The US military’s research arm is looking for missiles that can be built in a matter of days rather than months.
In recent documents posted on the government’s contracting website, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, said it’s looking for faster, cheaper ways to produce missiles, sensor technology, weapons avionics, and counter-air systems.
In three requests for information published on Tuesday, DARPA asks companies how to make that technology easier to produce and scale. The RFIs reflect a broader push inside the Defense Department to move away from the complex, highly engineered systems the military has traditionally favored.
“To accelerate current weapons development timelines, DARPA is considering an alternative development paradigm to increase the nation’s magazine depth and breadth,” one document reads, seeking out companies that can rapidly manufacture counter-air weapons using readily available parts.
“Rather than starting with complex, high-end systems that are typically large, expensive, exquisite, and few, a new approach prioritizes design for manufacturing at speed and scale,” it continues. “The goal is to produce large quantities of capabilities that are smaller, smarter, and significantly more affordable — designed for high-volume manufacturing.”
The ability to cost-effectively generate combat mass for high-intensity warfighting has become an increasingly important topic amid the war in Ukraine, where cheap drones are being expended in massive quantities, and the US-Israeli war with Iran, where the value of low-cost munitions is on display.
One DARPA request for information focuses on changing the traditional weapons development process for missile propulsion systems by prioritizing manufacturability, meaning the weapon’s capabilities are determined “by what can be produced quickly and efficiently at mass.”
Propulsion systems are a “notorious bottleneck in missile manufacturing,” DARPA said, adding that it is looking for emerging technologies that could crunch production timelines from months to days, and potentially even just hours.
The push for solutions is tied to a growing concern about what defense officials call “magazine depth,” or how long the US could sustain a fight against a near-peer adversary before running through its stockpiles. Modern missile systems are highly capable, but they are also expensive, slow to produce, and difficult to scale.
Those concerns have recently become more pronounced by the war in Iran.
American forces have relied heavily on stockpiles of high-end air defense interceptors, including Patriot missiles, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, and ship-launched Standard Missile interceptors, to counter Iranian missile and drone threats.
Experts at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK-based defense think tank, estimate that US stockpiles of advanced air defense interceptors and ground-attack missiles could be exhausted within weeks if the current pace of operations continues.
According to the RUSI report, the US and its allies in the Middle East had expended nearly 11,300 munitions after only 16 days of war, raising concerns that weapons critical for a potential conflict in the Pacific could be depleted. There have long been concerns that US munition stockpiles were already insufficient for a serious conflict with China.
Among the missile stockpiles under growing scrutiny are Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, a proven strike capability that can be launched from land and sea. The report estimates the US has fired more than 500, and that it could take “at least five years” to replace them.
A Washington Post article published three days later put the tally closer to 850, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies assessed that such heavy Tomahawk usage would mark the largest expenditure of the missile of any modern campaign.
None of these weapons is cheap. Patriot interceptors cost roughly $4 million each, THAAD interceptors more than $12 million, SM-2 and SM-6 missiles a few million apiece, and SM-3 interceptors can range from about $10 million to almost $30 million. Tomahawk cruise missiles cost around $2 million each.
The US has been turning up the production of these systems, but additional mass delivers advantages in high-intensity fights.
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