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.

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