In a decisive move to modernize and expand its precision strike capabilities, the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has executed a $27.2 million contract modification with defense contractor Leidos to procure the newly designated AGM-190A Havoc Spear Small Cruise Missile. The financial agreement specifically funds the acquisition of "All Up Rounds"—fully assembled, operational missiles ready for immediate combat deployment, officially moving the program out of its testing and prototyping phases and into the early stages of building an active munitions stockpile.
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| Screengrab from video posted to social media |
The manufacturing work will be heavily centralized in Huntsville, Alabama, a historic hub for American aerospace engineering, and is projected to run through February 2029. Structurally, the Pentagon has drawn the funding from both fiscal year 2025 and 2026 procurement budgets, with the lion's share of approximately $23.65 million originating from the newer 2026 allocation.
Crucially, this funding has been structured so that it does not expire at the end of the current fiscal year, a deliberate contracting mechanism that grants Leidos the flexibility to deliver the rounds on a sustainable production schedule rather than rushing manufacturing to burn through a looming budget deadline.
Better known throughout the defense industry by its internal Leidos moniker, the "Black Arrow," the AGM-190A represents a highly lethal convergence of miniaturization and extended-range lethality. Weighing merely 200 pounds (91 kilograms), the missile is compact enough for a two-person crew to manually handle and load without the need for heavy logistical equipment.
Despite this diminutive footprint, the Havoc Spear has successfully demonstrated an extraordinary standoff range exceeding 400 nautical miles (740 kilometers) during rigorous flight testing from a C-130 aircraft. This impressive reach allows special operations forces to launch strikes against high-value targets from safely outside the engagement zones of most short and medium-range enemy air defense networks.
The missile achieves its performance through a Pratt & Whitney TJ150-7 turbojet engine, an innovative piece of hardware built heavily utilizing additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. Generating 150 pounds of thrust, the small jet engine pushes the weapon to a cruising speed of Mach 0.8 (roughly 613 mph or 988 km/h). Furthermore, it boasts a service ceiling of 30,000 feet (9,144 meters), a specialized flight profile that allows it to fly well above the reach of conventional low-altitude, short-range defenses, while remaining low enough to slip beneath the radar horizons designed to track higher, faster strategic threats.
What truly distinguishes the AGM-190A within the rapidly crowding market of American precision munitions is not just its raw kinetic performance, but its unprecedented tactical flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Leidos engineered the weapon utilizing a highly modular hardware architecture paired with open-system software.
This forward-thinking design allows special operations planners to seamlessly swap the missile's payload to suit varying mission profiles without waiting for the Pentagon to field an entirely separate weapon system. Operators can equip the Havoc Spear with a traditional kinetic warhead for surgical, direct-action strikes, or substitute non-kinetic payloads designed for complex electronic warfare, advanced radar jamming, and deep intelligence-gathering missions.
This versatility is matched by its vast cross-platform compatibility. The missile can be deployed via palletized drops, fired from ramp-mounted launch tubes out of the back of an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship, or carried on conventional wing-mounted stores pylons of fixed-wing aircraft. Leidos has confirmed that the versatile airframe is also compatible with the MC-130J Commando II transport aircraft, unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones, and the newly fielded OA-1K Skyraider II light attack aircraft, ensuring that almost any platform in the current special operations inventory can bring the weapon to bear.
The Havoc Spear’s journey from a conceptual drawing board to a fielded military asset moved at a breakneck pace rarely seen in modern defense procurement. Originating in 2021 as an internally funded research endeavor by Leidos, the project leveraged the company’s extensive experience developing the GBU-69 Small Glide Munition—a smaller precision bomb of which over 4,000 units were delivered to the military by early 2025. This foundational manufacturing expertise allowed Leidos to accelerate development once USSOCOM officially joined the effort in 2022 via a Collaborative Research and Development Agreement.
This legal framework permitted government and industry engineers to collaborate directly in real-time, bypassing the traditional, sluggish process of the government issuing rigid requirements and waiting years for a finalized product. The aggressive timeline yielded rapid successes: store separation testing from an AC-130J was completed by December 2023, the first fully guided flight test occurred in November 2024, and the 400-nautical-mile range was officially demonstrated by May 2025.
The culmination of this roughly four-year sprint was cemented on February 26, 2026, when the U.S. Air Force formally integrated the weapon into the Pentagon’s standard inventory classification system by officially designating it the AGM-190A. In a clear signal of shifting strategic priorities, the Air Force also designated an entirely separate small cruise missile, the Barracuda-500M, as the AGM-189A during that exact same week.
This flurry of official designations underscores the military's urgent drive to field a deep pipeline of small, affordable strike weapons as viable alternatives to massive, expensive legacy systems. While traditional assets like the Tomahawk cruise missile offer substantially larger payloads and transcontinental ranges, they command a price tag reaching millions of dollars per unit.
That immense cost makes them politically and financially impractical for the smaller-scale, high-frequency strike missions that special operations forces routinely execute. By securing a 200-pound missile that costs a fraction of the price yet still strikes at over 400 nautical miles, military commanders have unlocked a critical new capability: the power to independently engage a vastly wider array of targets with standoff precision, all without requiring congressional approval for a multimillion-dollar munitions acquisition every time a mission arises.
Tyler A. Nguyen (via Defence Blog)
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