ERAM (AGM-188 Rusty Dagger)

The US Air Force went to two firms almost nobody in defence had heard of, asked for a cruise missile cheap enough that running out of them would not be a strategic event, and had flight tests four months later. ERAM is the West's structural answer to the cost-exchange problem the Shahed created.

Overview

The Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) is a United States Air Force programme, begun in August 2024, to field a class of low-cost precision-guided air-launched standoff weapons — initially and explicitly to supply Ukraine. The lead weapon, Zone 5 Technologies' AGM-188A "Rusty Dagger," had its designation publicly disclosed in February 2026; a parallel design from CoAspire was developed under the same programme, and Anduril's Barracuda-500M was subsequently designated AGM-189A within the same low-cost push.

ERAM matters less for what it is than for what it represents. Western deep-strike inventories are built around weapons like the Tomahawk, JASSM and Storm Shadow — exquisite, expensive and produced in the hundreds. Russia and Iran demonstrated that a $30,000 airframe launched in the thousands imposes costs no exquisite magazine can absorb. ERAM is the first serious American attempt to compete on that axis: a 500 lb-class weapon flying subsonically to a target hundreds of kilometres away, guided accurately enough to matter in a jammed environment, and cheap enough to expend freely.

A note on the range figure. The programme requirement is at least 250 nautical miles (460 km). Reporting on the fielded AGM-188A puts its range at more than 930 km — roughly double the floor. Both numbers are cited below with their source; the requirement and the delivered article are not the same thing.

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