Pentagon wants new hypersonic missile that outruns enemy defenses

The Pentagon’s most futuristic research arm has put out a call for a missile that can outrun and outsmart the very air defenses that increasingly threaten American pilots and ships. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon office famous for turning science fiction concepts like stealth aircraft and self-driving cars into real military hardware, wants to hear from companies and researchers about building what it calls the Next Generation Hypersonic Cruise Missile, a weapon meant to fly faster than five times the speed of sound while breathing its own oxygen from the atmosphere rather than carrying it onboard like a rocket.

DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office released the request for information on August 7, giving industry until October 6 to respond, according to the notice posted on SAM.gov, the federal government’s official contracting website.

A request for information is not a contract and does not guarantee any company will get paid, it is instead a formal way for the government to gather ideas from private companies, universities and government labs before deciding whether to launch a full competition. In this case, DARPA says the responses will help shape the technical requirements and acquisition strategy for what could become a real program, and the agency is explicitly encouraging teaming between traditional giants like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and smaller, non-traditional firms that do not usually work on Pentagon weapons contracts.

The reason DARPA wants a new hypersonic missile at all comes down to a problem the document lays out bluntly: adversary nations, widely understood in defense circles to mean China and Russia, have built increasingly sophisticated integrated air defense systems, networks of radars, missile batteries and fighter jets designed to detect and shoot down incoming aircraft and missiles before they reach their target. Those defenses have grown capable enough to threaten the effectiveness of America’s existing long-range strike weapons, the kind of standoff missiles that let bombers and fighters hit targets from a safe distance rather than flying directly over them. DARPA’s own language in the request states that current hypersonic missile concepts, even ones that have already proven the basic technology works, tend to deliver only modest, incremental improvements rather than the kind of leap forward needed to stay ahead in a future conflict against a well-defended enemy.

This is not DARPA’s first attempt at this kind of weapon, and the new program builds directly on lessons from an earlier effort. The agency’s Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, known as HAWC, spent years developing and test-flying a scramjet-powered missile, scramjet being a type of engine that compresses incoming air at supersonic speed to ignite fuel without any moving parts, a design that lets a missile sustain very high speeds using a relatively simple and lightweight engine. HAWC wrapped up its final flight test in January 2023 after a Lockheed Martin-built missile flew faster than Mach 5, above 60,000 feet (18,300 meters), and covered more than 300 nautical miles (350 miles), according to DARPA’s own announcement of the test. That program fed directly into a follow-on effort called More Opportunities with HAWC, or MoHAWC, which continued flying additional test vehicles built by Raytheon and Northrop Grumman to refine the design and manufacturing process.

Even with that head start, the Air Force’s own effort to turn the HAWC technology into an actual fielded weapon has run into serious trouble. The Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, built by Raytheon and known as HACM, has slipped its timeline repeatedly, and the Government Accountability Office reported in July that the program’s flight testing phase, already trimmed from seven planned tests down to five to save money, remains at risk of further delay. HACM’s initial operational capability, the point at which the Air Force can actually use the weapon in combat, has slid to fiscal year 2029, a jump of 18 months from earlier plans, and its total development cost has climbed toward $2 billion, well above original estimates. Those struggles help explain why the Air Force also revived an older, previously shelved hypersonic weapon called ARRW as a hedge in case HACM continues to stumble, and they give real weight to DARPA’s insistence that the new program cannot simply repeat the same evolutionary design approach.

That insistence shows up throughout the request in a requirement DARPA calls Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, an engineering philosophy that means designing a weapon from day one to be built cheaply and quickly at scale, rather than perfecting an expensive prototype and only later worrying about how to mass-produce it. DARPA is asking industry to explore radically different vehicle sizes and launch methods, ranging from missiles small enough to fit inside a fighter jet’s weapons bay to much larger versions launched from bombers, ships or even ground-based launchers, and to propose entirely new propulsion technologies, heat-resistant materials and testing methods that could cut years off the normal hypersonic development timeline. The agency plans to hold an in-person industry day in Arlington, Virginia in September, where it will share technical details and compile a directory of interested companies, though DARPA has made clear the event will be a one-way information session rather than a matchmaking opportunity between the government and specific bidders.

What DARPA is really asking, buried beneath the acronyms and focus areas, is whether American industry can break a cycle that has defined hypersonic weapons development for the better part of a decade: promising test flights followed by years of schedule slips and ballooning costs before anything reaches a warfighter’s hands.