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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Hypersonics — which are designed and engineered to fly faster than Mach 5, be highly maneuverable against enemy air defenses, and be able to attack time-sensitive targets — are a top priority for the Army and the Defense Department writ large as the U.S. military tries to catch up with China and Russia in this area.

“We’re confident going into this year, [but there’s] a lot of risk. Absolutely,” Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, director of hypersonics in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said during a panel at the Association of the United States Army’s annual convention in Washington. “We’re moving out on a very, very aggressive schedule with our industry partners.”

He and his team are “white knuckled every day” trying to manage that for the LRHW effort, he added.

DefenseScoop asked Rasch to identify the biggest sources of risk for the project.

“It’s just the fact that we’re going fast. I mean, we are doing a fair amount of concurrency on this effort. So we’re assuming risk. I would call it the appropriate amount of risk, but probably more so than we would normally assume in a traditional program of record where we’re going to have everything kind of laid out … over time to mitigate a lot of that risk and to go in completely confident,” he said.

The Army has already fielded ground support equipment for the LRHW, and soldiers have been training with it.

“We’re now working to finish up the testing and then the actual build out of the all-up round and what we call the all-up round canister munition,” he said.

The Army isn’t the only service working on hypersonic weapons. The Air Force and Navy are also pursuing these types of capabilities.

The Army and Navy have been working on a common glide body that will be used for the ground-launched LRHW and the Navy’s sea-launched Conventional Prompt Strike weapons.

The Defense Department has been testing components of the systems. Some previous test failures, known as “anomalies” in DOD parlance, have been attributed to problems with booster rockets.

“We’ll do a couple of more critical live-fire tests this year to characterize not just the hyper glide body, but characterize the two-stage rocket motor, characterize all the ground support equipment, and on path to field at the end of FY23,” Rasch said.

He was asked whether failures in these upcoming tests would result in delayed fielding of the LRHW.

“It depends on what you mean by ‘fail,’” he replied. “There’s learning opportunities in every one of these events. And so I don’t know if I could characterize now and say … ‘if this [anomaly] happens, then it will cause a delay.’ Obviously, we’re moving fast. … If we have an anomaly and we don’t really reach our somewhat stretch goals, we’ll sit down and analyze it and talk amongst the team and manage the risk as we go forward.”

When hypersonics and some of the other advanced missiles the Army is working on are fielded, they will yield a “huge increase” in the service’s long-range fires capability, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Doug Bush said during the panel.

However, a key question that remains to be answered is how many LRHWs the Army will acquire over time. The cost per round, among other factors, will determine how many hypersonic weapons the Pentagon ultimately buys, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante noted at DefenseScoop’s DefenseTalks conference last month.

There are also questions about where the LRHW will be based, which will partly depend on which allied nations will allow them to be forward deployed on their territories. U.S. Army leaders have expressed a desire to put them in the Indo-Pacific region where they could quickly strike Chinese targets if war breaks out.

During the panel on Monday, DefenseScoop asked service officials about long-term procurement plans.

The near-term aim over the next few years is to have three batteries of Long Range Hypersonic Weapons, but final requirements for the Army have yet to be determined, Rasch noted.

He added that he thinks Army, Navy and Air Force efforts will lead to larger-scale production over time as the DOD and its industry partners mature the technology.

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