smaller cruise missile powered by an air-breathing jet engines, or scramjet, meaning it can be launched from more tactical aircraft like fighter jets.

Despite their differences, Air Force officials have previously stated that both ARRW and HACM are “complementary” to one another.

Moving forward, the Air Force is working with Raytheon to create a new schedule for HACM that still follows the five-year rapid prototyping timeframe mandated for MTA programs, GAO noted in the report. The government watchdog also said the Air Force has altered HACM’s transition strategy to support faster delivery of more missiles, while also improving the weapon’s design for large-scale manufacturing and expanding the industrial base’s capacity for production.

The service currently plans to use the rapid fielding effort in FY’27 to deliver missiles developed during HACM’s initial prototyping phase and then iterate on the weapon’s design. That work will inform a concurrent major capability acquisition pathway program the Air Force will start production for in fiscal 2029, according to GAO.

“The program office stated that based on global power competition and urgency to address threats, the Air Force changed the focus of the HACM program from a prototype demonstration to a program that would deliver operational capability in fiscal year 2027,” per the report. “The program stated that, with this shift, it is focused on meeting schedule as the priority and maintaining velocity toward fielding an operationally relevant capability — the minimum viable product that meets user-defined performance requirements — in fiscal year 2027.”

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Following a troubled flight testing campaign, the Air Force decided not to include any funding to procure ARRW in its budget request for fiscal 2025. At the time, officials said it would take time to fully analyze and understand data gathered during the test campaign before fully committing to putting more money toward the system’s development or fielding.

But comments made by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin on Thursday suggest the service has resolved to continue funding the ARRW program rather than end it.

“I will tell you that we are developing — and you’ll see in the budget submission, assuming it’s what we put forward — two different programs. One is a larger form factor that is more strategic [and] long range that we have already tested several times — it’s called ARRW,” Allvin said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

Developing hypersonic missiles has been a top priority for the entire Defense Department as U.S. adversaries continue to mature their own technology. The weapons are able to reach speeds of Mach 5 or higher and are highly maneuverable in-flight, making them difficult for air defense systems to intercept.

And while the Air Force, Army and Navy each have respective hypersonic missiles development programs, all of the weapons so far have yielded mixed results during flight test campaigns.

After a successful all-up-round test for ARRW in late 2022, the Air Force conducted three additional tests in 2023 and a final one in 2024 — but declined to share any results, casting doubt on whether all objectives were met during the campaign.

In 2023, then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall admitted to lawmakers that ARRW’s second test in March of that year was deemed unsuccessful. As a result, he said the service intended to reevaluate the program as it finished flight tests, but would shift focus to its other hypersonic missile program, known as the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM).

Furthermore, a 2024 report from the Pentagon’s weapons tester revealed that ARRW’s test campaign was also challenged by a lack of available infrastructure and insufficient means to collect critical flight data. 

Now, both ARRW and HACM are “continuing to develop and moving beyond [research, development, test and evaluation] and getting into the procurement range in the very near future,” Allvin told lawmakers Thursday.

Under development by Lockheed Martin since 2018, ARRW is a boost-glide missile that uses a rocket booster to reach hypersonic speeds, meaning the weapon is large and can only be launched via very big aircraft like the Air Force’s B-52 Stratofortress bomber.

On the other hand, HACM is a smaller, air-breathing scramjet hypersonic missile that is compatible with more aircraft, including fighter jets. RTX was tapped to develop a prototype design for HACM in 2022, and the service was expected to conduct at least 13 tests between October 2024 and March 2027 before production decisions are made, according to the Government Accountability Office’s annual Weapon System Assessment report released last year.

“The Air Force plans to transition HACM to the major capability acquisition pathway at either development start or production start in 2027, depending on what capabilities the Air Force is willing to accept and whether production facilities are ready,” the GAO report stated.

The Air Force declined to provide additional details regarding ARRW’s fate until the FY ’26 budget is approved.

Lockheed Martin deferred specific questions to the Air Force, but a spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the company “has full confidence in the maturity and production readiness of ARRW hypersonic-strike capabilities. We continue partnering with the U.S. Air Force to meet the urgent needs of our warfighters.”

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Over the next couple of years, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), the Pentagon’s organization dedicated to developing overarching joint operational and integrating concepts, plans to move into the next phases of hypersonic weapons development known as “hypersonics 2.0 and 3.0,” Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and JROC Chair Adm. Christopher Grady told DefenseScoop.

The effort will focus on analyzing exactly how the technology will contribute to closing future “kill webs” — that is, the multi-layered and multi-directional structure of attack leveraging assets from all domains, Grady said Nov. 9 in an exclusive interview during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the University of Notre Dame’s new hypersonics testing facility.

“It gets back to the kill web. So, where do hypersonics fit into how we are going to fight?” he said. “We know that hypersonics allow us to get after time-critical, heavily defended targets. We know that hypersonics allow us to defeat adversary hypersonics. And then, we also know that hypersonics allow us to leverage hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft missions in those two domains.”

In recent years, the United States has raced to field hypersonic weapons capable of flying at speeds of Mach 5 or higher. In addition to their speed, hypersonics maneuver through the Earth’s atmosphere mid-flight, making them harder to detect and defeat compared to traditional ballistic missiles that have a more predictable flight path through space.

Both China and Russia are actively developing and testing their own hypersonic systems, putting pressure on the Pentagon to do the same. But the technology is extremely complex and individual programs have run into a number of hurdles — particularly during test campaigns — meaning the capability has yet to cross the finish line.

While program management for hypersonic weapons falls to the services, the JROC plays a role in identifying joint capability gaps and then establishing “large R requirements” for the entire Defense Department, Grady noted.

“This is the top-down approach. And so we try to write a really strong requirement that says, ‘This is the value proposition for hypersonics.’ And I think we’ve done a pretty good job,” Grady said. “We do things across capability portfolios now, so this fits into our kill web analysis that [the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office] and the rest run.”

But before the Pentagon can implement those next phases, the services must continue down the path to developing and testing their respective systems. 

The Army is working alongside the Navy to co-develop a common hypersonic glide body, which the Army will integrate into ground launchers for its version — known as the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) or Dark Eagle — while the sea service plans to use a ship-launched capability called Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS).

Although both services reported a successful end-to-end flight test in June, a series of prior aborted and failed tests have delayed fielding for both weapons by at least a year. The Army is planning to conduct one more flight test for the LRHW by the end of the year to inform whether it can field the complete system to the first unit in 2025. Meanwhile, the Navy is continuing its test campaign for CPS, which it hopes to field aboard Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers and Virginia-class attack submarines in the next few years.

As for the Air Force, the service decided to not procure or continue development of the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) in fiscal 2025 after years of inconsistent testing results. The Air Force is pursuing another air-launched hypersonic weapon — the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) — and plans to begin its flight test campaign in FY ’25.

Broadly, the Defense Department has recognized mishaps during hypersonic flight test campaigns and is working to close those gaps through a number of efforts, including partnerships with academic institutions and international partners that can assist with test efforts.

A key benefit to working with universities on emerging technology development is that many have begun emphasizing both fundamental and applied research, serving as dual-use facilities for the Pentagon, Jeffrey Rhoads, vice president for research and professor at Notre Dame’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, told DefenseScoop.

“I would argue that universities, at least many of us, are stretching across that valley as far as we can,” Rhoads said in an interview. “I think, at the same time, the department and industry are stretching from the other direction to try to de-risk things writ large.”

Another focus is on taking advantage of adaptive buying strategies such as Middle Tier Acquisition — which many hypersonic programs use — to make technology transfer between government research organizations, industry and academic institutions to the Defense Department as quick as possible, Grady said.

He also emphasized the importance of working with Congress on getting flexible funding.

“The ability to move money within line items will be critical of the system that we have now with congressional oversight — that’s entirely appropriate,” Grady said. “We have to earn that trust from Congress and show them that we can do this, and we are embarking on methods to do that across the services and within the department.”

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“We need to get into a faster clip of doing these tests, especially in the new stuff, to be able to really wring out the technology, but also to start beefing up the inventory levels [and] the capacity levels because, frankly, the hypersonics are too costly,” MDA Director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins said Thursday during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Development of hypersonic missiles and tools to defeat them, is a top modernization priority in the Defense Department, especially as adversaries like China and Russia mature their own versions of the technology. The weapons are able to reach speeds greater than Mach 5 and are highly maneuverable in-flight, making them difficult for traditional air defense systems to intercept them.

The Air Force, Navy and Army each have ongoing hypersonics programs, and a number of other efforts are in the works at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and other DOD organizations to advance the technology. However, a limited amount of adequate testing infrastructure has hindered overall development, Collins said.

With other programs, “you may launch dozens of dozens of weapons. But on the hypersonic side, we just have not been able to do that,” he said.

Data gathered from the department’s hypersonics tests can also support MDA’s efforts to develop capabilities to counter those types of systems.

Although the Pentagon operates a handful of ranges to test missiles, only one, located at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, is long enough — over 50,000 feet — to test hypersonic weapons at speeds of Mach 5 or higher.

Another option is to launch the missiles over the open ocean. However, doing so makes recovery of the vehicles for further analysis extremely difficult.

Speaking at a House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee hearing in March, George Rumford, director of the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center (TRMC), told lawmakers that the department is looking to upgrade the 70-plus-years-old track at Holloman, but doing so creates disruptions in missile testing. The Pentagon is also conducting an ongoing study to build additional tracks, he said.

Along with efforts to build more long-range corridors, there are two other major initiatives at the department to bolster the United States’ hypersonic testing capacity, Rumford told lawmakers.

That includes the Navy and TMRC’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed (MACH-TB) program, which aims to prototype a modular flying test body that can validate subsystems and materials prior to integrating them onto platforms. The TMRC is also running the SkyRange program, which retrofits unmanned aerial vehicles so that hypersonic weapons can be tested in more locations.

While infrastructure is one bottleneck to moving forward with the systems, Collins emphasized during the CSIS event that the Pentagon needs to commit to funding its test programs for the weapons.

He said that it isn’t uncommon for programs to cut tests and equipment when funding gets tight, despite having already planned a full testing campaign.

“Off the cuff, I would say many of those ended up having to test more in the long run, but they ended up paying for more test assets later at more cost,” Collins said. “We’ve got to get farther up the cost curve, the efficiency curve by investing in the capacity to be able to do these kinds of weapons.”

There have been several new entrants into the hypersonics industrial base recently, which has helped the department improve its ability to test the missiles, he added.

In the near term, Collins said MDA is looking at how non-traditional defense contractors can provide targets for hypersonic weapons testing at a low cost.

“There is the commercial and venture capital space that are bringing hypersonic capabilities to bear, which is exciting because the costs of targets is an order of magnitude lower,” he said. “If we can get them to the point where they’re delivering capability that meets what we need in that intersection, that is going to be very powerful for us because our targets mean we can test more — and that is going to only help us in the long run.”

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According to Defense Department budget documents for FY ’25 released Monday, the Air Force has not requested any procurement funding for the Lockheed Martin-made hypersonic missile. Instead, the service will wrap up the final flight test budgeted for the program in fiscal 2024 and then decide ARRW’s fate once all the data from the testing campaign has been analyzed, an Air Force spokesperson said in a statement.

“The Air Force remains committed to fully analyzing and understanding all test data gathered while conducting the ARRW Rapid Prototyping test series. This data will inform subsequent development and fielding decisions with ARRW,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Developing hypersonic missiles has been a top priority for the Air Force and other services as U.S. adversaries continue to mature their own technology. The weapons are able to reach speeds of Mach 5 or higher and are highly maneuverable in-flight, making them difficult for air defense systems to intercept them.

In its budget request for fiscal 2024, the Air Force asked for $150 million for ARRW to finish the rapid prototyping program and conduct flight tests of the missile. R&D funding was expected to end in FY ’24, after which the service would revisit the program’s funding for fiscal 2025. 

The lack of funding in FY ’25 wasn’t a total surprise, as Air Force leaders have gone back-and-forth on the hypersonic missile’s fate in the last year. The program suffered a series of setbacks in 2023, including an all-up-round flight test in March 2023 that was deemed a failure by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. The service has held two more flight tests for ARRW — the results of which were not shared publicly — and is planning for one last test before the end of the month.

Although the Air Force has not publicly stated what caused the failures, a recent report from the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation found that a lack of available infrastructure and insufficient means to collect data have impacted the service’s test campaign for ARRW.

“The hypersonic modernization area supports increased lethality for the Joint Force by providing responsive, lethal, and survivable effects from stand-off ranges,” the spokesperson said. “The goal is to enable the industrial base to manufacture affordable hypersonic systems and at the necessary capacity to achieve a decisive advantage on the battlefield.”

In the meantime, the Air Force will continue research and development for its other hypersonic missile program — the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM). Whereas ARRW is a boost-glide system that uses a rocket to reach high speeds, HACM is an air-breathing scramjet weapon.

The service has requested $517 million for HACM’s development in fiscal 2025, according to budget documents. While that is more than the $381.5 million requested by the service in fiscal 2024, last year’s proposal to Congress indicated that the service planned to ask for $557.1 million in R&D funding in FY ’25.

Raytheon has been the prime contractor for HACM since 2022, when it received a $985 million contract from the service for design, development and initial delivery of the missile by March 2027. In January, the company received an additional $407.6 million from the Air Force to conduct concurrent R&D work that will enhance the system.

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Developed by Lockheed Martin, ARRW is a boost-glide missile that uses a rocket motor to reach hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 or higher. Hypersonics are also designed to be highly maneuverable in-flight, making them difficult for adversaries’ air defense systems to intercept them.

ARRW is just one of several hypersonic weapons under development across the Defense Department, and it continues to compete with other services’ programs for access to adequate test and evaluation infrastructure, noted the 2023 annual report of the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E), which was publicly released last week.

“The program’s flight test schedule is continually challenged to the limited availability and numbers of hypersonic flight corridors, target areas, and test support assets,” the document stated. “To continue system development efforts, the Air Force has conducted flight tests to date using broad ocean area impacts which limited the amount of data collection for terminal flight and measurement of effects (i.e., lethality evaluation).”

In December 2022, the Air Force began what contractor Lockheed Martin has referred to as an “extremely aggressive” schedule for ARRW’s development and testing — with the goal to move the missile into production by fiscal 2024. That month, the service conducted the first all-up round (AUR) test at Edwards Air Force Base in California by launching live warheads of the missile from a B-52H Stratofortress bomber.

The Air Force noted that the first test was a success, and the DOT&E report indicated that the missile demonstrated all phases of flight successfully. But the new report also adds that the service was unable to collect data measurements of the warhead’s function and effects due to a “technical failure” of the testing range’s sensors.

“Due to these sensor system failures, it is unknown if the glide vehicle and warhead functioned as desired in the final phase of flight,” the document stated. 

The program’s fate came to a head after Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall told lawmakers that ARRW’s second test held in March 2023 was deemed unsuccessful. As a result, he said the service would be more focused on its other hypersonic weapon program known as the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM).

While details about the failed March test have been vague, the new DOT&E report highlights that the missile itself was properly launched from the B-52 and that early data showed successful vehicle flight and warhead detonation. However, “the AUR incurred a failure when the shrouds failed to fully eject properly during booster-glide vehicle separation, as one of two shroud ejector motors appears to have not fired,” the document noted.

Because of that failure, the service was unable to collect data for the glide and terminal phases during the flight test. To avoid future failures, the service added “continuity verification of the ejector motors,” according to the report.

The Air Force has since conducted two more AUR tests of the weapon — one in August 2023 and another in October 2023. The service has not been forthcoming with details on whether or not they were considered successful, instead claiming that they each “acquired valuable, unique data and was intended to further a range of programs such as ARRW and Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile.”

The report indicates initial data from the August test showed that the missile achieved nominal conditions during flight and warhead detonation. No data from the October AUR test, which took place in early fiscal 2024, was provided by the office.

Moving forward, the Air Force has one remaining AUR flight test budgeted for fiscal 2024 — it already conducted one in October — that will impact land targets instead of those located over the ocean. But the report notes that those two tests for this fiscal year may not be enough.

“Given the limited number of planned test events, there is a risk that the test program will not be able to demonstrate the ARRW lethal effects against the required tactical and strategic targets,” it said. It added that due to limited planned flight hours and test assets, it likely won’t be possible to fully assess the missile’s operational suitability during this current testing phase.

DOT&E is recommending that the Air Force submit a final “Operational Demonstration Plan” to the office for approval before it conducts the final two budgeted AUR flight tests, which are scheduled for fiscal 2024. As of press time, the service has not provide an on-the-record response to DefenseScoop’s inquiries on whether the document has been submitted.

The office is also suggesting that the Air Force “verify, validate, and accredit” the modeling and simulation tools that it plans to use to assess ARRW’s lethality and survivability against surface-to-air missile systems and anti-aircraft-artillery batteries, per the report.

Updated on Feb. 6, 2024, at 9:15 AM: A previous version of this story said the Air Force had two remaining AUR tests budgeted for ARRW in fiscal 2024. However, one of the two AUR tests budgeted for this fiscal year has already been conducted. This story has been updated to note that.

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The Pentagon announced the award in late December but few details were provided at the time. The contracting action is an addition to the nearly $1 billion awarded to Raytheon in 2022 to develop the air-launched hypersonic weapon. The new funds will allow the company to conduct supplementary research, development, test and evaluation work for the HACM program through 2028, an Air Force spokesperson recently told DefenseScoop. 

“After the initial contract award, the [Department of the Air Force] decided to initiate concurrent RDT&E efforts that will enhance capabilities of the missile,” the spokesperson said in an email. “These enhancements required additional scope, resources, and time than were provided in the initial [middle tier of acquisition] contract.”

Both the Air Force and Raytheon declined to provide specific details on the capability enhancements covered by the funding. The contract notice stated that $27 million from fiscal 2023 funds had been allocated to Raytheon at the time of the award.

The company initially received a $985 million deal from the Air Force for development work on HACM — an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile — in 2022 for design, development and initial delivery of the missile by March 2027. While the contract modification’s deadline extends past that until December 2028, the Air Force spokesperson said the HACM program is still on track.

“This contract award does not reflect any changes to the department’s commitment to deliver HACM operational utility within the statutorily-required 5 year timeline for the use of the Middle Tier of Acquisition authority,” they said.

Hypersonic weapons are a top priority for organizations across the Defense Department. The missiles are able to fly at speeds of Mach 5 or higher and can maneuver as they fly through the atmosphere, making them much harder to detect and intercept compared to traditional ballistic missiles.

HACM is one of two significant hypersonic efforts under development by the Air Force. The other — known as the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) — has experienced several hiccups during flight testing, which has prompted the service to focus its efforts more closely on HACM as ARRW wraps up tests in 2024.

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The Pentagon has been pursuing multiple types of hypersonics that have unique characteristics. Boost-glide missiles such as ARRW are first launched from a rocket booster that gives them sufficient energy to reach speeds greater than Mach 5 and then glide toward their targets. In contrast, hypersonic cruise missiles use air-breathing engines known as scramjets.

Last year, Raytheon was tapped to be the prime contractor for the HACM project.

“It is early days in the program, and so you certainly hope that a program like HACM is on track at this stage, because it’s quite early. And they typically are, right? And so, I’d say it’s on track but it is a challenging program. That’s why we’re undertaking a rapid prototyping effort really is to work through some of the potential risks, some of the potential technical risks associated with the HACM concept,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Andrew Hunter told DefenseScoop in an interview Tuesday.

“Of course, we’ve been building off of work that was previously done by the department in that program, so that has provided a great foundation for it. And then the Air Force effort is to turn that into something that’s more operationally useful. So, I do think there are concerns, as there are with any hypersonic technology, that we have to wring through how these work operationally and make sure that our test capabilities are sufficient to really help us know that we have a meaningful military capability,” he added.

Hypersonics are a top modernization priority for the Air Force as well as the Army and Navy. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are also pursuing these types of systems, which are designed to fly faster than Mach 5, be highly maneuverable, and take unpredictable flight paths. Those characteristics make them difficult to track and intercept.

For the Air Force, hypersonic cruise missiles offer advantages over boost-glide systems in that they are smaller and can fit on fighter jets, not just large bombers like the B-52 that’s been used to test the ARRW. However, some experts say they are more complex to develop.

The ARRW effort was dealt a blow after a March test was deemed unsuccessful. There have been at least two tests since then, including one in August and another in October, but the Air Force has provided few details about how well they performed.

“The rapid prototyping program is continuing. It’s been accomplishing flight tests, which has definitely been adding to our capabilities in the hypersonic realm. It adds to our understanding of … the capabilities that industry can provide, as it has provided under ARRW. And also adds to our ability to do test of hypersonic capabilities, which is really actually quite a key thing because the nature of hypersonic systems is they create a demand signal for a lot of new test capabilities, which we’ve been able to demonstrate with ARRW. And there will be more testing on ARRW in ‘24. So that effort does continue for the rapid prototyping program and testing,” Hunter told DefenseScoop.

Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for ARRW.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said earlier this year that the service was more committed to HACM. DefenseScoop asked Hunter if the Air Force had decided to abandon the idea of acquiring a boost-glide system for the foreseeable future and focus on the cruise missile effort.

“There are different approaches to delivering hypersonic capability. And we have not ruled out any of those approaches for the Air Force in the future,” he said.

More information about the fate of the ARRW effort and the service’s plans for advanced weapons will be revealed when the service releases its fiscal 2025 budget request early next year. During the interview, Hunter didn’t disclose whether additional funding will be included for ARRW or follow-on work in the next budget submission.

Meanwhile, Hunter declined to say when the service anticipates HACM will be fielded or the projected cost per round. Broadly, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante has said the Pentagon should aim for an average procurement unit cost in “the single digit millions” for its hypersonic missiles.

“We’re actually looking at some that are as low as $3 million an all-up round. That’s where we want to be,” he said at a conference in April.

Hunter told DefenseScoop that the Air Force has a cost target in mind for HACM, but he was tight-lipped about it.

“We do set targets for all of our programs and I’m a big believer in them. [But] I’m not gonna tell you what the target is,” he said.

The cost per round will affect decisions about how many missiles the Air Force should buy.

“As you look at the munitions portfolio — and let me just kind of speak generally about hypersonics versus, you know, the rest of the munitions, of which there’s a huge variety … it’s definitely a mix, right?” Hunter said. “We need affordable mass for munitions just like we need affordable mass for platforms. And that’s something that we’re working very hard on. And then you need the high-end things, right, that can go into the most contested environments and address the … highest priority threats.”

He continued: “And generally speaking, hypersonic capability tends to go in the highest threat conditions and go after the highest priority threats. And it’s optimized for that. And part of that is the cost equation, and part of it is that the capability that it provides allows it to do that, right? And those two are related facts.”

Because of their relatively high price tag and the types of targets they’re intended for, hypersonics will likely be “fewer in number” than some of the common types of munitions in the Air Force’s arsenal, he suggested.

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The company broke ground on the Hypersonics Capability Center (HCC) in Elkton, Maryland, two years ago, and the 60,000-square-foot facility is now officially open, the company announced on Thursday.

The contractor has been selected as a propulsion system supplier for multiple hypersonics programs featuring air-breathing engines, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s HAWC and the Air Force’s HACM.

“The HCC was really born as we look forward to air-breathing weapon systems and thinking through its needs. Air-breathing weapon systems are not fielded in scale today. They offer some unique design architecture that doesn’t have the backbone or the foundation that the solid-propulsion defense industrial base has to leverage as we think of building these in scale. And so our goal is really in the HCC was to think … about taking this capability for air-breathing propulsion from [research, development, test and evaluation] and transitioning into a production environment,” Chris Haynes, director for strategy and business development for Northrop Grumman’s missile products, told reporters during a teleconference on Thursday.

The Pentagon is keen on acquiring hypersonic weapons, which are designed to fly faster than Mach 5, be highly maneuverable and pose major challenges for enemy air defenses. The department has yet to field any, but it plans to ramp up procurement in the coming years and deploy them on a variety of platforms.

Unlike boost-glide systems that use rockets to achieve hypersonic speeds, scramjets pull in oxygen from the atmosphere and can add thrust or energy to their flight profile as they maneuver along their flight path. Scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missiles are also expected to have a smaller form factor than boost-glide missiles — meaning more platforms can carry the weapons — and potentially be less expensive.

Vendors need to be able to deliver hypersonics that are affordable and reliable — and build the systems in large quantities, Haynes noted.

“That really starts at the earliest phases in RDT&E thinking through the design aspects of what we’re developing, and how we would transition that into a production environment so that we can deliver it at the price point that DOD seeks to buy these weapons at,” he said.

Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante has said the Pentagon would like the average unit cost of hypersonics to be less than $10 million. That would still be a high price tag compared with most missiles in the U.S. military’s arsenal, but significantly less than the latest cost projections for some of the hypersonic weapons being pursued.

Northrop Grumman says the new manufacturing center will feature the most modern equipment and leverage digital engineering techniques.

“We’re really trying to drive the engineers working side by side with operations fully integrated on the floor so as we’re making design decisions, we understand the implications of those decisions as it relates to … delivering weapons that are reliable, affordable and at scale. So we tried to take a full lifecycle approach when we designed the layout of the HCC … really trying to think about not just the design and development but again the full production and integration elements,” Haynes said.

“And so our approach was to try to put as much of the capability under one roof trying to minimize part movement [around the country]. And so in simple terms, we think about raw material coming in one side of the building … and our goal is to produce an outcome of having air-breathing propulsion engines coming out the other side. And so that minimizing of part movement really helps us drive that rate and affordability piece that I spoke to, it really helps us deliver not only for the air-breathing propulsion needs for the current programs that we see moving, like HACM. But the facility was really designed not just to be a scramjet air-breathing propulsion center, but really ramjet” as well for future programs, he added.

DefenseScoop asked Haynes what the production capacity of the facility will be once propulsion systems move into full-rate production.

“It depends,” he said, “because air-breathing propulsion as a weapon system is not something that we see fielded in quantity today. There’s still much coalescing on that landscape. Design techniques for how we manufacture them will drive overall throughput and rate capability. So I can say that we’ve designed the facility with added square footage and footprint, recognizing that we [in the defense industrial base and DOD] may not have all the answers today … as we work through what is that balance on manufacturing approaches, how do we leverage advanced manufacturing techniques like additive manufacturing and others, while also drawing in conventional manufacturing techniques that may drive affordability.”

He added: “We’re designed well to be able to support the needs for the near-term systems that we see. And we’ve left ourselves with some room to grow as we develop together collaboratively within the industry base, as well as with DOD and our prime partner Raytheon in the instance of HACM. As we sharpen our knowledge about how we’re going to ultimately manufacture these things, that will drive kind of a sharper point on the throughput and total ready capability in the building.”

Ed Jones, senior manager for mission assurance at Northrop Grumman, told DefenseScoop and other reporters that the company has already invested “tens of millions” of dollars into the new facility and it’s bringing in additional personnel to work there.

“Right now, we are onboarding new staff within the area. We’re also pulling from other resources within [Northrop Grumman]. So it’s kind of a combination of approach right now” when it comes to finding workers, he said.

The building was designed for 50-plus workers once the systems go into full-rate production, according to Jones.

However, “not only is the space within the building modular, the building itself is modular and we all designed it with that in mind, having completed a lot of the site work. So as we continue to see the demand change or increase, we even have the ability to add square footage to the building in a rapid manner as well,” he added.

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