Zone 5 wins $12M to scale up Rusty Dagger missile manufacturing

The U.S. Air Power has awarded a $12 million contract to Zone 5 Applied sciences to advance manufacturing know-how for the Rusty Dagger program, a fast-moving effort to provide reasonably priced, mass-scale long-range strike missiles that has moved from program launch to potential fight employment in roughly two years.

The contract, awarded June 18, 2026, by the Air Power Analysis Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Power Base in Ohio, covers analysis and growth targeted particularly on manufacturing know-how for the Rusty Dagger Franchise, with work to be carried out in Miamisburg, Ohio, and an anticipated completion date of September 2027. Of the $12 million complete, $7.5 million was obligated instantly utilizing fiscal 12 months 2026 analysis, growth, check and analysis funds.

That manufacturing focus is the core of what makes this contract important. Constructing a cruise missile that works is tough. Constructing one that may be produced by the 1000’s at a fraction of the price of typical precision weapons is a basically completely different engineering problem, and it’s the problem the Rusty Dagger program exists to resolve. The Air Power launched the Prolonged Vary Assault Munition program in early 2024 with an express and publicly acknowledged major goal: to offer Ukraine with reasonably priced, mass-producible long-range strike weapons sooner than current applications might ship them. That directness about this system’s operational rationale was uncommon in American protection procurement, the place weapons growth applications usually communicate in summary warfighting necessities slightly than naming particular recipients or conflicts.

The AGM-188A Rusty Dagger addresses each issues concurrently by means of a design idea that’s simple in precept and tough in execution. Zone 5 Applied sciences, a small protection firm headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California, constructed the missile as a turbojet-powered, air-launched, precision-guided standoff munition that matches inside the dimension and weight envelope of an ordinary Mk 82 unguided bomb, the 500-pound (227 kg) general-purpose bomb that has outfitted Western and allied air forces for many years. The bodily compatibility with the Mk 82 footprint is the design’s central strategic benefit: any plane at the moment outfitted to hold that bomb, which encompasses nearly each fixed-wing fight plane in Ukraine’s stock in addition to these of dozens of NATO allies, can probably carry the Rusty Dagger with out important modification to the weapon station or the plane itself. The barrier to fielding shrinks dramatically when the receiving platform requires no new integration work.

Zone 5 Applied sciences occupies an atypical place within the American protection industrial base, working as a small enterprise in a website traditionally managed by giant prime contractors together with Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. The Small Enterprise Innovation Analysis program that funded the Rusty Dagger’s growth channels protection {dollars} particularly towards smaller, extra agile corporations able to transferring sooner than the key contractors on focused technical issues. The Rusty Dagger’s trajectory displays that pace benefit in a means that stands out even by the compressed timelines the Ukraine battle has pressured on Western arms builders: from program launch in early 2024 to a Part III manufacturing contract in June 2026 represents a tempo that typical protection acquisition applications not often maintain throughout the total arc from idea to manufacturing readiness.

The Part III designation carries particular which means within the Small Enterprise Innovation Analysis framework. Part I covers feasibility analysis. Part II covers prototype growth and demonstration. Part III is the place a know-how transitions from promising prototype to one thing a producer can really construct in amount, and it’s usually funded not by means of the innovation analysis program itself however by means of common protection procurement or different authorities contracts, reflecting a judgment that the know-how has confirmed itself sufficiently to justify manufacturing funding. The Air Power’s choice to fund a devoted manufacturing know-how growth effort at this stage alerts confidence that the Rusty Dagger design is sound and that the remaining work is industrial slightly than scientific.

The Miamisburg, Ohio work location provides a manufacturing geography dimension to this system. Ohio has a considerable protection manufacturing presence, and situating the manufacturing know-how growth work there slightly than at Zone 5’s California headquarters suggests this system is constructing towards a manufacturing association with services able to the throughput a mass-employment strike weapon requires. The September 2027 completion date for the present contract provides this system roughly 15 months to resolve the manufacturing challenges that stand between the present design and factory-floor manufacturing at significant scale.

What that scale may seem like stays one of many program’s most consequential open questions. All the logic of the Rusty Dagger, a low-cost missile that matches on current plane with out modification, solely delivers its strategic worth if it may be produced in numbers giant sufficient to alter the calculus of a sustained air marketing campaign. A weapon that prices a fraction of a Storm Shadow per unit however can solely be manufactured in dozens per thirty days presents restricted operational benefit. The manufacturing know-how contract is this system’s try to reply that query earlier than it turns into an operational constraint.

Including context to this system’s trajectory, a Russian military-affiliated Telegram channel has claimed that Ukraine used AGM-188 Rusty Dagger missiles to strike the Sborka semiconductor plant in Voronezh, a Russian metropolis roughly 470 km (292 miles) from the Ukrainian border and a facility beforehand recognized as a part of Russia’s missile manufacturing provide chain. The declare originated with the channel “Voevoda Broadcasts,” cited by the open-source intelligence account Standing-6, and has not been independently verified or confirmed by both the Ukrainian or American governments at time of publication. If correct, it might symbolize the weapon’s first documented fight use, at a goal deep sufficient inside Russian territory to require real standoff vary and exact sufficient to counsel the steering system carried out as designed.