U.S. Navy is buying more ship-killer missiles than ever before

The U.S. Navy wants to spend nearly a billion dollars on one of its most feared anti-ship weapons in the coming fiscal year — a clear sign that Washington is thinking hard about what a war at sea might actually look like.

The FY2027 budget request, submitted to Congress in April 2026, includes funding for 177 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, known as LRASM. The total price tag comes in just under $907 million. For a weapon that was still proving itself just a few years ago, that kind of sustained investment signals the Navy has made up its mind: LRASM is the weapon it wants in a naval fight, and it wants a lot of them.

The numbers in context tell the story better than any single figure. The year before, the Navy bought 200 LRASMs for roughly $1 billion — itself a major procurement push. The year before that, 164 missiles. Three consecutive years of buying this weapon at high volume is not a coincidence. It is a program being deliberately stocked up.

So what exactly is LRASM, and why does the Navy care so much about it? The short answer is that it kills ships — and it does so in ways that older anti-ship missiles simply cannot. Built by Lockheed Martin on the same airframe as the JASSM-ER cruise missile, LRASM is designed to fly low, avoid radar, and find its target on its own. Once launched from a fighter jet or a bomber, the missile uses a combination of sensors — including an infrared camera and radio frequency detection — to locate, identify, and maneuver around a ship’s defenses before striking. It does not need a pilot guiding it all the way in. It figures out the last part itself.

That autonomy matters enormously in the threat environment the Navy is preparing for. Modern warships — particularly those fielded by China’s navy — carry sophisticated air defense systems specifically designed to shoot down incoming missiles. Getting a weapon through those defenses requires either overwhelming them with numbers, flying under their radar, or both. LRASM is built to do exactly that. Its low-observable design and autonomous terminal guidance make it far harder to intercept than the anti-ship missiles of a previous generation.

LRASM can be carried by the Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and is actively being integrated onto the F-35C and F-35B as part of the jet’s Block 4 upgrade program. The F-35C — the carrier-based variant flown by the Navy — completed its first captive carry flight test with LRASM in September 2024 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River. The F-35B, operated by the Marine Corps, followed in March 2025. The Air Force flies LRASM on the B-1B Lancer and B-52 Stratofortress, extending the weapon’s reach even further. With the F-35 now entering the picture, every carrier strike group afloat will eventually be able to put a stealthy, autonomous ship-killer in the air from a stealthy jet — a combination that did not exist until very recently.

The FY2027 request is structured partly through the regular annual budget and partly through a separate mandatory funding mechanism — a legislative tool that lets the Navy commit to buying missiles across multiple years, giving Lockheed Martin the production certainty it needs to actually expand its output. Building cruise missiles is not like ordering trucks. The supply chains are long, the components are specialized, and ramping up production takes years of planning. The multi-year funding structure is Washington’s way of telling the manufacturer to start building more factory capacity now.

The backdrop to all of this is not subtle. Chinese naval shipbuilding has outpaced every historical precedent, producing destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers at a rate the U.S. has not matched. A Navy that wants to deter — or if necessary defeat — a large, modern surface fleet needs weapons that can actually penetrate its defenses. LRASM is the closest thing the U.S. currently has to that answer, and the budget numbers show the Pentagon is betting heavily on it.

Congress will have the final word on whether the full request survives the appropriations process intact. But three years of consistent, high-volume LRASM procurement across two services suggests this is one program that enjoys broad institutional support — and is unlikely to see its funding cut without a fight.