B-52 Bombers to Get the AGM-158C LRASM: Up to 20 Stealthy Ship-Killers per Aircraft

The B-1B Lancer was the first LRASM carrier and reached early operational capability in December 2018, Lockheed Martin said at the time, and Naval News puts its load at up to 24 missiles. The Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet has flown the weapon since December 2019. The P-8A Poseidon is to carry four under its wings but was still in flight testing with it as of September 2025, Naval News reported. Over time, though, the comparison reverses: the Air Force wants at least 100 B-21 Raiders to replace the B-1B and B-2, while the B-52 is being re-engined to fly into the 2050s. The anti-ship bomber that stays is the Stratofortress.

Against the weapon it replaces, the gain is range. The B-52H once carried the AGM-84 Harpoon, whose Block II version has an unclassified range of 124 kilometres, about 77 miles, according to the CSIS Missile Threat project. The baseline LRASM flies more than two and a half times as far, and each missile costs $3.22 million in the Air Force’s five-year buy, the magazine reported in 2024. China’s counter is the YJ-21 anti-ship ballistic missile, identified by naval analyst H.I. Sutton in PLA Navy footage of a Type 055 cruiser launch released in April 2022, The Maritime Executive reported. Beijing has published no range for it.

The AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile is a stealthy, subsonic cruise missile derived from the AGM-158B JASSM-ER, sharing its airframe, Williams F107 engine and production line, The Defense Post reported. It carries a 1,000-pound penetrating blast-fragmentation warhead. The missile flies to an initial point on GPS-aided inertial guidance, then hunts with passive radio-frequency sensors and an imaging infrared seeker, so it emits nothing a warship can track, and it can share data with the other missiles in a salvo, The War Zone reported.

The baseline missile reaches just over 200 miles by Air & Space Forces Magazine’s account, 200 to 300 by The War Zone’s. The C-3 is expected to reach 500 to 600 miles, the JASSM-ER’s bracket; no figure is official. The improved LRASM 1.1 was fielded in 2023, the F-35B and F-35C are in flight test with it, and the F-15E, F-15EX and F-16 are next, The Aviationist reported. Air Force budget papers cited by The Defense Post put 2026 production capacity at 240 LRASMs a year, enough for twelve full 20-missile B-52 loads.

The first operational B-21s are only due at Ellsworth Air Force Base in 2027, Military Times reported. The re-engined B-52J cleared its engine Milestone B in June and its radar Milestone C in August, The Defense Post reported, and the Government Accountability Office said in 2024 that initial operational capability had slipped to 2033. So for most of the next decade the aircraft able to put 20 stealthy anti-ship missiles over the Philippine Sea from outside a Chinese task group’s air-defence bubble is a design that first flew in 1952, the type that flew from RAF Fairford during Operation Epic Fury in March and left that base this month.

“A handful of B-52s will be able to deliver more weapons on maritime targets,” retired Colonel Mark Gunzinger of the Mitchell Institute told Air & Space Forces Magazine. The tighter limit is the stockpile. A CNAS estimate cited by the same magazine says the Air Force used about a quarter of its JASSM inventory in Epic Fury, and 240 LRASMs a year does not refill a war of that size quickly.