Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon

The Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, known by the Army name Dark Eagle, is a land-based, truck-launched hypersonic missile developed for the United States Army with Navy cooperation. It pairs a Common Hypersonic Glide Body, designed under Navy leadership, with a two-stage booster, and the two are packed into a canister of about 0.887 meters in diameter carried on a modified semi-trailer launcher towed by an Oshkosh tractor. The glide body is meant to fly at very high speed and stay maneuverable, so that it remains hard to intercept. A March 2019 directive from Army leadership ordered a prototype with residual combat capability to be delivered by fiscal year 2023; in August 2019 the Army awarded agreements to Dynetics for glide body production and to Lockheed Martin as the prototype system integrator. A flight test at Cape Canaveral in December 2024 was announced as end-to-end, and the program became the main hypersonic effort of the American services after the Air Force cancelled its own AGM-183A.