Pentagon wants new family of maneuverable hypersonic weapons

The Pentagon is preparing to build a new family of hypersonic weapons designed to maneuver past enemy air defenses, and it wants defense contractors to help design them.

The Department of War’s Strategic Capabilities Office disclosed the effort in a special notice posted August 21 on the primary U.S. federal contracting portal, ahead of a classified Industry Day set for September 14 to September 16, 2026, in Chantilly, Virginia. The notice describes a family of next-generation, maneuverable, and precise hypersonic weapons capable of defeating advanced defensive architectures. Multiple programs will fall under the effort, each using different stand-off ranges, booster sizes, and payload packages to strike a variety of target types.

Hypersonic weapons travel at Mach 5 or faster, more than a mile per second, and can change course during flight. That combination makes them difficult for existing radar and missile defense systems to track and intercept. A ballistic missile arcs high into space along a predictable path. A hypersonic weapon instead flies low enough and fast enough to occupy a gap that neither ground-based air defenses nor space-based interceptors currently cover well. That gap is the core problem the Offensive Fires programs appear built to exploit.

The Industry Day will brief contractors on program specifics in a classified environment, ahead of a future solicitation. SCO plans to award multiple Phase 1 Concept Development Other Transactions for Prototype, a contracting mechanism authorized under 10 U.S.C. § 4022 that lets the Department of War move faster than traditional procurement rules allow. Sessions will run at three classification tiers across the three days, from Secret up to Top Secret with Special Access Required, with separate one-on-one meetings available for companies that request them.

The notice does not disclose funding levels, target production quantities, specific range requirements, or how many distinct weapon programs fall under Offensive Fires. It also does not name the individual systems that will be discussed behind closed doors in Chantilly.

SCO is a Pentagon office built to move fast. Director Jay Dryer has described its mission as identifying, analyzing, and prototyping disruptive uses of new and existing systems, with a goal of fielding capabilities within three to five years rather than the decade or more a standard acquisition program can take. The office sits alongside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Innovation Unit, and several other technology organizations that the Department of War folded into its Research and Engineering directorate this year.

Offensive Fires is not the Pentagon’s only hypersonic push. The Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, known as Dark Eagle, has moved toward operational fielding in 2026 and took part in the multinational Valiant Shield 2026 exercise. The Air Force is separately funding the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon and the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, and the Joint Hypersonics Transition Office has awarded research contracts to smaller firms to mature underlying subsystem technology.

It is not clear how the SCO programs relate to those existing service efforts, whether as new systems, follow-on variants, or complementary capabilities. The notice states only that the goal is a flexible family of weapons able to hit a wide variety of targets and defeat defenses built to stop them.

No date has been announced for the resulting solicitation. SCO says the September briefings are meant to prepare contractors for that release, with the office directing further questions to a dedicated Offensive Fires email address rather than a public contracting office.