Dark Eagle

A road-mobile, intermediate-range hypersonic boost-glide missile that arms the US Army’s first conventional prompt-strike battery — designed to race across the Pacific at Mach 5+ and strike time-critical targets deep inside an adversary’s anti-access bubble.

Overview

The Dark Eagle, formally the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), is the United States’ first ground-launched hypersonic boost-glide missile. It mates a two-stage solid-fuel booster with the Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB), an unpowered maneuvering vehicle that separates high in the atmosphere and flies a depressed, unpredictable trajectory to its target. The US Army fields the system on a road-mobile Transporter Erector Launcher (TEL) that carries two sealed “All-Up Round plus Canister” (AUR+C) launch tubes; each battery holds four TELs, eight missiles, and a Battery Operations Center tied into the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS). The same AUR also equips the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) programme aboard Zumwalt-class destroyers and later Block V Virginia-class submarines, giving the weapon surface-, ship- and submarine-launched basing without redesigning the missile. The head of US Army Pacific has stated the missile can reach 3,500 km — enough to cover mainland China from Guam — and an official line-of-site range of 2,776 km (1,725 mi) was long cited by the Congressional Research Service.

Development

Dark Eagle descends directly from the early-2000s Conventional Prompt Global Strike effort. Sandia National Laboratories matured a wedge-shaped re-entry vehicle, SWERVE, which the Army and Navy tested in the 2011 Advanced Hypersonic Weapon flight and a 2014 failure. That design evolved into the C-HGB, with the Navy taking design lead from 2018 and Dynetics (now Leidos) producing the flight articles. Lockheed Martin was selected as the LRHW system integrator and launcher provider; Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne supply booster components. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act pushed the Army toward a fielding date of fiscal 2023 that proved impossible. A booster “no-test” in October 2021, an all-up-round failure at Hawaii in June 2022, and two scrubbed Cape Canaveral attempts in 2023 — traced to launcher mechanical issues — forced the service to publicly admit the slip in September 2023. A revamped, subcomponent-focused test strategy culminated in the programme’s first end-to-end success on 28 June 2024, when a missile launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai flew more than 3,200 km to the Marshall Islands, as confirmed by the Department of War. A second major test on 12 December 2024 — the first live-fire through the operational TEL and Battery Operations Center — demonstrated the complete tactical system. The Army formally christened the system Dark Eagle on 24 April 2025, with “dark” referring to its ability to “dis-integrate adversary capabilities” and “eagle” to a master hunter, according to the Department of Defense.

🔒 The rest of the Dark Eagle file is for BattlePolicy Pro members. Stop here and you miss the part that actually matters: how it performs and where it falls short, its combat record, how it stacks up head-to-head against its real counterparts, the complete specifications table, and our analysts’ procurement, supplier and assessment notes. Unlock the full file with BattlePolicy Pro →