Dragon Cart

Dragon Cart is a palletized and disposable weapons module which is airdropped in order to deploy flying munitions, typically cruise missiles, from unmodified cargo planes. First developed by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and Lockheed under the name Rapid Dragon, the airdrop-rigged pallets, called "deployment boxes," provide a low cost method allowing unmodified cargo planes, such as C-130 or C-17 aircraft, to be temporarily repurposed as standoff bombers capable of mass launching any variant of long or short range AGM-158 JASSM cruise missiles against land or naval targets. The size of the deployment boxes is configurable and ranges from 4 to 45 AGM-158B JASSM-ER (extended range) cruise missiles, which can strike targets at a range of 570 to 1,200 mi (925 to 1,900 km). Large numbers of JASSM-XR (extreme range) will become available in 2024. The current version uses unmodified cargo aircraft while missile deployment requires no additional crew skills beyond those for airdrops of supplies or vehicles. The system can be thought of as a smart and disposable bomb bay in a box that includes an interface allowing targeting information that is gathered from allied units in the area to be fed to the munitions from a distant fire control center. The system has been successfully used with C-130 and C-17 cargo planes to strike both land and sea targets with armed and test version JASSM-ERs. Future development will generalize the system beyond the AGM-158 missile family to include JDAM bombs, sea mines, drones, and other missile systems as well as integrating the launch system into use on other supporting cargo and non-cargo aircraft. Parallel to the initiative in 2026, the US Air Force has begun a five-year program called Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) to stockpile twenty eight thousand compatible munitions with an allocated $12...