U.S. Marine Corps and the New Long-Range Attack Munition - Naval News

Naval News was in attendance at the media roundtable teleconference. The USMC generals stated that the Hellfire anti-tank guided missile has a range of 8 kilometers (nearly 5 miles) and the Marines deemed that insufficient for precision stand-off range because that would put the AH-1Z attack helicopters well within enemy surface-to-air missile range. To counter this, the under-development Long-Range Attack Munition (LRAM) will have a range in the “hundreds of kilometers and be ready 24 [hours a day]/7 [days a week] with the ground troops.”

The quest for information on the new LRAM took a bit of a circuitous route in August 2023. Naval News inquired to the U.S. Marine’s Public Affairs who transferred the LRAM inquiry to the U.S. Navy’s Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR). NAVAIR checked their programs and replied with the U.S. Navy’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) and that is not the USMC’s LRAM. NAVAIR then replied to a follow-on email that the LRAM does not exist in its program inventory. So Naval News went another route with the U.S. Marines, and at the end of August, a USMC major at the Director of Communication Strategy & Operations, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Deputy Commandant, Combat Development and Integration at Quantico, Virginia, emailed the following comments.