‘Wolf Pack' Of Modular Mini Cruise Missiles Unveiled By L3Harris

Yahoo

18-07-2025

L3Harris has formally rolled out its modular Wolf family of 'launched effects vehicles,' which includes the Red Wolf, configured for long-range precision strikes against targets on land or at sea, and the Green Wolf fitted with an electronic warfare payload. Both could be launched from air, ground, and maritime platforms. L3Harris is one of three companies this week to highlight work on weapons in this general category. This points to something of an industrial arms race to create modular, relatively cheap, and small systems that increasingly blur the line between uncrewed aerial systems, especially longer-range kamikaze drones, and cruise missiles, as well as decoys.
The development of the Wolf family traces back to 2020, according to a press release L3Harris put out yesterday. More than 40 test flights have been conducted to date. The existence of Red Wolf first emerged publicly at the U.S. Army's Experimentation Demonstration Gateway Event in 2021 (EDGE 21), with Aviation Week reporting at the time that it had originated from a secret project run by the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO). The U.S. military has already been testing and evaluating versions of Red Wolf for years now, including as a path toward a new long-range strike capability for U.S. Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters.
The wait is over. Introducing Red Wolf ᵀᴹ and Green Wolf ᵀᴹ, the first vehicles in our expanding pack of launched effects systems. pic.twitter.com/d4oG7fgeE4
— L3Harris (@L3HarrisTech) July 17, 2025
'Our launched effects 'wolf pack' provides U.S. military branches – regardless of platform – with a significant advantage in closing long-range kill chains, defeating adversarial threats in challenging environments and protecting assets,' Ed Zoiss, president of the Space and Airborne Systems at L3Harris, said in an accompanying statement. 'The Red Wolf and Green Wolf are lethal, modular, affordable, and ready to hunt.'
Renderings of Red Wolf L3Harris released yesterday show a missile-like design with pop-out main wings and horizontal stabilizers at the tail end. It also has two vertical fins. There are a pair of intakes blended at the rear of the body to feed air to the small turbojet that powers the design.
The design also has a prominent chine line that wraps around the front end and extends along the sides of the body, as well as a shovel-like shape to its nose. Both of these features are indicative of air vehicle designs with at least a degree of low-observability (stealthiness).
In terms of performance, 'their endurance has been proven in flight testing, demonstrating high subsonic speeds – 200+ nautical mile range at low altitudes and 60+ minutes duration,' an L3Harris product card says. 'Modeling data proves greater speed, range, and duration capabilities.'
Further details about Red Wolf and Green Wolf, including what kind of guidance package the strike configuration uses, remain limited.
The renderings show a design that is also prominently different from pictures of the Red Wolf that have previously emerged. The air vehicles seen in the earlier imagery all have four fixed tail fins. At least one also has a single flush-mounted air intake for its turbojet. The design of the body looks to have remained largely consistent.
I think I saw a picture of Red Wolf at PC-C4 https://t.co/Jd14a2p37g pic.twitter.com/ccv42tdffo
— 笑脸男人 (@lfx160219) May 2, 2025
'For awareness, we have several derivatives of the baseline [design] that have flown and provide for a variety of ranges, payloads and capabilities,' L3Harris had told TWZ in February.
As noted, the U.S. Marine Corps has already been actively testing Red Wolf as part of its Long Range Attack Missile (LRAM) project, the core goal of which is to demonstrate a new long-range strike capability for its AH-1Z attack helicopters. The LRAM effort has been targeting a range of at least 150 nautical miles (just over 170 miles or nearly 278 kilometers), which is exponentially greater than that of the AGM-114 Hellfires and AGM-179 Joint Air-to-Ground Missiles (JAGM) that Marine Vipers can fire now. Though longer-range versions of the Hellfire and JAGM are in development, existing variants of both missiles have maximum ranges of under 10 miles.
LRAM is feeding into a program of record called Precision Attack Strike Missile (PASM), which could consider other options beyond Red Wolf. The Marines have also said LRAM/PASM could lead to further air-launched capabilities for the AH-1Z and other Marine aircraft. Broadly speaking, this highlights how Red Wolf, as well as similar munitions, will allow platforms previously capable only of conducting direct attacks to launch standoff strikes, something that will only become more and more important in the face of expanding air defense threats.
'The opportunity that LRAM provides is the modularity that can come with it. So kinetic [and] non-kinetic capabilities,' Marine Col. Scott Shadforth said during a presentation at the annual Modern Day Marine exposition in May. 'And then we can certainly get into an open debate of, is it a weapon? Is it an air-launched effect? Is it a UAS [uncrewed aerial system; drone]? How are we defining those capabilities?'
Shadforth is head of Naval Air Systems Command's (NAVAIR) Expeditionary and Maritime Aviation-Advanced Development Team (XMA-ADT). The newly announced Green Wolf electronic warfare configuration would fit well with his mention of future non-kinetic possibilities.
We also know that the U.S. Army has previously conducted a test involving a Red Wolf configured for communications signal relay. That service has also eyed the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone as a launch platform in the past.
As part of yesterday's announcement, L3Harris has released its own graphics depicting notional scenarios involving air, ground, and sea-launched Red Wolves and Green Wolves, as well as a potential future decoy variant, all working together. Green Wolves could be used to help locate targets, especially hostile air defense assets, by zeroing in on their signal emissions, while also working to clear a path for Red Wolves to actually strike them. Decoys could be used to further confuse and overwhelm defenders, too. Variants of the Wolf family could be layered in with additional types of munitions and other capabilities, as well.
L3Harris is targeting a unit price of approximately $300,000 for members of the Wolf family once production reaches the full expected rate of around 1,000 per year. The unit cost of a much shorter-ranged JAGM is also in the $300,000 range. For further comparison, the price tag of a single stealthy AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER), a much larger and longer-ranged traditional air-launched land attack cruise missile in U.S. service today, is in the $1.5 million range.
The cost and production goals reflect immense interest, especially from the U.S. military, in new standoff precision strike munitions that are also relatively cheap and readily producible. All of this is being driven heavily by planning to ensure that the U.S. military has sufficient munition stockpiles ahead of any potential high-end fight in the Pacific against China, and the ability to sustain those inventories in the event the conflict becomes protracted. Lessons learned from recent U.S. operations in and around the Middle East, as well as from ongoing support to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, have put additional emphasis on new lower-cost capabilities that can be produced at scale. Many other countries outside of the United States have been arriving at the same conclusions when it comes to future precision munitions developments.
With all this in mind, it is important to note that L3Harris is hardly the only company responding to this demand signal, which is also notably attracting a growing number of non-traditional firms outside of the established defense industry.
On Wednesday, Anduril revealed new details about testing to date of its Barracuda-100M air vehicle, which is in a roughly similar class, form and function-wise, to the Red Wolf and Green Wolf. Anduril unveiled the Barracuda family, which also includes larger and longer-ranged 250 and 500 models, last year.
The U.S. Army has been testing Barracuda-100M as part of a demonstration effort called High-Speed Maneuverable Missile (HSMM), which focused primarily on the development of a new Precision Target Acquisition Seeker (PTAS) capability.
'The Government developed PTAS payload is being developed to allow for passive, autonomous tracking of identified targets,' Anduril said in a press release. 'It uses video feedback to correlate and seek a previously identified target image using a Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) camera within the seeker.'
In testing so far, Anduril has been air-launching Barracuda-100M from an L-29 light jet, but the company plans to conduct a series of ground-launched demonstrations later this year. A full end-to-end live-fire test is expected to come next year.
Successful flight test of Barracuda-100M for the @USArmy's High Speed Maneuverable Missile program.Delivering high-G maneuvers, speeds over 500 knots, and 10x the range of the Hellfire missile. pic.twitter.com/rvAYqodvku
— Anduril Industries (@anduriltech) July 16, 2025
The Army does not currently have a formal plan to operationalize the results of the HSMM program, but there are active discussions about potential paths forward, according to Anduril. Barracuda-100M, along with the other members of the Barracuda family, could be of interest to other customers.
'You can envision … where the Barracuda 100 wants to live. So, in that Hellfire form factor is kind of the displacement,' Steve Milano, senior director for Advanced Effects at Anduril, told TWZ and other outlets during a press call earlier this week. 'Anytime that there's a need for extended range capability for roughly the same cost point you're going to have Barracuda 100 playing in that space. So both from a … mobile surface launch capability, as well as rotary wing and fixed wing aircraft.'
Lockheed Martin put out new details about ongoing work on its family of Common Multi-Mission Truck (CMMT, pronounced 'comet') air vehicles on Wednesday, as well. The CMMT first broke cover in 2022, and is an evolution of a low-cost air vehicle concept the company had been working on before that called Speed Racer, which you can read more about here.
The CMMT family now includes a CMMT-D version designed to be dropped via the Rapid Dragon palletized munition system and a CMMT-X type intended to be launched via a typical pylon on an aircraft. Rapid Dragon is a U.S. Air Force program intended to allow the service to bolster its standoff strike capacity by transforming cargo aircraft like the C-130 Hercules or C-17 Globemaster III into additional launch platforms.
'In May, a team from Orlando, Florida traveled to the Tillamook UAS Test Range on the Oregon coast to test CMMT-D, a compact cruise missile designed to deploy from air mobility aircraft like the C-130,' according to Lockheed Martin's press release earlier this week. 'They dropped a CMMT-D test missile from a Rapid Dragon pallet, which was carried by a helicopter to an altitude of 14,500 feet to simulate a parachute descent. The CMMT-D deployed its wings and entered an unpowered glide following a safe release.'
'In June, a CMMT team from Palmdale, California, traveled to the Pendleton UAS Range in Oregon to test CMMT-X, a smaller variant of the CMMT family,' the release added. 'They mounted CMMT-X to the pylon of a test aircraft and took to the skies for CMMT's first pylon launch from an airborne aircraft. The vehicle safely separated from the launch craft, deployed its wings and lit its engine to initiate powered flight.'
'Using model-based engineering, the team rapidly evolved SPEED RACER into CMMT-X, rewriting software to meet U.S. Air Force weapon open systems architecture standards and ground testing to ensure airworthiness, all within a record time of just seven months,' the release also noted.
L3Harris Red Wolf and Green Wolf, Anduril's Barracuda family, and Lockheed Martin's CMMTs, and the U.S. military programs they are being developed around, represent just a portion of the low-cost precision munition projects known to be going on now in the United States. The previously secretive nature of the Wolf family underscores the likelihood of even more work being done in the classified realm.
Now that Red Wolf, along with Green Wolf, are fully out in the open, even more details about that particular family of launched effects vehicles may begin to emerge.
Contact the author: [e-mail]