Air Force Set to Evaluate New Industry Offerings for Low-Cost Missiles

The Air Force is poised to begin evaluating a new class of low-cost missiles needed to defeat the kind of aerial threats it’s likely to face in a future conflict.

Potential U.S. adversaries are building huge inventories of attack drones and cruise and ballistic missiles, based on lessons from the Ukraine-Russian war and the conflict between Israel and Iranian-backed militias. In response, U.S. officials say the Air Force and the Pentagon need to prioritize large-scaled production of relatively cheap munitions or risk exhausting its limited inventory of expensive, precision ones.

Industry has already taken steps to meet the new demand by unveiling low-cost cruise missiles such as Lockheed Martin’s new Common Multi-Mission Truck system and Anduril Industries’ Barracuda system. Leidos is also developing its Small Cruise Missile, nicknamed Black Arrow, a low-cost munition, capable of being launched by “pallet or conventional means.”

The Air Force signaled it may be ready to evaluate some of these offerings when it recently invited industry to submit ideas for its Counter Air Missile Program, or CAMP, an effort designed to provide an initial ground-launched capability “as a pathway to low-cost air-to-air missile,” according to a recent call to industry to submit white papers on Sam.gov.

Retired Air Force Col. Mark Gunzinger said the move is essentially the service’s first step toward establishing what it calls a Family of Affordable Mass Munitions, or FAMM.

“This is a major shift on the part of the Air Force,” said Gunzinger, director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“The Air Force knows its munitions inventories are woefully undersized, and that’s an artifact of years of insufficient investments to acquire munitions and maintain an industrial base that has the capacity to surge those munitions in a time of crisis,” Gunzinger said. “And in fact, that’s exactly what they are beginning to do now. They need a family of lower cost air-to-air missiles or counter-air weapons that will be highly capable against threats, which include aircraft, drones, even other missiles.”

The FAMM program first emerged in the Air Force’s fiscal 2026 budget request. Prototyping activities include “integration and flight demonstrations of affordable and highly manufacturable small turbine engines, seekers/sensors, networked datalinks, collaborative autonomy behaviors, and ordnance (warhead/fuse),” according to budget documents. The documents also note plans to procure more than 3,000 cruise missiles for a total of $656.3 million—a per-unit cost of $218,000 per cruise missile—but did not include many details.

The origins of the FAMM program date back several years, Gunzinger said, to the goal of developing a low-cost, palletized, air-to-surface munition through the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, or ETV, program.

“Then the idea was, why should it just be air-to-surface weapons? Why not air-to-air? And for that matter, why not surface-to-air?” Gunzinger said. “So, they’re expanding the envelope for the program to develop those lower-cost weapons.”

Now, the ETV program has become a starting point for multiple programs under the concept of Affordable Mass Munitions. The CAMP call for white papers notes that the program’s first phase to develop a low-cost ground-launched missile will constitute “a new weapon class” under ETV to demonstrate and prove out future subsystems and components prior to becoming a program of record.

The deadline for submitting white papers for the first phase of the effort is Dec. 2. If future contracts are awarded, phase one of the effort is scheduled to last 24 months and would focus on producing and delivering a prototype of a ground-launched prototype missile that’s ready for its first flight within nine months, the document states.

The initial goal of the CAMP effort is to produce anywhere from 1,000 to 3,500 missiles per year in full-rate production for less than $500,000 per missile, according to the Sam.gov document. A second phase would transition the ground-launched system into a program of record, covering research, development, test & evaluation into production. Future phases will seek to transition the initial ground-launched variant into an air-to-air variant, the document states.

The Air Force is “really focused on developing a family of low-cost munitions for a number of kinds of targets—initially air-to-surface targets, and now they’re expanding that to surface-to-air and air-to-air, which is great,” Gunzinger said.

For a conflict with potential adversaries such as Russia or China, the Air Force will need counter air weapons ranging from lasers and high-power microwave systems to low-cost missile systems, Gunzinger said.

“We don’t have enough precision-guided weapons, and we certainly don’t have enough low-cost munitions, so we’re on the wrong side of the cost-exchange ratio,” he said.

“You need both kinetics and nonkinetics to counter the kind of drone threats that we’re seeing certainly in Europe … as well as the kinds of threats that we should be prepared to counter in the Pacific, which includes cruise missiles. All of that substantiates the Air Force’s interest in developing a family of low-cost counter air weapons,” he said.