Business is booming for the companies in the boom business.
Late last week, the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons office awarded California-based Kongsberg subsidiary Zone 5 Technologies $65M to develop a maritime strike variant of its Rusty Dagger low-cost cruise missile for US allies under the Navy’s Coalition Heterogeneous Affordable Offensive Strike (CHAOS) program.
The award comes a month after the Navy selected CoAspire’s Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile-Extended Range (RAACM-ER) for the CHAOS program under a $70M OTA deal.
- Both the Rusty Dagger and RAACM-ER were developed under the Air Force’s Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) program and are key parts of the service’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) program.
- Zone 5 and CoAspire’s missiles were also among the five “disruptive new entrants” tapped in May for the Pentagon’s Low-Cost Containerized Missiles (LCCM) program (alongside a longer-range variant of Leidos’ Black Arrow and Anduril’s Barracuda-500M), which will collectively deliver 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles over three years.
The whole dang Pentagon is really going all-in on the whole boom on a budget thing, huh?
Boom and zoom: The Navy’s CHAOS program—designed to “rapidly build and deliver low-cost, scalable precision strike weapons to allies and partners,” according to the service—is focused on giving partner nations an affordable long-range precision-strike capability—particularly against ships, and particularly in the Pacific.
- The Rusty Dagger, weighing around 500 pounds, has a range of about 600 miles, while CoAspire’s RAACM-ER has a range of more than 1,000 miles.
- The Rusty Dagger can be launched from a fighter (the Air Force tested it on an F-16 in April) or configured for surface launch from a container, both on land and at sea.
Battle-tested: Under the $65M OTA contract, Zone 5 says it’ll “design, build, test, and deliver” a CHAOS variant of the Rusty Dagger. It helps that the OG Rusty Dagger is already pretty well-tested, validated, and, according to numerous reports, wreaking havoc in Russia.
- The two boom buds were cleared for an $825M Foreign Military Sale to Ukraine under the ERAM program last August, which covered the sale of 3,350 Rusty Daggers and RAACM-ERs.
- In June, Russian and US analysts alike said the Rusty Dagger was used to strike a Russian military electronics plant about 120 miles from the border with Ukraine.
Sea strike: According to the Navy, the missiles Zone 5 and CoAspire are tasked with developing for the CHAOS program will first be focused on an “expeditionary ground launch capability, expected to be in production by 2028,” and “rapidly” expanded to surface launch platforms—with “opportunities for air-launched configurations based on warfighter demand”—afterward.
“As adversaries increasingly deploy advanced area denial systems, coalition and allied forces face significant challenges in maintaining credible, modern, and affordable anti-ship capabilities,” the Navy’s precision strike program (PMX-201) manager said. “CHAOS closes this capability gap by delivering a highly capable, adaptable, and exportable maritime strike solution that overcomes present-day obsolescence and supply chain challenges.”
Even though the US is getting its hands on plenty of the Rusty Dagger and RAACMs through the Low-Cost Containerized Missiles (LCCM) program, CHAOS is all about spreading the love to America’s friends in unfriendly places.
“Moving beyond traditional US programs that prioritized domestic requirements first, PMX-201 developed a strategy for CHAOS from the outset with a ‘partner-first’ philosophy to quickly meet international release requirements,” the office said. “This allows for rapid and secure technology transfer to trusted allies and partners.”
