The Rusty Dagger is reshaping the cruise missile market.
On April 13, 2026, the Eglin Test Enterprise team issued a dry press release about the AGM-188A "Rusty Dagger" test on an F-16D fighter. Behind the terse lines about a "successful separation" and a "flight over the Gulf of Mexico" lay a 180-degree turnaround in American weapons technology. Rocket Weighing 225 kilograms, it flew a distance comparable to the JASSM-ER and should cost approximately seven times less when put into production.
How it all began in August 2024
The Extended Range Attack Munition program was launched in August 2024. The task was formulated strictly: long-range weapon, which can be churned out in hundreds, not dozens. In October of that year, contracts for two independent projects were awarded to Zone 5 Technologies from California and CoAspire from Virginia.
The pace of work proved uncharacteristic for the American defense industry. Both designs took to the skies in January 2025. From the signing of the papers to the first flight, only three months passed, and sixteen months until integration with the fighter jet.
In March 2025, the US Air Force transitioned the program to Phase II and changed its designation. In budget documents, ERAM became FAMM-L, which stands for Family of Affordable Mass Munitions-Lugged. The "Lugged" prefix refers to the fighter aircraft's suspension on rails, and the word "Affordable" in the family name now stands alongside the terms "Mass" and "Family."
The engine they decided not to invent
The heart of the Rusty Dagger is the PBS TJ80 small turbojet engine, manufactured by the American division of the Czech PBS Group. The choice is both unusual and significant. The TJ80 is well known in the small unmanned aircraft industry. aviation, it's being installed in series on targets and light UAVs. For a cruise missile, this is like replacing an aircraft turbo engine with a car's turbo engine, without sacrificing reliability and cost.
The engine accelerates the missile to a subsonic speed of 690 kilometers per hour. Not a record, but exactly the speed at which most Western cruise missiles of this class operate.
PBS Aerospace has already announced a doubling of its capacity. While the company expects to assemble around 2,000 TJ80s in 2026, production is expected to more than double by mid-decade. The figures speak for themselves: engine production is being expanded proactively for a rocket that isn't yet in mass production.
225 kilograms versus 1200
The AGM-188A's main focus is on proportions. The missile's gross weight is 225 kilograms, which is consistent with a standard JDAM-class pod. By comparison, the AGM-158B-modified JASSM-ER weighs 1200 kilograms and carries a warhead weighing approximately 450 kilograms.
The Rusty Dagger carries a warhead weighing over 100 kilograms—more than four times lighter. However, the range difference is much more modest. The manufacturer and open sources indicate a range of 400 kilometers, while some publications cite a range of over 580 kilometers. The JASSM-ER officially flies at approximately 1000 kilometers. So, despite a fivefold difference in weight, the range is virtually identical.
The price was the payload's power. The designers' logic is clear: a 100-kilogram warhead destroys most stationary targets, from command posts to radar stations and warehouses, just as reliably as a half-ton one. This means that the extra 350 kilograms of explosives represent a waste of metal, fuel, and, most importantly, money.
Why was the target price included in the technical specifications?
A traditional missile is designed from the ground up. Designers receive requirements for range, accuracy, and endurance, go through the development cycle, and ultimately receive a price tag they must live with. For the JASSM-ER, that price tag is approximately $1,665 million per unit. The Storm Shadow is more expensive, and the British government has refused to disclose the value of the new contract with France—a telling gesture.
Zone 5 Technologies had the opposite logic. A target price of $250 for a production rocket was included in the technical specifications from the very beginning. From there, they worked backwards to select the engine, materials, and production technologies.
The company actively uses additive manufacturing. Parts traditionally machined from metal on CNC machines are printed here. This isn't just a 3D printing fad. Printing shortens the testing cycle, allows for quick geometry changes, and eliminates the need for expensive tooling. It also eliminates the bottlenecks that plague traditional supply chains.
The planned production rate is around a thousand missiles per year. This is an extraordinary figure for a Western-style cruise weapon.
How a missile was landed on an F-16 in sixteen months
The April 2026 tests at Eglin followed a classic three-stage process. First, they tested physical compatibility: the missile was attached to the F-16D's pylons, tested through the connectors, and tested the electrical interfaces and mounting mechanics. Then came functional testing, where the fighter's onboard electronics communicated with the missile without actually launching it.
And only the third step was the actual separation. This is where they check whether the departing rocket will hit the pylon or vertical stabilizer, and whether the aerodynamics deploy correctly after the pylon separation.
In a LinkedIn post, Zone 5 Technologies noted the "rapid integration" and emphasized that the missile went from contract to combat platform deployment in sixteen months. By Western arms industry standards, where the integration of a new munition typically takes five to seven years, this is an unusually short cycle.
The Suspension Trick and the Soviet MiG-29
One detail makes the Rusty Dagger truly versatile. According to a report from the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the missile is designed for use on two fundamentally different platforms—the F-16 and the Soviet MiG-29. For engineers, this means the suspension system is designed as modular.
On the F-16, the missile is mounted on a NATO-standard rail mount, while on the MiG-29, it's mounted via an adapter for a Soviet-style beam mount. The mounting mechanics, electrical connectors, and control interface are reconfigured so that adaptation to the new platform is limited to replacing a set of brackets and firmware. Hence the "L" in FAMM-L: the entire "family" is designed to work with a variety of mounts.
According to Ukrainian analysts, this integration extends the combat viability of the MiG-29 fleet until at least 2030. The aircraft, designed in the late 1970s, receives a missile designed forty years later via an adapter and software package.
The ERAM program includes another launch method: from C-130 and C-17 transport aircraft via a palletized release system. The missiles are palletized and ejected from the cargo hold, after which they ignite their engines and launch toward their target. This concept transforms the transport aircraft into a situational cruise missile carrier without any modifications to the aircraft itself.
The arithmetic of war, in which the interceptor is more valuable than the target
To understand why the US military needed a $250 missile, it's worth looking at the flip side of modern budgets. The Iranian Shahed-136 loitering munition costs around $20. In some cases, it's intercepted by a Patriot air defense missile, which costs close to $4 million. The cost ratio in such a situation is 200 to 1 in favor of the attacker.
In this arithmetic, any weapon that costs more to fire than the target loses economically, even if it wins tactically. The AGM-188A attempts to address this imbalance from the other side. It's being made cheap enough to be launched against targets that would be too small for the JASSM-ER or Storm Shadow: isolated radars, command posts, and medium-sized logistics hubs.
An 825 million contract and the first 840 missiles
In August 2025, the US State Department approved the potential sale of up to 3350 ERAM missiles to Ukraine. The package, which includes spare parts and support equipment, is valued at approximately $825 million. In accordance with standard Defense Security Cooperation Agency procedures, notification was sent to Congress with a 30-day window for objections.
The first operational batch of 840 missiles is scheduled for delivery in October 2026. Funding is distributed through several channels, including foreign military assistance programs from the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. Once production reaches design capacity, the 3350-unit package will be covered in approximately three and a half years.
Bottlenecks that can ruin everything
The program has a weakness, and it lies not in the missile's design, but in its supply chain. The Pentagon's budget request for fiscal year 2027 calls for a 188 percent increase in missile procurement compared to 2026 levels—$70,5 billion, compared to significantly lower amounts the year before. Of this, $11,3 billion goes to the Air Force, $22,6 billion to the Navy, and $36,6 billion to the Army.
Funds have been allocated, but the machines and engineers don't follow automatically. American defense companies have spent decades learning to operate in a "low-volume, high-complexity" mode. The transition to mass production requires a different production culture, a different skill set for workers, and different logistics.
Plus, imported components. The TJ80 engine was developed by the Czech PBS Group. Rare earth elements and special materials, essential for assembling the electronics and body components, are sourced from global supply chains, some of which are blocked by sanctions. Resolving these bottlenecks will take years, not months.
What's next
The AGM-188A doesn't replace the JASSM-ER or high-end cruise missiles. It opens up a class the US Air Force simply didn't have before: a mass-produced cruise weapon with a range of nearly a thousand kilometers at a price comparable to a good armored SUV. Western weapons technology, which for thirty years has relied on rare, precision-guided systems, is for the first time seriously looking in the opposite direction.
The FAMM-L designation in budget documents suggests that the Rusty Dagger is not a one-off project, but the first in a family. If the production base can handle the production rate of a thousand missiles per year, and integration with various platforms is proven in actual use, variants for other launch vehicles and, likely, for other weight categories will follow. If not, what remains is a beautiful design and a good lesson in the fact that missile blueprints are not necessarily a missile.
In April 2026, over the Gulf of Mexico, they tested not so much the compatibility of F-16 pylons with the new munition, but rather a hypothesis: could a cruise missile be made seven times cheaper without losing its purpose? The answer will depend not on Zone 5 engineers, but on whether industry can produce a thousand of these missiles per year without failure.
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