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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The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office and the Navy Strategic Systems Programs conducted the highly anticipated test Thursday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, according to the Defense Department. The event marks the first live-fire test for the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) — also known as Dark Eagle — with a battery operations center and transporter erector launcher.

“This test builds on several flight tests in which the Common Hypersonic Glide Body achieved hypersonic speed at target distances and demonstrates that we can put this capability in the hands of the warfighter,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in a statement.

The event also marked the second successful end-to-end flight test of the AUR in 2024, according to the Pentagon.

The Common Hypersonic Glide Body is a collaboration effort between the Army and the Navy to develop and field a hypersonic missile for each service. The Army intends to integrate the system into ground launchers for Dark Eagle, while the sea service plans to integrate it into a ship-launched hypersonic capability called Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS). 

As adversaries like China and Russia tout their own advancements in hypersonic missiles, the U.S. military has raced to field systems of their own and will soon move into the next phase of development — dubbed “hypersonics 2.0 and 3.0.” The high-speed weapons are able to maneuver through the atmosphere at speeds of Mach 5 or greater, making it difficult for enemy air defenses to detect and defeat them.

The successful AUR test for the Common Hypersonic Glide Vehicle comes after a series of prior aborted and failed events that have delayed fielding for both hypersonic weapons. The services previously called off tests due to problems with the system’s launcher, after which the Army and Navy revised their testing plans and schedule. 

Following a successful end-to-end flight test in June, Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told reporters on multiple occasions that the services would conduct one more key AUR test before the end of 2024 in order to decide whether to field the system next year.

The Army has already delivered the first LRHW capability — without the all-up rounds — to the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. Meanwhile, the Navy is planning to field CPS aboard Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers and Virginia-class attack submarines in the next few years.

Data collected from the recent test will support plans to deliver the common hypersonic AUR for both ground- and sea-based fielding, according to a Pentagon news release. The Defense Department declined to provide any additional details regarding fielding timelines and expectations for both programs.

“This test marks an important milestone in the development of one of our most advanced weapons systems,” Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said in a statement. “As we approach the first delivery of this capability to our Army partners, we will continue to press forward to integrate Conventional Prompt Strike into our Navy surface and subsurface ships to help ensure we remain the world’s preeminent fighting force.”

Leidos is the prime contractor for the Common Hypersonic Glide Body, while Lockheed Martin serves as the prime contractor for both the Army’s LRHW and the Navy’s CPS.

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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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