Sustained Munitions Production and Lower-Cost Designs
By John A. Tirpak
Munitions have long been a bill-payer in the Air Force budget—staples of warfare that, in peacetime, can be neglected or shortchanged to pay for more pressing needs—but after more than two years of war in Ukraine and the Middle East, alarms are ringing across the Air Force on the need to better manage this critical supply.
Air Force and industry leaders at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo., said it will take effort on both sides to fix the munitions problem. They prescribed clarifying “the demand signal” for munitions needs to industry, establishing predictable, multiyear acquisition programs, investing more in less-costly weapons, and developing more modular weapons designs leveraging open mission systems that are not vendor-locked to a single supplier. They also said the Air Force needs new longer-range munitions.
“We’ve wargamed a lot … and we know what this highly contested fight [of the future] looks like,” said Maj. Gen. Jospeh D. Kunkel, the Air Force’s director of force design, integration and wargaming. Then, in a reference to the Russia-Ukraine war, he added: “We see what happens when you run out of weapons … it turns into a meat grinder very quickly, and the side that runs out of weapons loses very fast.”
Speaking as part of a panel discussion on air superiority, Kunkel made the case for change. “We need to have the stockpiles, but we also need to be able to build weapons at the rate that we are expending them,” he said.
Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, head of Air Combat Command, said the Air Force is partly at fault. USAF has “spent a lot of our time in public talking about these very exquisite weapons that are unbelievably expensive,” he said. “And we need some of those.” But the Air Force also needs mass, he added and is keenly interested in lower-cost weapons that can be manufactured and acquired at scale. More inventory to expend, he explained, “could cause the adversary to run themselves out of weapons.”
Finding the right balance of high- and low-end weapons “is the art of what we need to do,” Wilsbach said.
It is a national imperative to have “a strategic capacity” to build weapons rapidly and in volume, something not possible today, when lead times for ordering some munitions can stretch out three or even four years.
The Air Force has already begun seeking industry input on producing low-cost cruise missiles in volume. In early March, in concert with the Defense Innovation Unit, the Air Force chose two suppliers—Anduril Industries and Zone 5 Technologies—from among four competitors to proceed as the finalists in the Enterprise Test Vehicle program, which seeks demonstrations of cheap, quick-to-build weapons. Anduril and Zone 5 beat out Integrated Solutions for Systems and Leidos Dynetics in the contest, which is supposed to yield flyable prototypes within seven months. The value of the work was not disclosed.
Weapons production lines around the country are too small and too few to sustain the level of effort needed in a future war, warned Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons, program executive officer (PEO) for weapons and director of the Air Force’s Armament Directorate Center.
In a panel discussion on next-generation munitions, Lyons shared three conclusions following visits to weapons factories and their chief executives:
National treasures. “The production lines in this country that make weapons are national assets, and we’ve got to make them healthy,” he said.
Critical parts. The nation still needs “exquisite” weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and other long-range weapons, but must at the same time find ways to make weapons “cheaper and differently.” He advocated for common components and materials so that parts can be produced in great quantities, providing stockpiles of parts so production can accelerate in the event of war.
New thinking. “We need to … get to the new ways of building bombs and missiles as fast as we can, leveraging the newest technologies,” such as open systems architectures, he said. New weapons should also be “more lethal and more effective” on the battlefield.
Industry panelists said they are already developing modular weapons concepts and have plans for surging capacity if necessary. But companies are skittish about investing in the unknown and, having been burned before, officials said they need to see a committed “demand signal” before building up large-scale production capacity.
In a Feb. 26 House Armed Services Committee hearing, National Defense Industrial Association President and CEO David Norquist suggested the government can’t assume capacity will be there when it wants it; if the military wants surge capacity, he said that should be a required part of weapons competitions.
The reality of the bidding process, he said, is that “if you have two bidders, and one bids excess capacity, they will bid a higher price and lose.”
Surge needs to be “priced into the contract or treated as an allowable cost,” said Norquist, a former deputy secretary of defense. Otherwise, “you’re going to get what you asked for.”
Frank DeMauro, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and general manager for weapon systems, said the Air Force should produce a road map of its weapons needs so industry can anticipate the service’s performance requirements and invest appropriately.
Some suppliers in the weapons supply chain are small players, “mom-and-pop” operations that cannot ramp up or down as fast as needed. Planning the munitions acquisition campaign for more than “one year at a time” by means of multiyear acquisition contracts can help those smaller players overcome their limitations.
“If you can get to the point where it’s a five-year program with options for one and two years after that,” small business can “step up” and “make that investment with confidence knowing they’re not going to lose their business when that procurement falls off.”
Modularity
Jon Norman, RTX vice president for air and space defense systems, said Raytheon’s AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile “has been around a long time,” but is getting fresh software and circuitry to allow it to be used by the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System being employed by Ukraine.
That presents opportunities and challenges. “We’ve got to be thinking about … how are we going to produce it, sustain it, make it modular enough that we are looking at the ability to reuse that weapon [for uses other than ] it was originally intended,” he said.
Jon Piatt, executive vice president of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance with SNC, said his company is adapting components designed for one application—air-to-air, for example—for use in other weapons. There is value in reusing designs, and successful weapons makers in the future will be those that design for “modularity, upgradeability, alternate uses, the adaptability to other launchers or other platforms,” he said.
Norman said that with AMRAAM, “the rocket motors lasted much longer than anyone ever suspected,” and the missiles can be adapted with “larger warheads or smaller warheads [to achieve] more … or less collateral damage. Those warheads have been able to be changed out.”
The lesson: Older weapons “can be adapted … to provide the ability to expand that production base to meet the full demand of the threat,” Norman said. “What we have to do [is] develop the infrastructure and the capacity in the stores that allow us to evolve [the weapons] as that threat evolves.”
That can refer to both changing technical requirements and changing volume needs. Flexibility and speed are just as essential. Requirements set three years ago are “archaic,” because technology is advancing so quickly. Technical leaps in propulsion and manufacturing technology are taking place daily, but program executive officers are “in handcuffs” having committed to now-obsolete requirements.
Lt. Gen. Dale White, in the air superiority panel, said, “we need to make sure we have a firm grasp on things like rare Earth [metals], minerals, microprocessors, things of that nature, so that we can make sure we have everything we need. The reality is, our supply chain is somewhat fragile.”
It’s also crucial to “get a firm grasp on where our priorities are” as a joint force, because the military services are effectively competing to acquire products from the same suppliers.
Michael Rothstein, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control vice president for strategy and requirements, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that Lockheed has anticipated the Air Force’s high-low weapons vision and is ready with solutions.
On the high end, Rothstein said, Lockheed offers the stealthy, long-range AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) and its maritime variant, the Long Range Air-to-Surface Missile (LRASM), weapons that cost $1.5 million apiece. On the lower end, Lockheed plans to offer its Common Multi-Mission Truck (CMMT, or “Comet”), at a fraction of that price, around $150,000.
CMMT won’t be stealthy, like the other two, but it will be modular, including an open-mission systems architecture adaptable to numerous missions and able to support a variety of payloads, from a warhead, to a sensor, jammer, or anything else the Air Force wants to put on it. Fuel load and range can similarly be tailored to the mission.
Lockheed has begun testing the CMMT with vertical drops similar to previous Air Force “Rapid Dragon” tests, where pallets of nine JASSMs were dropped out the back end of C-130 and C-17 cargo aircraft. For CMMT, though, the pallet would include 25 missiles.
At 96 inches, the CMMT could fit in an F-35 weapons bay and offer a range up to 1,000 miles, Rothstein said. The modular warhead/sensor/fuel building blocks would be sandwiched between generic front and rear sections. (The range for JASSM extended range and LRASM variants are classified.)
Anduril unveiled its plans for the similar “Barracuda” family of low-cost cruise missiles last September. Rothstein said Lockheed’s CMMT concept was not related, and had been in development “for a while now … we’ve been listening to the customer for a number of years.”
Rothstein envisions employing JASSMs and CMMTs together, just as how the Air Force once operated stealthy F-117 Nighthawks in force packages with nonstealthy F-16s. Just as an enemy sensor homes in on the conventional aircraft to let the stealth weapons fly unimpeded, so an adversary’s air defense might pick up the CMMT but miss the JASSM.
The production space for CMMT will probably fit inside a large room and could be picked up and moved to a partner country to get production closer to the action in “Poland, or Australia, or wherever,” Rothstein said.
In addition to the JASSM-ER (ER is for Extended Range), Lockheed is also offering the Air Force the JASSM-XR, for “extreme range,” whose performance and extra length Rothstein could not quantify due to classification.
The XR, though, would offer the benefit of reducing tanker needs by allowing combat aircraft to launch it much farther from the target.
Kunkel has said on several occasions that the U.S. would be willing to permit partner countries to license designs for local manufacture, reducing the logistical challenge of transporting weapons “7,000 miles away.”
Anduril’s Enterprise Test Vehicle is intended to be modular, inexpensive and rapidly producible. They are also building their so-called “Arsenal” plant near Columbus, Ohio, which will be geared to building simplified weapons by workers with minimal training. Using a modular design and open mission systems architecture, Anduril wants its Barracuda family of weapons to be easily manufactured and adaptable to the changing threat, Anduril has said.
In a press release coinciding with the Air Force announcement, Anduril said it will produce “a number of Barracuda-500 units” over the next few months, “using manufacturing processes and equipment that are representative of future full-rate production techniques, continuing development toward a production variant capable of rapidly scalable manufacture in 2026.”
Zone 5’s candidate is the Rusty Dagger, which the company has said is “mature” and has demonstrated palletized and pylon launch, long-duration missions, and high accuracy.
Steve Milano, Anduril’s Senior Director of Advanced Effects, said that up to now, the ETV program has been focused on producibility, open systems architecture and integrated subsystems. The next step—which, in the interest of speed, will be executed in about six months—will be to rapidly evolve the design and integrate it with autonomous networks.
Lt. Gen. Linda Hurry, deputy commander of Air Force Materiel Command, said the Air Force has “long-term” contracts in place for weapons like JASSM and LRASM, but not necessarily every weapon.
Multiyear contracts “minimize the cost [and]…we can minimize the response time,” she said. AFMC has a “capacity task force” looking at “trying to drive change and break the status quo and think differently about how do you do munitions, what can we do about … modularity, open architecture and digital material management tools, and assets that we have at our fingertips, and then push the envelope?”
The effort is urgent, she said, because “it takes about two years” to get on contract and start delivering weapons; time that the Air Force cannot afford in wartime.
What the Air Force needs is to regenerate “the health of the shelf,” she said. “The good news is, we’ve got the support of our senior leaders to get after that. In fact, we got a $1.5 billion ask to actually put assets back on the shelf so we can generate the readiness we need and build the capability.”