The transformation of the war in Ukraine over the past three years boils down to one humble weapon: the FPV drone. Ukraine turned a $500 quadcopter into one of the most feared tools on the front line, and every major military on Earth has spent the last two years scrambling to catch up. But the United States isn’t just watching from the sidelines anymore. It’s actively importing the tactics, the doctrine, the manufacturing playbook, and in some cases, the actual drone companies and the people who built this style of warfare in the trenches of Donbas.
Dig a bit further, though, and you’ll see the US isn’t just copying Ukraine’s homework—it’s taking Ukraine’s genius idea and building something even better with it. To understand what the US is doing now, you have to start where it all began. When Russia rolled across the border in 2022, Ukraine didn’t have the artillery stockpiles, the air force, or the armored formations to fight symmetrically. What it had was a desperate, decentralized, wildly creative civilian tech culture and an urgent need to make Russian soldiers afraid to move.
The answer was first-person view drones—the kind hobbyists raced through backyard obstacle courses for fun or used to take wedding photos. Strap a warhead to a quadcopter, put a soldier in a trench a few kilometers back with a pair of video goggles, and suddenly you have a precision-guided munition that costs less than almost anything else in existence. And that weapon can find and destroy a tank through a tree line. The economics of a war where drones dominate directly influence the conversation inside the Pentagon.
By April 2025, some estimates suggested drones were responsible for 80% of Russian losses. In some areas of the front, that statistic climbed to 90%—nine out of ten vehicle losses caused directly by drones. There’s practically nowhere left to hide on the modern battlefield. Every road, every tree line, every staging area is watched by something small, cheap, and armed.
Of course, Ukraine isn’t the only country with a steady drone supply. Russia adapted and, in some cases, made significant developments in drone warfare. Russian FPV and kamikaze-style drones have been knocking out Western tanks, particularly the Leopard 2A6, which is directly comparable to America’s M1 Abrams. In the first year of the war, Ukrainian tank losses such as Leopards were mainly attributed to drone warfare.
This suggests that neither side was truly immune to having its most hardened structures or weapons obliterated by cheap, replaceable drones. But Ukraine didn’t stop at improvising drones in a garage. It built an entire industrial and bureaucratic ecosystem around the idea, and that ecosystem is arguably the more important export than the drones themselves. Ukraine’s Ministry for Digital Transformation runs a platform called Brave 1—essentially a digital marketplace where frontline commanders can browse hundreds of drone models and order equipment the way you’d order something off Amazon, with delivery in as little as a week.
Ukrainian drone units then document their strikes on camera and earn points based on the value of what they destroy, redeeming those points to unlock more advanced drones on the same marketplace. Damaged units can get emergency repairs from frontline workshops in hours instead of the weeks it would take through a traditional military supply chain. Then came the strike that made the entire world take Ukraine’s drone program seriously as a strategic weapon, not just a battlefield nuisance. In June 2025, Ukraine smuggled a swarm of low-cost FPV drones deep into Russian territory, hidden inside the roofs of civilian cargo containers, then launched them remotely against five Russian air bases in Operation Spiderweb.
Ukrainian officials said the strike used up to 117 drones and hit 41 aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22 strategic bombers—some of Russia’s most expensive and hardest-to-replace military assets. Estimated damage: $7 billion. Regardless of the actual scale, the message was clear. Cheap drones could now threaten strategic assets thousands of kilometers from any front line without a single manned aircraft crossing a border.
Russia was quickly forced to adopt a different strategy to protect its far-off bases, in some cases putting tires on planes to make them less visible from satellite imagery. This didn’t stay a Ukraine-Russia conflict, since the tactic spread to the other major conflict going on simultaneously. The Guardian reported in May 2026 that Hezbollah adopted fiber-optic FPV drones in Lebanon, explicitly adapting techniques pioneered in Ukraine to slip past Israeli electronic warfare—one of the most sophisticated jamming environments on the planet. When the US entered its own conflict with Iran at the end of February, Iran responded with barges of drones across the region, and American and allied forces shot down many of them.
But the sheer scale of the attacks exposed just how hard and how expensive it is to defend against cheap mass-produced systems using exquisite, expensive interceptors. The previous weapons the US used were extremely effective in terms of battle readiness, operational capabilities, and power projection. But what they weren’t was cost-effective. Take the most prominent long-range drone the US has.
By July 2026, US officials suggested that over 30 Reaper MQ-9 drones were destroyed as a result of operations in Iran. These drones were last reported to have a per-unit cost somewhere around $16 million. When pitted against low-cost expendable drones, the balance of power shifts in favor of the weapon you can chuck at the enemy and not worry if your investment is safe. So that’s the main discrepancy between how the US and Ukraine have been running things in their respective conflicts.
But how is the US changing things all of a sudden? Let’s start with doctrine. The US Army is tearing up decades of its own playbook. Army Chief of Staff General Randy George told Congress in 2025 that technology is moving too fast to keep relying on big procurement programs that take years to develop and can be obsolete the moment they’re fielded.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth also signed a directive in July 2025, ordering every Army modernization program to shift to a rapid, iterative development model. Gone are the days of perfecting a system for a decade before fielding it. The new approach is to get something into soldiers’ hands quickly, let them experiment with it, and iterate based on real-world feedback. The US is also importing Ukrainian drone companies and the people who built this style of warfare.
American defense firms are partnering with Ukrainian manufacturers, bringing their production lines and their combat experience directly into the US military-industrial complex. This isn’t just about buying Ukrainian drones; it’s about absorbing the knowledge of how to mass-produce cheap, effective systems and how to integrate them into combined arms warfare. But the most significant signal of how far the US is willing to go is a new missile program that dwarfs anything previously discussed. The Air Force is developing the Air-Launched Long-Range Weapon, or AFLRW, with a requirement for a minimum range of 1,000 nautical miles—over 1,150 miles.
That’s the maximum range of the AIM-260 JATM, the Navy’s longest-range air-to-air missile, multiplied by more than ten. It’s more than ten times the maximum range of the 93-mile AIM-120 AMRAAM and almost fifty times the range of the 22-mile AIM-9X Sidewinder. To be fair, the US’s latest air-to-air missiles extend the ranges of the stalwarts significantly. The newer AIM-260 JATM offers a maximum range of at least 120 miles, and the Navy’s AIM-174B has a classified range estimated at over 200 miles.
But the AFLRW aims to increase those distances by five to ten times. In terms of air-to-surface missiles, the US’s current arsenal is significantly greater in range than its air-to-air missiles. The AGM-88 HARM anti-radiation missile only has a range of around 93 miles, and the AGM-84 SLAM standoff cruise missile has a mid-range of around 168 miles. But the AGM-158B JASSM-ER long-range cruise missile has a range of around 620 miles, the AGM-158C LRASM anti-ship variant has a range of around 575 miles, and the AGM-183 ARRW hypersonic air-to-surface missile almost reaches the range of the AFLRW with a range of 994 miles.
Still, except for the ARRW, which is yet to be operationally deployed, the AFLRW beats the range of the US’s current arsenal by at least a third. As aerial warfare becomes an increasingly long-distance affair, that could make all the difference, especially in and around Taiwan. An anti-air missile with this kind of extreme range will be especially well suited for attacks on critical AEW&C planes, refueling tankers, and other high-value aerial assets operating in rear areas. Until now, these assets have been operating more or less with impunity, safe behind layers of aerial denial defenses that are well beyond the reach of current US air-to-air missiles.
But not anymore. The US Air Force has scheduled an AFLRW industry day gathering in late August at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to get the ball rolling. The event has a secret classification and aims to engage defense industry contractors with the intention of getting the AFLRW built as soon as possible. AFLCMC, the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, is seeking the next generation of air-launched long-range weapon variants that expand the United States’ ability to hit priority air, land, and sea targets far and fast.
The notice for the event states: “The intention is to build two variants, an air-to-air (AA) and an air-to-surface (AS) missile, with the initial focus being on the AA variant. ” According to the notice, both AFLRW variants will have a threshold minimum range of 1,000 nautical miles and be capable of striking respective AA and AS targets in defense planning scenario 2. 1 and 7. 1 environments in a responsive manner.
The notice also emphasizes the need for modular components and open architecture systems, as well as finding a master integrator to combine the various elements into a complete missile or all-up round. This isn’t the first time the US has contemplated air-launched missiles with extended range, although the AFLRW’s range is roughly three times anything the US is known to have considered before. The Air Force almost adopted a long-range, high-speed missile designed to engage both air and surface targets during the Cold War. However, the maximum range of that missile, dubbed the Advanced Strategic Air-Launched Missile (ASALM), was still only expected to be 300 miles or 260 nautical miles.
In the post-Cold War era, the US had also dabbled with other long-range air-launched missile variants like the Joint Dual-Role Air Dominance Missile (JDRADM). This Navy concept from around 2008 to 2010 was intended to replace both the AIM-120 and AIM-9. However, it focused on kinematic performance and maneuverability rather than extreme standoff range, with projected capabilities likely capped in the region of 54 to 81 nautical miles. In the 2010s, the JDRADM evolved into the now-defunct Next Generation Missile (NGM) program, which aimed for a range of roughly 86 to 108 nautical miles.
Most recently, the Long-Range Engagement Weapon (LREW) was the direct precursor to the AIM-260 JATM and potentially the AIM-174B. Its design goal was to achieve a range of approximately 108 to 200 nautical miles. Earlier in 2026, the Navy did put out its own call for a long-range anti-radiation missile capable of engaging air and surface targets, dubbed the Advanced Emission Suppression Missile (AESM). However, the service has not specified what its desired range for this weapon might be.
So, the US has clearly been looking to develop a powerful long-range air-launched missile for decades, but nothing like the scale of the AFLRW. Indeed, nothing approaching a range of 1,000 nautical miles appears to have ever been discussed, at least openly, in relation to any of these programs. However, the Air Force did publicly talk about the prospect of anti-air missiles with ranges of up to 1,000 miles in a report to Congress in December 2024. “Counter-air weapons with ranges out to over 1,000 miles and supported by space-based sensors will place aircraft such as tankers that have traditionally operated with impunity at risk,” the Air Force’s 2024 report said.
But that was envisioned as part of a projected threat ecosystem the Navy saw taking shape by 2050. By the looks of it, the intention now is to get the AFLRW into service within the next few years. So why the increased urgency? It’s a sane response to the growing capabilities of the US’s adversaries, and in particular one which has been investing huge amounts of effort and money into AEW&C and long-range air defenses: China.
China has expanded its AEW&C fleet and long-range aerial denial capabilities to an alarming degree in recent years, shifting from a limited regional force to one capable of projecting power deep into the Western Pacific. Of particular concern is that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has increased its AEW&C capacity by six to eightfold over the last decade. In the process, they’ve created the most modern and diverse fleet in the world, behind only the US. China has established serial production of its turboprop-powered KJ-500 workhorse and now has over 60 units in service, 40 with the Air Force and more than 20 with the Navy.
The KJ-500’s advanced digital radar reportedly allows it to detect stealth targets at ranges comparable to larger aircraft. More concerning, China’s also introduced the KJ-600, a carrier-based AEW&C aircraft similar to the US E-2 Hawkeye. The plane allows Chinese carrier strike groups to operate with organic long-range radar coverage, drastically extending their defensive and offensive reach beyond the range of ship-based radars. But those capabilities are about to expand even further.
China is developing the KJ-3000 to replace its aging KJ-2000. The new plane is intended to offer greater fuel efficiency, endurance, and radar power. Additionally, the high-altitude WZ-9 and advanced KJ-700 are being fielded to detect low-observable aircraft and manage complex battle spaces. In addition, new special mission aircraft like the Y-9DZ and the Y-9LG combine AEW&C functions with potent electronic attack and intelligence gathering.
These sophisticated aircraft will allow China to simultaneously detect, jam, and geolocate adversary emissions in a single sortie. These developments have greatly reduced the US’s huge advantage in surveillance and battlefield intelligence. But China has also been developing long-range offensive and defensive weapons to combat threats at increasingly massive distances, and they’re already fielding long-range air-launched missiles that can equal or better the AFLRW. The Chang Jian 20 (CJ-20) is an air-launched cruise missile carried by the H-6K bomber.
It has an estimated range of around 930 to 1,240 miles. This directly matches the lower end of the AFLRW requirement, giving the H-6K the ability to strike distant targets after flying well out into the Pacific. China also already fields an air-launched variant of its YJ-21 hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missile adapted for use with the H-6K bomber. It has a range of approximately 932 miles and speeds of Mach 6 to 10, roughly 4,566 to 7,600 mph.
While slightly shorter than the AFLRW’s intended range, its hypersonic speed makes it a critical threat to carrier groups. China is also actively miniaturizing these systems for smaller tactical aircraft like the J-10, expanding the reach of long-range hypersonic missiles beyond strategic bombers. So in this regard, the US is, to an extent, playing catch-up, as is the rest of NATO. Outside of the US, within the alliance, similar missiles to the AFLRW are still in the development stage.
ELSA, the European Long Strike Approach, is a collaborative effort that includes a UK-Germany bilateral project to develop a new cruise missile with a range exceeding 1,240 miles. And the Future Combat Air System (FCAS/SCAF), being developed by nations including France, Germany, and Spain, includes plans for next-generation long-range weapons. Though specific range data remains classified. It’s not just in the range of its offensive long-range missiles where China has the edge.
It’s also developed defensive anti-aircraft missiles that can reach beyond 1,000 nautical miles. The HQ-19 is China’s premier exo-atmospheric anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, comparable to the US’s THAAD. It has a confirmed intercept range of around 1,620 nautical miles. While primarily an ABM system, its radar and kinematic performance also contribute significantly to aerial denial against high-altitude threats like US AWACS aircraft, fighter jets, bombers, and incoming missiles.
But there are clearly members of the PLA’s elite who see the need for an equivalent missile to the AFLRW, something designed specifically to target high-value assets like AEW&C aircraft and bombers. Chinese researchers have publicly proposed a new hypersonic surface-to-air missile with a range of around 1,080 nautical miles. And that changes the equation for the US. It means that the US’s standoff missiles are no longer able to be fired from standoff distances—i.
e. , outside the range of China’s air defenses. The US’s bombers and fighters would have to enter the effective range of China’s long-distance missiles to launch their own missiles. In effect, that means the US’s current standoff missiles aren’t really standoff weapons anymore.
That’s why there’s an increased urgency in the US to develop a missile that can compete. China’s existing ability to reach out and touch the US’s most prized assets at distances over 1,000 nautical miles, plus China’s growing fleet of AEW&C and tankers, makes it imperative, especially when you consider the distances between the US’s bases and allies in Taiwan. The distance between US bases on the Japanese island of Okinawa and Taiwan is roughly 390 nautical miles. Further out, the distance between Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and Taiwan is around 1,500 nautical miles.
That means AFLRW-armed aircraft flying over the East China Sea or the northern end of the South China Sea should be able to engage targets with hundreds of missiles inside the Chinese mainland, provided that suitable targeting data was available. AFLRW would also give the Air Force a way to pick off airborne AEW&C aircraft, tankers, bombers, other surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, and potentially even unsuspecting tactical jets. What’s more, the missiles will be able to do so without necessarily alerting them to the fact that they’re being targeted at all, at least until it’s too late to escape. Going after targets from such great ranges also greatly reduces the need to project tactical air power and support aircraft far forward and deep into harm’s way, particularly during the opening stages of a conflict.
By eliminating vital force-multiplying aircraft with long-range missiles, the survivability of traditional counterair packages would be greatly enhanced. AFLRW missiles would also give US Air Force aircraft another potentially decisive edge: added flexibility to engage targets closer to the tactical edge, but far from their current flight paths. In the Pacific, areas of active combat in the air or on the surface could easily be dotted across thousands of square miles. AFLRW missiles would allow the US to cover the whole zone without putting planes in the air in each sector.
You may be wondering why, with so many immediate benefits, the development of ultra-long-range air-launched missiles has been so sparse. You would think that with the range of warfare increasing all the time, development of these missiles would be top priority. Well, as you can see from the urgency of the US’s plans for the AFLRW, it is a priority, but it’s not such an easy task to accomplish. Ultra-long-range air-launched missiles come with a unique set of development challenges.
For starters, at those ranges, there are significant propulsion and aerodynamic constraints that need to be overcome. Achieving such extreme ranges actually requires moving beyond the standard rocket motors used in current air-to-air missiles. The traditional solid-fueled rockets used to power these missiles burn out quickly, leaving the missiles dependent on kinetic energy for the remainder of the flight, and that dissipates rapidly over 1,000 nautical miles due to atmospheric drag. To bridge this gap, the AFLRW will likely require multi-stage architectures similar to air-launched ballistic missiles.
Alternatively, advanced scramjet or ramjet propulsion will likely be required to sustain hypersonic speeds for extended durations. As with all hypersonic missiles, there’s also a serious challenge dealing with thermal load. Sustaining flight at hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 and beyond over 1,000 nautical miles generates extreme aerodynamic heating. To prevent structural failure and protect the critical internal electronics, advanced refractory materials and active cooling systems are required, significantly increasing production cost and complexity.
Traveling that distance also requires large quantities of fuel, which makes the missile rather large and particularly heavy. This is likely to limit the range of aircraft that can actually lug the AFLRW. It’s probably only going to be launchable from strategic bombers like the B-21 Raider or B-52. The weapon is likely to simply be too large for internal bays and too heavy for external pylons on smaller fighter jets without sacrificing range or maneuverability.
Now, these design challenges don’t just plague the US. Chinese, Russian, North Korean, Iranian, and all other designers of long-range air-launched missiles must contend with the same constraints of physics and chemistry. But there’s another critical problem that must also be overcome so that the AFLRW can be truly effective: the blind-fire guidance problem. At 1,000 nautical miles, targets like aircraft or ships can move hundreds of miles during the missile’s flight time.
The launch aircraft’s radar cannot see the target at such distances due to the curvature of the Earth and radar horizon limits. So at those ranges, the missile can’t rely on fire-and-forget active radar homing from the launch platform. The target guidance will have to be updated while it’s in the air. These midcourse updates will have to be delivered by offboard sensors on satellites, drones, or other aircraft.
And that requires a robust, jam-resistant data link that can survive in a contested electronic warfare environment, possibly requiring an upgrade to the capabilities of the US’s existing data link systems. Fortunately for the US, that’s an area where it already has the best capabilities among any military on the planet. Maneuvering the missile into the right general area for a strike shouldn’t be too much of a sweat. But there’s one more area where a precision strike at extreme distances still presents a serious technological challenge: seeker sensitivity during the terminal phase.
When the missile reaches the target area, its onboard seeker must acquire specific targets amidst clutter and countermeasures, and do so autonomously and without external help. The AFLRW thus needs seekers with the sensitivity and processing power to distinguish high-value targets like tankers or AWACS from decoys. And that’s very much easier said than done. In fact, what these challenges reveal about the AFLRW is that it can’t really be considered a standalone weapon.
It’s entirely dependent on a system that many believe is going to be at the core of future warfare: a heavily networked kill web. This kill web brings together tertiary sensors and other supporting elements across vast networking layers. It’s spread across the air, land, sea, space, and even cyberspace domains and incorporates assets from across the US military, not just the Air Force. Successful engagement by the AFLRW requires real-time fusion of data from this web to track moving targets across the vast Pacific or European theaters.
Of course, that process is also not without its challenges. If China can successfully jam communications or destroy key sensor nodes like US AWACS or satellites, the missile will lose its ability to update its trajectory, rendering it ineffective against maneuvering targets. This shifts the bottleneck from the missile’s hardware to the resilience of the broader command and control network, creating a myriad of new challenges well beyond the missile itself. But in effect, the AFLRW should be able to impose the same conundrum onto the Chinese.
Taking out China’s AEW&C aircraft and other key sensors like radar installations would have the same effect, compromising its command and control network and adversely affecting the guidance of its own long-range missiles. And that could make all the difference in a conflict in the Indo-Pacific. It all points towards a future where distance from target becomes an increasingly marginal variable, where highly accurate, ever longer-range strikes become the norm.
More pertinently perhaps, it points to a new era of net-centric warfare where the kill web is truly king.
