The United States fired 1,100 JASSMs at Iran in the first 39 days of the war. That is not a stockpile being drawn down. That is a stockpile being emptied.

Lockheed Martin’s answer, unveiled this week, is not a better missile. It is a missile you can take apart.

The AGM-158 FLEX has a nose cone that unscrews and a tail you can reconfigure, and the company has spent $35 million of its own money getting it this far without, as far as anyone will say, a single order.

What Modular Actually Means Here

Most “modular” weapon claims mean you can bolt a different fuze on. This one is more serious than that.

The nose comes off. That is where the seeker lives, and the seeker is the part of a cruise missile that ages fastest and costs most to redesign. Swap the nose and the same airframe becomes a different weapon: land attack, anti-ship, something not yet invented.

The tail is reconfigurable for different launch options, which is the other half of the trick. The same missile can be set up to fall out of a bomb bay, come off a ship, or be fired from the ground.

Two lengths are offered, and both are deliberately familiar. The 206-inch version is the same size as the JASSM-XR and the 168-inch version matches the JASSM-ER, so everything already built to carry those missiles carries these.

The word buried in that sentence is “obsolescence”. Cruise missiles sit in bunkers for twenty years while the electronics inside them stop being manufacturable. A missile whose expensive, perishable end unclips is a missile you can keep current without rebuilding.

The Part Lockheed Would Not Discuss

Asked whether the Air Force has contracted for FLEX, or what stage of development it is at, the company did not answer. The $35 million is Lockheed’s own money, spent in response to what it described as customer demand for more options.

That is worth reading carefully. Companies fund things themselves when they believe an order is coming and want to be first. It is not the same as an order.

There is precedent for the interest, though. In January 2025 the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center put out a notice to industry looking for technology to make its Extended Range Attack Munition modular at subcomponent level. The service has been circling this idea for a while.

Dragon Cart, and Firing Missiles Off a Cargo Ramp

The most interesting deployment option is the one Lockheed would only gesture at.

Rapid Dragon was the programme that proved you can push a pallet of cruise missiles out of the back of a C-130 or C-17, let them fall clear, and have them light up and fly. It has now become Dragon Cart and, crucially, a programme of record rather than an experiment.

A Rapid Dragon test launch: a cruise missile leaving a pallet dropped from a cargo aircraft.

Put the two ideas together and the logic is obvious. A modular airframe with a reconfigurable tail, dropped by the palletful from transport aircraft that were never designed to carry weapons, turns every C-17 in the inventory into a potential missile carrier. That is a very different way of counting how much magazine depth an air force has.

Whether Any of It Gets Built

The Air Force is already planning to raise JASSM and LRASM production substantially, for the straightforward reason that it has just demonstrated how quickly it can run out.

FLEX is a bet that the answer to that is not simply more of the same missile, but a cheaper family of them that can be re-roled as the threat moves. It is a good bet. It is also, at the moment, a concept with a press release, a render and thirty-five million dollars of company money behind it, and no customer anybody will name.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; Lockheed Martin; Center for Strategic and International Studies; U.S. Air Force