Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee on June 10, 2026, that production of the Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) will begin in September 2026, marking the first time an Air Force program born out of the Defense Innovation Unit's commercial prototyping pipeline will transition directly into large-scale production on this timeline. The confirmation came as congressional defense appropriators pressed senior service leaders on how the military intends to field low-cost attritable munitions capable of overwhelming adversary air defenses at scale.
FAMM traces its lineage to the Defense Innovation Unit's Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV) program, which was designed to demonstrate that commercially derived manufacturing methods could dramatically reduce the unit cost of cruise-class weapons. The Air Force formally took over the program and awarded prime contracts to Anduril Industries, CoAspire, and Zone 5 Technologies — all three specifically for the lugged variant. The contractor or contractors producing the palletized variant have not been publicly disclosed. Leidos is separately tied to a related Low-Cost Containerized Munitions program that shares elements of the broader affordable-mass-munitions initiative.
Funding Structure and Procurement Volumes
The Air Force has already secured funding for the first 1,000 FAMM weapons through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in fiscal year 2026, enabling the September 2026 production start. The FY2027 budget request layers on an additional $300 million in reconciliation funding to purchase a further 1,000 all-up-rounds across both the palletized and lugged configurations. The palletized variant is designed for rapid loading from standard air-mobility aircraft, while the lugged variant is configured for conventional fighter-jet carriage, giving the Air Force flexibility in how it deploys the weapon across its fleet.
An additional $55 million in FY2027 discretionary baseline funds is allocated to the extended-range FAMM-BAR variant. The BAR designation refers to a longer-range configuration intended to engage targets farther inside contested airspace without requiring launch aircraft to penetrate layered air defenses. The combination of reconciliation and discretionary funding in a single fiscal year signals strong bipartisan congressional support for the program at a moment when the defense industrial base is under pressure to produce affordable munitions faster than adversaries can build interceptors.
Over the longer term, the Air Force's plan is to purchase nearly 28,000 FAMM weapons across a five-year period. Production capacity is expected to scale as prime contractors bring additional manufacturing lines online, reaching an annual procurement rate of 7,990 units by fiscal year 2031. That trajectory would make FAMM one of the highest-volume air-launched munitions programs in the current Defense Department portfolio, surpassing the annual production rate of several legacy precision-guided munitions programs that were designed for a lower-threat, lower-volume conflict environment.
Wilsbach's Strategic Rationale
Testifying before the subcommittee, Wilsbach articulated the core logic behind investing in large quantities of lower-cost weapons as a complement to the Air Force's inventory of expensive precision munitions. “When you have a lot of them,” Wilsbach said, “adversaries will end up using their exquisite defenses to shoot those weapons down, and eventually we’re going to get some through.” The argument is rooted in a cost-exchange calculus: if a defender must expend a high-value interceptor — potentially costing millions of dollars — against each incoming round, an attacker willing to deploy hundreds or thousands of cheaper weapons can exhaust that defense faster than it can be replenished.
That calculus has become a central pillar of Air Force thinking about future large-scale combat operations, particularly in the Pacific theater. Integrated air defense networks in the region rely on a finite number of high-end interceptors, and U.S. planners have spent years studying how to force adversary commanders to make impossible allocation decisions in the opening hours of a conflict. FAMM's low per-unit cost — a figure the Air Force has declined to specify publicly, but which FAMM contractors have characterized as a fraction of existing cruise-missile costs — is what makes mass saturation operationally feasible rather than prohibitively expensive.
What It Means for Contractors
For the defense industrial base, the September 2026 production start and the five-year ramp to nearly 28,000 units represent a significant and durable revenue stream across the FAMM prime contractors. Anduril, which has built much of its defense business around software-defined autonomous systems, will have its manufacturing credibility tested as the program scales from prototype quantities to production volumes in the thousands per year. CoAspire, a smaller and less publicly visible contractor, stands to benefit substantially if it can demonstrate production reliability at scale — the kind of performance record that typically leads to follow-on awards and potential expansion of contract scope.
Zone 5 Technologies, along with Anduril and CoAspire, holds a production contract for the lugged variant — the configuration most directly compatible with existing fighter aircraft weapons stations. All three primes share exposure to the portion of the FAMM buy most likely to surge quickly, since the Air Force can begin loading lugged rounds on fighters without waiting for modifications to airlift platforms. Leidos, through its work on the related Low-Cost Containerized Munitions program, is positioned to benefit from parallel investment in affordable-mass-munitions infrastructure even if its direct FAMM work remains structurally separate.
Suppliers and subcontractors in the guidance, propulsion, and airframe integration tiers should pay close attention to the ramp schedule. A program reaching 7,990 units annually by FY2031 will require long-lead material commitments beginning well before that production peak. Companies that can qualify as second-source suppliers for critical components — seeker heads, navigation units, or solid-fuel propulsion modules — are likely to see competitive solicitations over the next 18 to 24 months as prime contractors seek to secure supply chains capable of supporting sustained high-rate production.
The FY2027 reconciliation funding's inclusion of FAMM also signals that the program has cleared the political threshold that separates prototypes from programs of record. Contractors tracking the annual appropriations cycle should expect FAMM line items to appear in future President's Budget requests, making multi-year planning assumptions more defensible. The transition from ETV origins to confirmed production funding in a single appropriations cycle is a faster-than-average acquisition path, and one that other affordable-munitions programs will be studied against as the Pentagon looks for replicable models.
