IMAGINE AN F-15 ARMED WITH MACH-5 MISSILES. THE US AIR Force in its 2021 budget proposal made a seemingly surprising choice. It abandoned a joint effort with the US Navy and US Army to develop a common hypersonic missile and instead shifted hundreds of millions of dollars to its own, single-service hypersonic missile. Now it's clear why. The flying branch favors the AGM-183 Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW, pronounced 'arrow') hypersonic missile over the joint Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW, or 'hacksaw') because the former is smaller... and the F-15 Eagle fighter could carry it.
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