Fresh Approach Ushers In New Era For Mass-Produced Cruise Missiles

Three years ago, a small Fairfax, Virginia-based company named CoAspire decided to create a cruise missile that cost roughly $300,000 in the simple, familiar shape of a 500-lb. Mk.-82 gravity bomb.

The concept defied a decades-long trend in the cruise missile market. Instead of small, cheap and easy to build weapons, the U.S. military prized larger, more advanced and expensive designs, such as the 2,000-lb. stealthy Lockheed Martin AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER), which cost $1.2-1.5 million each.

• Nearly $1 billion is in the budget for U.S. Air Force programs
• The Navy and Army are also planning low-cost alternatives to Tomahawks

But a new breed of cruise missiles, including CoAspire’s Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missiles (RAACM), sprung rapidly from the drawing board to flight testing during the past two years.

The weapons are now defining the bottom end of an emerging high-low mix of air-launched missiles powered by a multiplying number of turbojet engine options. With few survivability features and a 100-lb. warhead, these low-cost options compare poorly on paper with the half-ton warhead of a JASSM or Raytheon BGM-109 Tomahawk. But the combination is designed to overwhelm an enemy’s defensive systems while relieving the strain on the stockpile of larger and exquisite missiles.

The U.S. Air Force now plans to spend nearly $1 billion over the next three years on low-cost cruise missiles, even as a historic spending surge also ramps up production of AGM-158Bs and other advanced missiles.

According to Air Force officials, the concept behind the Family of Affordable Mass Munitions (FAMM) program arose nearly by accident in 2022. A specially created task force was formed to solve chronic shortages of long-range munitions and found the answer after considering a long list of traditional options, such as signing multiyear deals for JASSM-ERs and other munitions.

In the process, the team—the Weapons Capacity Task Force within the Armament Directorate at Eglin AFB, Florida—discovered they could leverage a range of new development and manufacturing technologies, which could turn low-cost cruise missile concepts into reality years more quickly than the traditional process.

But the viability of low-cost cruise missiles still faces two major tests. As development contracts transition into production orders, a diverse group of new entrants representing a broad swath of financial capacity must be ready to scale up production rapidly while conquering a challenging gauntlet of integration testing on fighter, bomber and transport aircraft.

This new era for munitions began in October 2024 with development contracts from the U.S. Air Force for two companies to develop cruise missiles for Ukraine’s Mikoyan MiG-29s. CoAspire and Zone 5 Technologies—two small defense companies more than a decade old with no prior history of producing weapons at scale—won orders to kick off the Extended-Range Attack Munition (ERAM) program, intended to deliver more than 800 missiles to Kyiv over the next five years. Both companies are also now developing a version of ERAM for the Air Force; Zone 5’s Rusty Dagger is confirmed to be in flight testing as the FAMM-Lugged (FAMM-L) on Lockheed Martin F-16s.

But ERAM was just the beginning. Two of CoAspire’s rivals—Anduril Industries and Zone 5 Technologies—are developing Barracuda 500 and Rusty Dagger cruise missiles for the FAMM-Palletized (FAMM-P) variant for the Air Force, which would support a concept to convert transport aircraft, such as Boeing C-17s, into part-time arsenal planes. When not busy performing their original mission of delivering cargo or troops, such aircraft could be loaded with pallets full of cruise missiles that would be dropped from the cargo bay.

Beyond the conventional air forces of Ukraine and the U.S., L3Harris is supplying Red Wolf and Green Wolf cruise missiles for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Bell AH-1Z fleet. Leidos is delivering 200-lb.-class AGM-190A Black Arrow cruise missiles for Air Force Special Operations Command’s Lockheed Martin AC-130Js.

In less than a year, several more development programs could appear. The Navy is analyzing options for potential low-cost alternatives to the Lockheed AGM-158C Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile. In perhaps a nod to the Air Force’s internationally-oriented ERAM and domestic FAMM programs, the Navy has launched studies for the Coalition Heterogeneous Affordable Offensive Strike for the international market and the Multimission Affordable Capacity Effector for the U.S. inventory.

Meanwhile, the Army is studying the possibility of fielding hundreds of cheap, containerized, ground-launched cruise missiles to long-range fires units.

Demand has surged for this new category of low-cost cruise missiles, prompting CoAspire to unveil a new long-range variant of the RAACM at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space convention on April 20.

“We are developing other variants, including a RAACM-Extended Range, to compete for air- as well as surface- and shipboard-launched opportunities with all the services as well as international customers,” CoAspire CEO Doug Denneny told Aviation Week.

The origins of all these efforts trace back to the creation of the Weapons Capacity Task Force within the Armament Directorate in 2022. The organization’s initial focus was not to create a new class of low-cost munitions but to find ways to accelerate existing cruise missile production.

“At first, it was, like, we need to just do multiyear procurements, and we just need to buy more,” former Col. Tim Fuhrman told a Defense Acquisition University class in April 2025, when he was chief of the Adaptive Weapons branch at the Armament Directorate. “We just need to package our contracts differently. That was kind of the first idea.”

But the task force quickly identified another approach. At the time, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) was in the process of developing the Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV). As the name suggests, the DIU planned to develop a nonoperational cruise missile that could be used to test and qualify new weapons technologies, such as airframes, engines, guidance systems, warheads and seekers. To make the vehicle as adaptable as possible for that task, it would be designed to comply with the Air Force-owned Weapon Open System Architecture (WOSA) and Government Reference Architecture (GRA).

“Certain people in very high places caught a hold of it, and they said, ‘Could you drop a warhead in it? Could you scale it?’” Fuhrman recalled. “We started having real discussions on this. We said, ‘Yeah, we could do a variant on that, and we’ll call it AMM—the Affordable Mass Missile.’”

The decision to adapt the ETV was fortuitous. That program was building on several previous attempts to develop an affordable air vehicle to serve as a test asset or a weapon. As early as 2015, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) was studying options for low-cost missiles. In response, Zone 5 started developing demonstrator weapons, CEO Thomas Akers told Aviation Week.

That led to the demonstration of Zone 5’s Cargo Launch Expendable Air Vehicles with Extended Range (Cleaver) missile from an MC-130J Commando II aircraft on Jan. 28, 2020. The MC-130J released six simulated Cleavers from five pallets dropped from the back of the MC-130J. Data from the test informed concepts for launching palletized missiles from transport aircraft. In a parallel effort called Rapid Dragon, the AFRL also launched multiple AGM-158B test vehicles from C-17s. “That built a technology foundation that matured into Rusty Dagger and its variants that we have today,” Akers said.

For Zone 5, the key difference during the transition from the Cleaver to the ETV and finally to the FAMM programs was focusing on the systems inside the airframe. The munitions industry typically relied on purpose-built subsystems for each missile. But those programs provided time and funding to develop new designs that would incorporate modular subsystems to comply with WOSA and GRA requirements.

In June 2024, Anduril, Integrated Solutions for Systems, Leidos and Zone 5 won DIU contracts to demonstrate ETV prototypes that summer and fall. The prize for the winners would initially be contracts to develop ERAMs to deliver to Ukraine. Ultimately, the competitors could also compete for the multiple variants of the FAMM program. In the end, the Air Force awarded the first ERAM contract to Zone 5, then picked CoAspire for the second, even though the latter did not participate in the ETV program.

“They had to show us that they could scale their manufacturing,” Fuhrman recalled in April 2025. “It just so happened that these were nontraditional vendors. They had to adopt and show us how they were implementing open architecture. They had to give us form, fit, function rights in writing—like, we get every bit of it. Neither one of these companies . . . had a problem doing any of that.”

The low-cost munition programs are also benefiting from technologies developed under separate projects. The AFRL and the Navy, for example, collaborated on a 3D-printed warhead design. “It’s an exciting thing to see when you can produce on a 3D printer a warhead pretty quick—at least the outer mold line—then pop in the right amount of gunpowder and the fuze,” Fuhrman said.

The Air Force previously maintained strict requirements for air-launched munitions, covering advanced performance criteria, such as survivability, target discrimination, speed and maneuverability. But the task force adopted a more lenient approach to those performance standards to keep the focus on affordability and mass production.

“The old way in my world was all of that stuff was a must-have, which created long timelines,” Fuhrman said.

In the past, the pace of fielding new weapons was also partly driven by the integration and certification process. To reach the operational combat aircraft fleet, each new cruise missile has been required to integrate in the operational flight program and pass a safety certification. For the latter, weapons for fighters and bombers go through the Seek Eagle certification process for air-launched stores. The new category of palletized munitions can bypass Seek Eagle but still must be certified for air-dropped cargo through the Air Transportability Test Loading Activity office.

But the ERAM program offered some relief from those requirements. Since those missiles are bound for the Ukrainian Air Force’s MiG-29s, the vendors can avoid the cumbersome process of operational flight program integration and Seek Eagle certification. Those steps remain for the FAMM-L weapons, but CoAspire and Zone 5 can draw on the testing and experience from the ERAM program.

In March, the Air Force started testing the first FAMM-L contender—Zone5’s Rusty Dagger—on an F-16D operated by the 40th Flight Test Sqdn. at Eglin AFB, Florida. Following a series of fit and functionality checks, the F-16D crew released the missile from the F-16.

“This was a perfect demonstration of test readiness to meet warfighter needs,” said Lt. Col. Brett Tillman, commander of the 780th Test Sqdn., which executes all munitions testing for the Air Force.

According to Fuhrman’s presentation to the Defense Acquisition University class in April 2025, the Air Force planned to launch source selection for the FAMM Increment 1 weapon this spring.

Robert Lyons, the portfolio acquisition executive for weapons, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 24 that the program is still on track. “We are beginning to do that design and test effort for the next jump in that demonstrated capability this spring,” Lyons said. The Air National Guard could perform the test planning and execution effort, he added.

The Increment 1 version will quickly be succeeded in development by an Increment 2 featuring a beyond-line-of-sight, long-range kill chain capability in the third quarter of fiscal 2027. Increment 2 development will continue for 21 months, even as Lot 1 production deliveries begin in the third quarter of fiscal 2028, according to Fuhrman’s presentation.