Air Force Research Lab Advances “First-of-its-Kind” Armed Hypersonic Attack Drone

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington D.C.) The Air Force Research Laboratory is in the early stages of developing a breakthrough-level hypersonic drone, something it appears the world has not yet seen. Hypersonic missiles are certainly here and already firing, and there has been a long-standing, multi-year scientific effort to evolve hypersonic technologies into new dimensions of possibility.

Hypersonic Drone

The weapon, called Mayhem, is an air-breathing hypersonic weapon system, is largely in the conceptual stages, however officials with the AFRL say some initial subsystem hardware work is underway. The AFRL is very clear that most details, if even conceptual, are not discussable for understandable security reasons, they do say the platform will be a “Multi-mission ISR/Strike” vehicle which will travel at hypersonic speeds above Mach 5. In a simple tactical sense, this mission scope means the hypersonic vehicle will travel with some kind of sensor payload able to gather information and targeting detail and also, it appears, be capable of launching offensive strikes. 

The full name of the program is referred to as Expendable Hypersonic Multi-Mission ISR and Strike Program, and the effort is now moving into a System Requirements Review and Conceptual Design Review in a digital engineering kind of environment.

Video Above: Air War in 2050 – Air Force Research Lab Commander on Hypersonics

Leidos and Kratos have been given an AFRL deal to perform advanced work on a System Design Agent team to gather promising industry innovations of relevance to the project and ultimately oversee designs, prototypes and testing.

This breakthrough, should it come to fruition in coming years, is extremely significant for a number of reasons and could very well give the US a tactical and strategic advantage, given the speeds at which it could conduct surveillance and attack operations. The Air Force has already fired its Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) from a B-52, demonstrating an ability to use scramjet propulsion technology to launch and sustain hypersonic speeds with an attack weapon at five times the speed of sound. This weapon, and others across the US military services, are evolving quickly and showing great promise as paradigm-changing weapons for future attack.