Speaking at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on May 20, Meink said the Air Force continues to prioritise the programme alongside other nuclear modernisation efforts, including the B-21 Raider, Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear command, control and communications systems. “Absolutely we will keep our eye on the ball on that,” Meink said.
“I didn’t mention it, but it is one of those programs that is going very well,” Meink added. “The program was properly structured from the beginning, and it is delivering actually at a very good cost point—not just from a schedule perspective, but from a cost perspective.”
The Air Force is requesting $1.53 billion for the Long Range Stand-Off Weapon in 2027. The request includes $565 million for research and development, $506 million for procurement and $457 million for advance procurement.
That amount is nearly double the 2026 budget, when Congress reduced the Air Force request to $793 million for research, development and procurement. At the time, lawmakers described some of the proposed funding as “unjustified growth” or “early to need.”
Representative Scott DesJarlais called the Long Range Stand-Off Weapon the Air Force’s “best performing” nuclear modernisation programme. Meink said the increased funding comes as the missile enters a “sensitive period” while moving from research and development toward production.
Budget documents show procurement spending for the programme is planned to rise year by year and exceed $3 billion in 2031. Research, development, test and evaluation funding is projected to decline over the same period to $23 million by 2031.
The programme remains closely linked to the future of the Air Force bomber force. The AGM-181 is intended to be carried by both the B-21 Raider and the B-52.
The current AGM-86 missile, built by Boeing, has been operational since 1982 and is carried only by the B-52. About 1,715 missiles were produced, while the Air Force inventory was down to 536 units as of 2024.
Mark Gunzinger, director of future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said the AGM-86 is becoming difficult to replace and was not designed for modern air defence systems. The current missile has a range of about 1,000 miles.
The AGM-181 will carry the W80-4 warhead, which has a yield of up to 150 kilotons, and will fly at subsonic speed. “LRSOs will also give B-2s and B-21s the ability to strike targets without overflying defenses surrounding targets and it will expand the areas a bomber can hold at risk in a single sortie,” Gunzinger said.
Gunzinger, a former B-52 pilot, also said bombers offer flexibility because they can be recalled or retargeted. That makes them, in his view, among the most flexible and stabilising elements of the nuclear triad.
The Air Force issued its request for proposals for a nuclear air-launched cruise missile replacement in 2016. In 2017, it awarded contracts worth about $900 million each to Lockheed Martin and RTX to develop technologies and demonstrate the weapon’s reliability and maintainability.
RTX won the contract to produce the AGM-181 in 2020. The company received a $2 billion contract in 2021 for the missile’s engineering, manufacturing and development phase.
Wesley Kremer, then president of Raytheon Missiles and Defense at RTX, told investors in 2021 that the Long Range Stand-Off Weapon had flown 6 million miles in a virtual environment. “Right now, today, on LRSO, the Long-Range Stand-off Weapon, every single night, this code is compiled, the updates are made, the inputs from our vendors are made and we fly that missile 6 million miles in the highest threat environments in the world in a completely virtual environment,” Kremer said.
The missile passed its critical design review in 2023. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported in March that a B-52 had been photographed carrying what appeared to be a pair of Long Range Stand-Off Weapons, in what was described as the first known public sighting of the missile.
Source: Air & Space Forces Magazine.
