AH-1Z Attack Helicopter’s New Long Range Missile Seen For The First Time

The U.S. Navy has released a picture of a U.S. Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter with a previously unseen long-range munition armament. The Marines are known to be in the process of developing at least one new missile, the Precision Attack Strike Missile (PASM), to dramatically extend the range at which AH-1Zs can engage targets on land and at sea. The Corps sees this as key to ensuring the relevance of the helicopters in a future major conflict, especially one in the Pacific against China.

Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) recently shared the image of the AH-1Z as part of an announcement about “the Marine Corps [having] successfully executed its first live employment test of a new Long Range Precision Fire (LRPF) capability” last November.

“The event was successfully executed at Yuma Proving Grounds (YPG) in Yuma, AZ where an AH-1Z conducted [a] single launch by way of a wireless application via Marine Air-Ground Tablet (MAGTAB),” according to NAVAIR’s release. “The November test at YPG exceeded the threshold requirements with regards to position, navigation, and timing.”

A wider view of the AH-1Z with the new munitions seen in the picture NAVAIR recently released. USN

Though NAVAIR did not specifically name the Corps’ PASM program, which evolved from an effort known as Long-Range Attack Missile (LRAM), it seems likely that what has been shown now is the first look at a missile developed through these efforts.

“This project is an Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD R&E) sponsored Defense Innovation Acceleration (DIA) project led by the XMA-ADT to evaluate cost-effective, long-range disparate effects in expeditionary and maritime environments,” according to the Navy release.

XMA-ADT, which is housed within NAVAIR, has been directly involved in the LRAM/PASM work, as well as other advanced aviation projects. The 2025 Marine Aviation Plan, released earlier this month, also said that “recently, PASM successfully completed its first launch from the AH-1Z.” It is also possible that the munitions seen in NAVAIR’s recently released image are unrelated to LRAM/PASM.

A slide from a 2024 briefing describing XMA-ADT’s work, including on LRAM. USN/USMC

The AH-1Z in the picture NAVAIR released is armed with two of the munitions loaded — one each onto the outboard pylons of the helicopter’s stub wings via standard U.S. military triple ejector racks (TER) with large, orange-colored fairings at its front. The Viper also has test instrumentation pods on its wingtip pylons, as well as a pair of fuel tanks under its stub wings.

The missiles themselves each have an x-shaped tail fin arrangement and pop-out wings under their bodies. Though NAVAIR’s image is of lower quality, the munitions also look to have a design intended to reduce its radar signature, at least from the front, with a prominent orange-colored section on the lower half of the front of the nose. This might be an aperture for a seeker, but it is also unclear whether the image may have been edited in some way for operational security reasons.

A look at the missile under the AH-1Z’s right wing, attached via a triple ejector rack, as well as the drop tank under the stub wing and what may be a data point on the wing tip. USN

NAVAIR also interestingly says that the test last year marked “the first time a Marine Corps rotary-wing platform has employed a weapon system using a tablet-controlled device.” The aforementioned MAGTAB system is typically used by individual Marines on the ground or riding in aircraft for communications and other data-sharing purposes, including coordinating close air support, helping with route planning, and providing additional situational awareness.

MAGTAB could be used to pass data from offboard sources to the AH-1Z about targets beyond the range its onboard sensors can ‘see.’ TWZ has previously pointed out that LRAM, at least, would require some kind of offboard cueing given the Viper’s existing sensor capabilities. It is worth highlighting here that the U.S. military has also been using tablet-like devices to help with the rapid integration, in general, of new Western precision-guided munitions onto Ukraine’s Soviet-era jets.

A Marine riding in the back of a UH-1Y Venom armed light utility helicopter uses a Marine Air-Ground Tablet (MAGTAB) during a training exercise. USMC

TWZ has reached out to NAVAIR and the Marines for more information.

The Marine Corps has previously said that LRAM was leveraging an existing, but unspecified U.S. Air Force missile design. The Air Force has three projects ongoing, at least that we know about, that are centered on the development of new, more compact, and lower-cost air-launched precision-guided munitions with ranges in the hundreds of nautical miles. A number of designs with x-shaped tail fins and pop-out wings have already emerged from those efforts, though none appear to be clearly in line with the missiles seen on the AH-1Z in NAVAIR’s recently released picture.

A munition design with x-shaped tail fins and a pop-out wing from Leidos subsidiary Dynetics that the Air Force is testing in cooperation with the Defense Innovation Unit as part of the Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV) program. Leidos Dynetics

There is a possibility that any designs that the Marines explored through the LRAM effort, which is described as a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) and dates back at least to 2023, are different from what the service is now pursuing for PASM. As mentioned earlier, the munitions seen on the AH-1Z in the recent image from NAVAIR could be unrelated to LRAM/PASM entirely.

The Navy has its own stated interest in new air-launched munitions in a somewhat similar category to LRAM/PASM. Private industry has been taking notice of the overall growing demand in this space, as well. Just in January, General Atomics teased a previously unseen air-launched “Strike Missile” concept, which you can read more about here.

An unpowered gliding munition, such as the GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb II, known as StormBreaker, which also has pop-out wings, could be another pathway to longer-range strike capability for Marine AH-1Zs. Published estimates of StormBreaker’s maximum range vary, from 45 miles to upwards of 60 miles at maximum release height and speed from a fixed-wing aircraft. The development of powered derivatives of existing glide munitions is another growing trend globally.

Regardless, extending the range at which AH-1Zs can engage their targets is a clear imperative for the Marines, especially in the context of planning around a potential future high-end fight in the Pacific against China. A new munition with a range of around 100 to 150 nautical miles would substantially increase the kinetic reach of the Viper. The AGM-114 Hellfires and AGM-179 Joint Air-to-Ground Missiles (JAGM) the Vipers can carry now have maximum ranges under 10 miles. Hellfires and JAGMs with tripled and doubled ranges, respectively, have been tested, but still fall far short of what the Marines are looking at for LRAM/PASM.

A US Marine Corps AH-1Z fires an AGM-179 JAGM during testing. USMC A Marine AH-1Z fires an AGM-179 Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM), one of the existing and much shorter-ranged missiles in its inventory. USMC

“I was a bit frustrated about the conversation they were having about what the next fight looks like. It was about a fight with a peer competitor and the distances we had over water with China and that H-1s were not going to be there,” Marine Col. Nathan Marvel told The War Zone in an interview back in 2023 laying out a case for the continued relevance of the AH-1Z, as well as the UH-1Y. “I was like yes they are. Not only are we going to be there but we are going to be right beside the Marines in the field because that’s what we do.”

At that time, Marvel was commander of Marine Aircraft Group 39 (MAG-39) based at Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton in California. He subsequently became the head of the Rapid Capabilities Office and Science and Technology Directorate within the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab (MCWL).

“Coming back to that interoperability, it’s multiple pathways and multiple waveforms. I don’t think we say kill chains anymore, because it’s not a linkage of nodes, it’s a linkage of webs,” Marvel added in his 2023 interview. “We may very well be an enabler where you’re pushing data through us via voice and or data and we may very well be the end of that kill web or that kill chain enabler as well. We may tell someone where something is so they can go kill it or we maintain custody or someone may tell us where something is so we can go kill it like we have traditionally done. Interoperability is a huge focus for us.”

“We are going to be able to carry a Potpourri of weapons. It would not be unheard of to hang some exquisite fixed-wing fighter weapons on the wing-stub of a cobra and bring that to a fight,” he continued. “It may be a loitering weapon or maybe an exquisite pod that does only certain things that we’re used to seeing on fixed-wing aircraft and bring that to the fight and put that down at the rotor wing level to enable the battlespace commander and the maneuver element commander to do things that they may or may not have thought they could do before. So that’s kind of where we are with capabilities buildup.”

With our first look at an AH-1Z with a new longer-range munition capability now in hand, more details about LRAM/PASM and other work to extend the reach of the Viper may now begin to emerge.

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