On March 17, almost seven a long time after the venerable B-52 bomber entered service with the U.S. Air Force, one among the eight-engine jets took off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam carrying a novel weapon that was a far cry from the nuclear gravity bombs famously flown to their Soviet goal by Major Kong within the film Dr. Strangelove.
Slung under this B-52’s wing was a beefy AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Respond Weapon (ARRW or ‘Arrow’)—a hypersonic missile once dubbed the “Super Duper missile” by Donald Trump, designed to race towards targets over a thousand miles away at eight times the speed of sound while retaining enough maneuverability to evade air defenses.
This was also the primary test of a U.S. hypersonic weapon within the Western Pacific. It was pointedly staged from Guam, a key U.S. military base in event of a conflict with China.
But there was one other unusual aspect to this latest test. Despite being originally slated to enter Air Force service in 2022, the 2024 test is the weapon’s final launch—this system was afforded no further funding in the following Air Force budget, having consumed $1.73 billion in R&D. The cancelation was announced after a string of testing failures detailed on this earlier Popular Mechanics article.
Nevertheless, the Air Force leadership had already paid for 3 more ARRW test shots of ‘All-Up Rounds,’ and the service thus fully intends to execute the tests and hopefully determine why the once promising multi-million dollar weapons kept falling into the ocean. Perhaps that knowledge could avert failures in future missile designs.
Furthermore, by 2024, some rhetoric from Air Force leadership appeared to solid uncertainty concerning the cancelation, suggesting ARRW may need a future in spite of everything. As Lt. Gen Mike Greiner noted in March: “Future ARRW decisions are pending final evaluation of all flight test data. There remains to be one remaining test and we’ll see when that happens.”
The implication gave the impression to be that a last-minute string of successful tests might just change the minds of service leaders and congressional overseers. And manufacturer Lockheed-Martin has insisted it’s able to begin production of the AGM-183A, should it ever be funded.
Proponents of ARRW have argued that the Air Force was too quick to toss a few years and tens of thousands and thousands of dollars of R&D when it was a bug fix away from being a viable weapon. The skeptics contend that there have been multiple issues, and that repeated test failures demonstrated that correcting those issues was proceeding too slowly and expensively.
The Air Force indicated that the newest test was focused on ‘end-to-end’ performance. The B-52H carrier performed a flight representing an operational mission traversing 2,500 miles out to sea before releasing the ARRW, which itself then traversed well over a thousand miles to its goal on the Reagan Test Range near the Kwajalein Atoll.
While offering no details of the test’s end result aside from that a missile was “launched,” an Air Force spokesman stated that the test “acquired priceless, unique data and was intended to further a variety of hypersonic programs. We also validated and improved our test and evaluation capability for continued development of advanced hypersonic systems.”
The language doesn’t confirm that the missile successfully struck whatever it was being shot at—an end result sometimes reported when it happens. The language emphasizing testing process validity may reflect correction of errors that hindered data collection in multiple prior tests.
Nevertheless, several analysts perceive the Air Force statements as confirming successful tests of the last three all-up rounds. Nevertheless, the Air Force also reported the ‘successful release’ of an ARRW in a test subsequently characterised by the Air Force Secretary as being “not a hit,” so caution is warranted when parsing such rigorously hedged statements.
It’s speculated that the Air Force may pursue a follow-on hypersonic glide vehicle weapon to exchange the gap in its bomber arsenal left by ARRW’s unexpected failure, perhaps drawing from DARPA’s Tactical Boost Guide program. This project, also in its final 12 months, helped spawn ARRW in the primary place.
Originally, ARRW was projected to cost between $14.9 million and $18 million per missile. As much as 4 could be carryable on a B-52, and the choice would exist to mount them on B-1B Lancer bombers and F-15E Strike Eagle fighter bombers. The air-launched weapon would enable these older, non-stealth aircraft to contribute effective precision missile shots deep into hostile airspace while remaining far outside the range of air defenses.
What’s the massive cope with hypersonic weapons and the way do they work?
ARRW is technically a rocket-powered missile that, upon blazing upward into the exosphere, petals open and releases a follow-on munition called a hypersonic glide vehicle. The glider then skip-glides over long distances atop the denser atmosphere particles —maneuvering because it does so in ways in which ballistic missiles mostly can’t, to avoid being a predictable goal—before plunging down towards its goal.
Technically, any weapon capable of move faster than five times the speed of sound (a couple of mile per second) may be described as hypersonic. But the trendy hypersonic arms race specifically pertains to weapons that mix the massive speed and range of ballistic missiles with the maneuverability and various design characteristics of cruise missiles, thereby confounding sensors and air defense missiles optimized to have interaction either variety of threat.
China has taken a lead on this weapons technology by deploying truck-based DF-17 missiles into operational service in 2019. The identical 12 months, Russia deployed Avengard hypersonic glide vehicles for mating to UR-100N/RS-18 truck-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles.
China and Russia’s lead has actually lit a fireplace under the U.S. and Europe, encouraging efforts to match them. But its debated whether these expensive arms are far more prone to penetrate enemy defenses than the U.S.’s in-service AGM-158 JASSM stealth cruise missiles. Nevertheless, hypersonic weapons reach their targets faster than traditional cruise missiles (and plenty of, like ARRW, can go further than JASSM), which is vital when targeting mobile, time-sensitive targets.
The Air Force previously canceled one other hypersonic glide vehicle weapon called HCSW (or ‘Hacksaw’), which was mainly an air-launched version of a weapon developed for surface launch by the Army and Navy (under the designation LRHW/Dark Eagle and CPS, respectively, with a variety of 1,725 miles). Nevertheless, this formerly sold-seeking program bumped into trouble in 2023 with a string of 1 failed and three cancelled tests, which have delayed its expected entry into Army service in 2023.
With AGM-183A canceled, the Air Force’s primary hypersonic program is the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) attaining hypersonic speed because of an air-breathing ramjet engine (which is optimized for very high speeds.)
The Air Force has requested over a half-billion dollars to proceed HACM development in 2025. If HACM may be made to work, it arguably could prove directly harder to detect and fewer complex than a glide-vehicle type weapon. HACM can also be smaller, allowing as much as 20 (in theory) to be carried by a B-52—though it also is anticipated to have significantly shorter range, which can affect enthusiasm for its adoption on more vulnerable aircraft just like the B-52.
The Navy appears to be working on an identical anti-ship weapon called HALO, and the Air Force has one other hypersonic bomber in development called Project Mayhem involving a fancy multi-cycle engine. Russia, too, has been testing (and possibly combat testing in Ukraine), a hypersonic scramjet-powered anti-ship cruise missile called the 3M22 Zircon.