AGM-114 Hellfire

The missile that defined precision killing — the AGM-114 Hellfire is the 40-year workhorse of US and allied airpower, the weapon that armed the Apache against Soviet armor, made the Predator and Reaper into the tools of the drone age, and killed Qasem Soleimani in a Baghdad car park. Over 100,000 have been built in every flavor from tank-busting shaped charges to thermobaric bunker-busters — and, most notoriously, the R9X "Ninja," a version that carries no explosive at all, only a dense slug and six pop-out steel blades to shred a single target with almost no collateral damage. It is the benchmark against which every cheaper strike option, from the APKWS rocket up, is measured.

Overview

The AGM-114 Hellfire is the United States' standard precision air-to-surface missile — a ~100-pound-class weapon that began in 1971 as the "HELicopter-launched FIRE-and-forget" anti-armor missile to stop Soviet tank columns, and became the defining strike weapon of the past four decades. Roughly 1.6 m long with an 8–11 kg warhead and a 7–11 km range, it guides two ways: semi-active laser (homing on a laser spot from the launcher, another aircraft or the ground) across most variants, and millimeter-wave active radar (fire-and-forget, all-weather) on the AGM-114L "Longbow." Its warheads span the mission set — shaped-charge and tandem-HEAT for armor, blast-fragmentation for soft targets and boats, thermobaric for bunkers, and the extraordinary R9X kinetic blade for surgical targeted killings. First fired in combat in Panama in 1989 and fielded on the AH-64 Apache, it went on to arm nearly every US attack helicopter and, decisively, the MQ-9 Reaper and its predecessors — the Hellfire-armed drone is the signature weapon of the post-9/11 era, from countless strikes to the killings of Soleimani (2020) and al-Zawahiri (2022). More than 100,000 have been built for some 28 operators including the US; it is now being succeeded by the dual-seeker JAGM and echoed by the British Brimstone derivative. At ~$150,000 a round, the Hellfire is also the cost benchmark that made the cheaper APKWS guided rocket attractive for the targets a Hellfire is too expensive to spend.

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