Lockheed's Low-Cost Cruise Missile ‘Truck' Is Now In Testing

Yahoo

05-03-2025

Lockheed Martin has revealed more about its Common Multi-Mission Truck (CMMT, pronounced 'comet'), a revised design based on its Speed Racer air vehicle concept, a missile-shaped uncrewed system you can read more about here. The CMMT is now said to be a family of systems, intended to yield low-cost subsonic air vehicles designed for a wide range of missions and for launch from both air and ground platforms. The ethos is very much in keeping with an ongoing U.S. Air Force push for cheaper, easier-to-produce munitions that has been accelerated by the realities of the current stockpile and its limited depth.
Lockheed is currently pitching CMMT in two basic configurations. The first is a missile that will be deployed via U.S. Air Force fighters, bombers, and transports. Concept artwork this week by Lockheed Martin shows CMMTs being launched from a C-130 series airlifter (as seen at the top of this story) and from an F-16 fighter. The second configuration is for a smaller long-range launched effect that will be deployed from rotary-wing platforms — the related concept artwork shows an H-60 Black Hawk series helicopter.
At the 2025 Air & Space Forces Association (AFA) Warfare Symposium today, Lockheed Martin also showed concept artwork of a ground-launched version of CMMT, with an example being fired from an M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) using one of its rocket pods. This version is apparently based on the second configuration of CMTT, but it's fitted with a supplementary booster for launching.
As for the air-launched version of the larger CMMT, Mike Rothstein, vice president of Strategy and Requirements, Air Weapons and Sensors at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control said at the AFA Warfare Symposium today that a potential palletized scenario could involve as many as 25 CMMTs. This compares with the nine palletized JASSM missiles used in Rapid Dragon, a previous experimental effort that armed airlifters with cruise missiles but which is, broadly speaking, conceptually similar to CMMT.
Rothstein confirmed that, over the last weekend, the company completed a CMMT drop test, making use of the latest iteration of Rapid Dragon to test the new store in what he described as 'more of a lab test,' involving a common pallet dropped under a parachute. This will be followed up by a planned free flight test of CMMT later this year, Rothstein said.
Lockheed Martin has recently also released more details about the development path for CMMT — which it says is 'highly adaptable and affordable' and which 'can be produced and delivered as fast as it is expended.'
The ability to produce munitions at scale is something that is increasingly seen as a key requirement by the U.S. military. To try and meet this demand, Lockheed Martin says it benefited from 1LMX — a program to 're-engineer its internal processes.'
1LMX is said to be the largest internal program ever undertaken by the company and is focused on 'automations and capabilities required to drive efficiency, increase velocity, and enhance … key captures and programs.'
One of the first programs to leverage 1LMX was Rapid Dragon, another Air Force initiative in keeping with the Pentagon's doctrine of 'affordable mass.' Lockheed Martin and the Air Force started work on Rapid Dragon in early 2021 and, within the first 10 months, had conducted three customer exercises and a first flight.
Rapid Dragon went on to yield four live-fire strike missions from airlifters, two in the United States and two abroad.
As Lockheed Martin was preparing Rapid Dragon for fielding, the company was also 'developing affordable mass weapons to support the Air Force mission —and a few others.'
This includes CMMT, which Lockheed Martin says is chiefly a manufacturing program rather than a technology development effort. As such, the aim was to drastically reduce the normal development path, producing a low-cost design that was '100 percent producible from the start.' Once a scalable product is achieved, 'performance-enhancing and mission-specific capabilities' will be introduced later 'as use cases and threats emerge.'
CMMT has an open architecture and modular design. This means it can be manufactured using distributed supply chains and production lines that can surge to meet customer demands. At the same time, new capabilities can be easily added as required. For this reason, too, Lockheed Martin typically refers to CMMT not as a missile but as an air vehicle since it can be fitted with different types of sensors as well as a warhead. Potentially, it could also be easily adapted as an air-launched decoy.
By utilizing 1LMX, Lockheed Martin was able to reduce the time required to get CMMT to a preliminary design review by 50 percent, the company says.
At the same time, as mentioned, CMMT is not an all-new design, since it also draws from the earlier Speed Racer. A product of Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works advanced projects division, this was an experimental low-cost 'pathfinder' design that was developed first to demonstrate new digital engineering and advanced manufacturing methods — techniques that were also rolled into 1LMX.
Like CMMT, Speed Racer was based around a modular architecture that allowed it to be relatively readily reconfigured for different mission sets. Speed Racer was also designed to be a low-cost vehicle, with a planned unit cost significantly under $2 million, and was not intended to be recovered after a mission.Back in July 2022, Lockheed Martin unveiled four distinct uncrewed aircraft designs, one of which was CMMT, with Speed Racer being disclosed as the basis for it.
An official project video released by Lockheed Martin depicted an F-35 launching a future CMMT from a wing pylon, a mode of employment that would negatively impact the jet's stealthy characteristics.
Meanwhile, other similar designs have emerged, and it's notable that the current CMMT looks quite similar to Anduril's Barracuda, a new family of what that company is calling 'expendable autonomous air vehicles' that are scalable, highly modular, and already being flight-tested. However, Barracuda is just one of an increasing number of cheaper cruise missiles now in the works, and this is an area that has attracted particular interest from smaller firms, including some brand-new players.
Shown: successful flight test of Barracuda-500, with vertical launch, autonomous flight, and precision target engagement. pic.twitter.com/kngqq09TQt
— Anduril Industries (@anduriltech) March 5, 2025
Overall, there's now a growing focus on less expensive, expandable, air-launched drones and munitions, driven by concerns about a potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific region. At the forefront of this is the Pentagon's Replicator initiative, which is accelerating work on low-cost air vehicles that could evolve into relatively cheap cruise missiles.
'As we envision the environment that we have to work in, we understand that in a global conflict, and the kind of conflict we're going to have, maybe against a peer competitor, being able to get mass on targets is important,' Rothstein said.
'We know we got to be able to produce at more rate,' Rothstein continued. 'And we know we have to work not only with some of the exquisite high-end weapons that we do so well, such as JASSM and LRASM, but we are also listening and understanding that there's a need to bring more affordable mass to that target. Think of [CMMT] like a low-cost cruise missile.'
With a genesis that dates back several years, and with the experience of the Speed Racer and Rapid Dragon, Lockheed Martin will hope that its CMMT is well positioned for future success — especially the scalable mass production that is a central tenet of its design.
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