Boeing Wins $75 Million Air Force Deal for JDAM LR Strike Bomb

Powered bomb clears production. The turbojet-powered bomb is designed to fly more than 300 nautical miles — about 345 miles — and Boeing says it will cost far less than a cruise missile.

1. CHARLES, Mo. — The U.S. Air Force awarded Boeing a $75 million undefinitized contract action on Aug. 5 to begin building the GBU-75 Joint Direct Attack Munition Long Range, a turbojet-powered bomb the Navy wants for strikes beyond enemy air defenses.

Such a contract is a Pentagon instrument that lets a contractor start work before the government and the company finish negotiating final terms and price. It covers initial production of the BSU-111/B Payload Delivery Unit — the wing-and-engine section that, mated to a 500-pound bomb and a JDAM tail kit, forms the GBU-75 — for the U.S. Navy.

For Boeing, the deal ends a period of self-financing. The company put nearly $100 million of its own money into maturing the Powered JDAM concept, funding aerodynamic modeling, wind tunnel work, propulsion integration and a digital twin of the weapon before the Defense Department committed production dollars. Boeing calls this the program’s first production contract. Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems, called the award “a major milestone for the JDAM LR program, demonstrating our ability to deliver long-range precision-strike capability at a significantly lower cost.”

What the Weapon Does

The JDAM LR is not a new design so much as a recombination of existing ones. It pairs a 500-pound-class Mk 82 general-purpose bomb with the legacy JDAM guidance tail kit — an inertial navigation system tied to a military-code GPS receiver — then adds two things the standard weapon lacks: a pop-out wing and an engine.

The wing kit comes from Ferra Engineering, an Australian aerospace supplier, and derives from the unpowered JDAM Extended Range wing, developed by Boeing with Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation in the 2000s from earlier Australian glide-bomb research; the powered variant uses a larger derivative kit. After release, the weapon rolls, the wings deploy, and the bomb becomes a glider.

Gliding alone, however, caps range at whatever altitude and airspeed the launching aircraft can provide. The engine solves that. Boeing says the complete weapon can fly more than 300 nautical miles, or about 555 kilometers, carrying a 500-pound-class payload.

The Engine Behind the Range

Propulsion comes from the Kratos TDI-J85, built by Technical Directions Inc., a business unit of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions. Boeing signed a memorandum of understanding with TDI in October 2023 to supply the turbine for the Powered JDAM program. The firm has built low-cost, expendable turbojets for unmanned aircraft and miniature cruise missiles since 1983.

The TDI-J85 produces 200 pounds-force of net thrust at sea-level static conditions and runs on either commercial or military kerosene-grade turbine fuel. It also does something less obvious but equally necessary: it makes electricity. Conventional JDAMs draw on thermal batteries during a brief ballistic fall. A flight of 300 nautical miles far outlasts that. The engine carries a shaft-integral permanent magnet generator producing up to 1.5 kilowatts of alternating current from idle through maximum speed, keeping the guidance sensors, flight computer and actuators powered the whole way.

The engine was not an untested choice. Between 2017 and 2020, the Air Force Research Laboratory used the TDI-J85 in experimental low-cost cruise missiles under the Gray Wolf project, an effort aimed at proving out cheap, mass-producible cruise missiles.

Two Flights Off California

The Navy flew the weapon twice in early April over the Point Mugu Sea Range off the California coast, launching the test vehicles from an F/A-18E Super Hornet operating out of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.

On April 1, an inert round separated safely from the aircraft, lit the turbojet, deployed its wing kit and transitioned into powered flight. It flew a predefined profile of roughly 200 nautical miles, covering the distance in 34 minutes and guiding on military-code GPS to impact within meters of its planned aim point.

The April 3 flight repeated the 200-nautical-mile profile but added altitude changes and maneuvering, stressing the flight control software and the generator’s sustained output.

Capt. Sarah Abbott, who took command of the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons Program Office, or PMA-201, in February 2025, described the requirement driving the work after those flights.

“As Naval Air Forces in theater continue to rely heavily on JDAM systems, the program recognizes a critical need to provide the fleet with greater standoff range,” Abbott said. “This new capability allows pilots to engage targets from significantly safer distances, maintaining a tactical advantage in contested environments.”

Why the Navy Wants It

The problem is arithmetic. A conventional JDAM glides about 15 nautical miles. A JDAM-ER glides 40 to 45. To use either, a Super Hornet — capable, but not stealthy — must fly inside the engagement envelope of modern long-range surface-to-air missiles backed by advanced early warning radars.

At more than 300 nautical miles, the JDAM LR lets fourth-generation fighters release from outside that envelope, opening deep-strike missions that had been the province of stealth aircraft such as the F-35C Lightning II or expensive standoff missiles. Because the weapon uses the standard JDAM aircraft interface, it needs no new software or special pylons; any aircraft cleared for conventional JDAM can carry it.

Cost is the other half of the argument. Stealthy cruise missiles like the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile and the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile can run well over $1 million apiece — an unfavorable trade against adversaries holding deep magazines of interceptors. Boeing has not disclosed a unit price for the JDAM LR beyond saying it will cost significantly less than existing standoff missiles. Standard JDAM tail kits have historically run between about $20,000 and $30,000, with the bomb body adding a few thousand more.

Final assembly will take place at Boeing’s St. Charles, Missouri, facility, which is being configured for BSU-111/B production. Boeing said leveraging existing JDAM infrastructure will let it move to high-volume production quickly.

Mines, Decoys and a 30-Year Lineage

Beyond land and naval strike, the weapon has implications for aerial mining. The Navy’s Quickstrike bottom mines are fitted with target detection devices that sense the magnetic, seismic and pressure signatures of passing ships. The Mk 62, Mk 63 and Mk 64 are converted Mk 80-series bomb bodies; the 2,000-pound Mk 65 uses a purpose-built, thin-walled mine case. A 2014 test mated a 500-pound Mk 62 to a JDAM-ER wing kit, letting B-52 Stratofortress bombers seed minefields from 35,000 feet at 40 nautical miles. In a defended strait, 40 miles is not far enough. Pairing Quickstrike with the powered GBU-75 architecture would push that to hundreds.

Boeing has also indicated the modular design could accept an auxiliary fuel tank in place of the payload, turning the weapon into an air-launched decoy with a range exceeding 700 nautical miles, or about 805 miles.

The lineage runs back to the 1991 Gulf War, which exposed the limits of unguided bombs and weather-dependent laser guidance. McDonnell Douglas, later acquired by Boeing, won the JDAM development contract in October 1995. The system reached initial operational capability on the B-52H in December 1998 and debuted in combat during Operation Allied Force over Yugoslavia in 1999, where B-2 Spirit bombers flying nonstop from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, dropped more than 650 of them at a reported 96 percent reliability rate.

JDAM achieves a circular error probable under 5 meters with GPS and about 30 meters on inertial navigation alone for free-flight times up to 100 seconds, the Air Force says. Tail kits originally estimated at $40,000 fell to roughly $18,000 to $20,000, and Boeing marked its 300,000th kit in early 2017.

Next for the JDAM LR team: shipboard integration testing, proving the weapon can survive carrier electromagnetic environments, catapult launches and arrested recoveries.