U.S. Air Force ERAM Missile Test Backs Push for Low-Cost and High-Volume Weapons.

The U.S. Air Force confirmed it completed a live-warhead test of its Extended Range Attack Munition on January 21, 2026, at Eglin Air Force Base, less than 16 months after contract award. The accelerated test pace signals a deliberate shift toward affordable, high-volume long-range strike weapons designed for sustained combat rather than limited inventories. Eglin Air Force Base’s latest test update put a hard timestamp on a program the U.S. Air Force is clearly trying to move at wartime speed.

On January 30, 2026, the U.S. Air Force confirmed it had completed a live-warhead firing of its Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) on January 21, 2026, at the Eglin Test and Training Range in Florida. The event was framed as more than a routine range sortie: it was a proof of acceleration, reaching a full detonation test less than 16 months after the program’s initial contract award. While the Air Force kept key performance numbers under wraps, the message was unambiguous. ERAM is being built to deliver long-range effects in quantity rather than boutique shots, and the live-fire collected the instrumentation data needed to mature the design toward operational fielding.
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ERAM is a rapidly produced air-launched standoff cruise missile in the 500 lb class, using turbojet propulsion and GPS/INS guidance to deliver precision strikes on fixed high-value targets from outside dense air defenses, enabling the U.S. Air Force to generate larger salvos and sustain long-range strike at scale (Picture source: U.S. Air Force).

ERAM is best understood as a “cruise missile for mass,” sized and integrated like a familiar 500 lb class weapon rather than a large, expensive standoff round. CoAspire, one of the two selected developers, describes its competing ERAM variant as derived from its Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile (RAACM), an additively manufactured weapon with a deployable wing, a turbojet engine, a warhead section, and a guidance package, built to match the physical envelope of an MK-82 or GBU-38 class store and to ride on aircraft already cleared to carry those munitions. That design choice matters as much as the propulsion: it reduces aircraft integration friction, expands the list of feasible launch platforms, and supports a distributed loadout concept where fighters can carry meaningful standoff punch without waiting for a bespoke clearance campaign. For export configurations, the U.S. government’s Ukraine case also explicitly references embedded GPS/INS guidance sets with anti-spoofing options, reinforcing that the program is being engineered from day one for electronic warfare realities.

For the operations, ERAM targets a gap the Air Force has been warning about for years: the mismatch between the number of aimpoints in a high-end fight and the number of exquisite missiles available on day one. Eglin’s release characterizes the weapon as precision standoff for high-value fixed targets, a phrasing that aligns with the kind of preplanned strike sets that dominate early phases of a peer conflict: command nodes, logistics chokepoints, hardened infrastructure, and air defense support sites that enable an integrated kill chain. In tactical terms, ERAM offers commanders a way to trade a portion of stealth and maximum range for volume and responsiveness, enabling larger salvo sizes, multi-axis timing, and repeated waves that complicate interceptor management and force adversaries to spend scarce air defense rounds on relatively lower-cost threats. That “affordable mass” logic is also why ERAM sits naturally alongside the Air Force’s broader experimentation with attritable, rapidly produced strike systems, rather than competing head-to-head with legacy cruise missiles on a one-for-one basis.

The Air Force awarded ERAM work to non-traditional suppliers, Zone 5 Technologies and CoAspire, and outside reporting indicates the January event likely showcased Zone 5’s “Rusty Dagger” ERAM offering, with uncertainty remaining over whether the CoAspire variant was also flown in that specific live-warhead test. Regardless of which airframe carried the detonating warhead, the pathway is clear: use rapid contracting, parallel prototype work, and manufacturing approaches like additive production to compress timelines that traditionally stretch across many budget cycles. CoAspire openly claims it designed, built, and flew its RAACM off a tactical jet in four months and is positioning for full-rate production at its Virginia facility, while broader program reporting highlights a production ambition measured in thousands, not dozens. Early ERAM planning emphasized the ability to build 1,000 weapons within two years, a monthly output that forces designers to prioritize supply-chain simplicity, modularity, and testability over bespoke subcomponents.

For the U.S. Air Force, ERAM’s value is not that it replaces today’s premier standoff missiles, but that it changes the arithmetic of strike. Weapons like AGM-158 JASSM and JASSM-ER remain the penetrating, higher-end options for defended targets when survivability and range dominate the requirement, yet they are also expensive and production-constrained by design. ERAM introduces a complementary tier: a rapidly producible, precision standoff round intended to bulk out inventories, widen commander choice, and sustain operational tempo when the opening stockpile starts to thin. It also carries a strategic aftertaste that is hard to ignore. The same system being accelerated for U.S. deterrence has been cleared in principle for a major Foreign Military Sale package to Ukraine, including thousands of missiles and associated mission planning support, signaling that Washington sees scalable air-launched strike as both an Indo-Pacific imperative and a European war lesson. If ERAM performs as intended, the larger shift may be cultural: a move away from decade-long, single-prime missile programs toward iterative, competitive, factory-friendly weapons that can be built fast enough to matter.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.