The Air Force's ‘Super Duper Missile’ Has Faded to Black

The once-promising hypersonic weapon made its final launch, as the Air Force contemplates the next leap in defense.

On March 17, almost seven decades after the venerable B-52 bomber entered service with the U.S. Air Force, one of the eight-engine jets took off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam carrying a unique weapon that was a far cry from the nuclear gravity bombs famously flown to their Soviet target by Major Kong in 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.

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This was also the first test of a U.S. hypersonic weapon in 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 another unusual aspect to this new test. Despite being originally slated to enter Air Force service in 2022, the 2024 test is the weapon’s final launch—the program was afforded no further funding in the next Air Force budget, having consumed $1.73 billion in R&D. The cancelation was announced after a string of testing failures detailed in this earlier Popular Mechanics article.
However, the Air Force leadership had already paid for three more ARRW test shots of ‘All-Up Rounds,’ and the service thus fully intends to execute the tests and hopefully figure out why the once promising multi-million dollar weapons kept falling into the sea. Perhaps that knowledge could avert failures in future missile designs.

Moreover, by 2024, some rhetoric from Air Force leadership seemed to cast uncertainty about the cancelation, suggesting ARRW might have a future after all. As Lt. Gen Mike Greiner noted in March: “Future ARRW decisions are pending final analysis of all flight test data. There is still one remaining test and we’ll see when that happens.”

The implication seemed 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 is ready 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 many years and tens of millions of dollars of R&D when it was a bug fix away from being a viable weapon. The skeptics contend that there were multiple issues, and that repeated test failures demonstrated that correcting those issues was proceeding too slowly and expensively.

The Air Force indicated that the latest 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 target on the Reagan Test Range near the Kwajalein Atoll.

While offering no details of the test’s outcome other than that a missile was “launched,” an Air Force spokesman stated that the test “acquired valuable, unique data and was intended to further a range of hypersonic programs. We also validated and improved our test and evaluation capability for continued development of advanced hypersonic systems.”

The language does not confirm that the missile successfully struck whatever it was being shot at—an outcome sometimes reported when it happens. The language emphasizing testing process validity may reflect correction of errors that hindered data collection in multiple prior tests.

However, several analysts perceive the Air Force statements as confirming successful tests of the last three all-up rounds. However, the Air Force also reported the ‘successful release’ of an ARRW in a test subsequently characterized by the Air Force Secretary as being “not a success,” so caution is warranted when parsing such carefully hedged statements.

It’s speculated that the Air Force may pursue a follow-on hypersonic glide vehicle weapon to replace 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 year, helped spawn ARRW in the first place.

Originally, ARRW was projected to cost between $14.9 million and $18 million per missile. Up to four would be carryable on a B-52, and the option 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 big deal with hypersonic weapons and how 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 as it does so in ways that ballistic missiles mostly can’t, to avoid being a predictable target—before plunging down towards its goal.

Technically, any weapon able to move faster than five times the speed of sound (more than one mile per second) can be described as hypersonic. But the modern hypersonic arms race specifically pertains to weapons that combine the huge 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 engage either type of threat.