The AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon was supposed to be America’s first operational air-launched hypersonic missile. It was effectively killed in March 2023 — after three failed booster tests in 2021 and a failed all-up round test that month — when the Air Force told Congress it did not intend to buy the missile. The remaining test rounds flew two final trials in 2023 and 2024 before the programme wound down.

This week the US Air Force’s new budget documents confirmed the missile is being brought back, with $345.7 million requested for an improved Increment 2 version and integration onto the B-1B Lancer. The ARRW is alive again. The revival had been building since 2024, but the Iran air campaign of early 2026 showed the Pentagon what it costs to fight a peer-level air war without an air-launched hypersonic weapon in the inventory.

The Three Failures That Killed It

ARRW began as a Lockheed Martin programme in 2018 with a simple promise: a fighter or bomber would launch a missile that climbed to roughly 100,000 feet, separated, dropped a hypersonic glide body, and steered it down to a target 1,600 kilometres away at speeds nothing on Earth could intercept.

The testing did not cooperate. In April 2021 the missile failed to release from its B-52. In July 2021 the booster did not ignite. In December 2021 the launch sequence aborted. The boosters finally flew well in 2022 and the first all-up round succeeded in December 2022 — but the March 2023 all-up flight ended in failure for reasons the Air Force would not disclose. Congress was unimpressed. ARRW was zeroed in the FY24 budget.

Iran Changed Everything

The strikes on Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure in early 2026 exposed two uncomfortable truths. First, even Iran’s degraded but still functional integrated air-defence network forced US strike packages to fly long, fuel-burning approaches and accept a small but real loss rate. Second, US forces fired more than 1,000 JASSM-ER cruise missiles in a matter of weeks — nearly half the global stockpile — leaving inventories that would take years to rebuild.

A working hypersonic missile would have changed both equations. ARRW shoots from outside the threat envelope, ignores SAM coverage entirely on the way in, and arrives faster than any human or computer can react. One missile per kill, no escort fighter losses, no follow-up strikes required.

“One is a larger form factor that is more strategic long range that we have already tested several times — it’s called ARRW,” then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin told lawmakers in June 2025, when the revival first surfaced.

The Hypersonic Gap

Russia has Kinzhal, Avangard, and Tsirkon. China has DF-17 and the DF-27. The US Air Force has — until ARRW is fielded — no operational hypersonic strike weapon of its own. The Army’s Dark Eagle activated its first battery only in December 2025. The Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike is in test. The Air Force’s HACM (a smaller air-breathing follow-on to ARRW) is two years from IOC at the earliest.

A revived ARRW, with the lessons of the failed tests baked in, could finally reach operational service in the coming years. That timeline assumes the funding survives the next budget cycle, the technology actually works the second time around, and the Air Force does not change its mind again.

Sources: The Aviationist, Air & Space Forces Magazine, Pentagon FY2027 budget request.