GAO: Navy and Army Have No Joint Plan for $50 Billion Hypersonic Missile Program

The Pentagon is pouring more than $50 billion into hypersonic missiles for the Navy and Army. It doesn't have a single coordinated plan to spend that money, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

Both services are developing their own versions of the same underlying weapon, what the Navy calls Conventional Prompt Strike. The Navy wants it on upgraded Zumwalt-class destroyers and eventually on Virginia-class submarines. The Army wants its own ground-launched version, called the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon or Dark Eagle. The Army also builds the missile glide body used by both services.

"While Navy and Army officials told GAO that they coordinate with each other, the services largely manage investment decisions for these programs separately, which contributes to inefficiencies and delays," the GAO report states.

Two branches of the same military are running parallel programs on the same weapon technology without one person in charge of making sure the money is spent smart. Each missile in the planned 224-missile stockpile costs tens of millions of dollars. This isn't small change.

The Delays Are Already Here

The Navy's Zumwalt-class upgrade is running about two years behind schedule, according to GAO. The lead ship, USS Zumwalt, was 94% complete with its modifications as of January 2026, but GAO found it's still falling further behind because of "unplanned work."

Flight testing for the Conventional Prompt Strike system on the Zumwalt-class was supposed to happen in 2025. It's now pushed to 2027. GAO blames "funding and testing challenges."

Lockheed Can't Build Enough Missiles

The production problems may be worse than the schedule problems. GAO found that prime contractor Lockheed Martin is struggling to build the missiles "at anticipated rates and costs." The goal is 12 missile rounds a year. Lockheed's actual capacity right now is six to seven rounds annually, according to the report. That's roughly half of what the program needs.

Lockheed Martin did not respond to a request for comment from Breaking Defense. The company did tell DefenseScoop it's working the problem. "We're confident in the quality of our capabilities and are working across the industrial base to strengthen supply chain resilience," the company said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

The statement doesn't say when production doubles or what's actually broken in the supply chain. Defense manufacturing is hard and hypersonic technology is new, but taxpayers are owed a real answer on when six missiles a year becomes twelve.

The Case for Two Separate Programs

There's a reasonable argument for why the Navy and Army run separate programs even on shared technology. The Navy needs a system that survives shipboard launch conditions and integrates with destroyer and submarine combat systems. The Army needs a mobile ground-launch platform built for entirely different logistics and deployment scenarios. Different platforms, different engineering constraints, different acquisition timelines. The services aren't wrong that the end products look different.

GAO's argument, however, is that the services should be coordinating investment decisions since they're drawing from the same industrial base, the same contractor, and in some cases the same glide body production line. Right now, that coordination isn't happening at a level that prevents duplicated inefficiency, per the report.

Hypersonic Weapons and the China Factor

Hypersonic weapons are supposed to be the answer to China's growing missile arsenal and its own hypersonic advances. The Pentagon has treated this as an urgent national security priority for years. GAO's report suggests the urgency hasn't translated into program discipline.

Every year of delay is a year China's hypersonic programs keep moving. Every missile Lockheed can't build on schedule is a missile that isn't in the stockpile when it's needed.

GAO's report doesn't recommend killing either program. It calls for a unified investment strategy between the Navy and Army so the two services stop making separate decisions on a shared capability. Whether the Pentagon adopts that recommendation, and whether Lockheed Martin can actually close the gap between six missiles a year and the twelve it's contracted to deliver, remains to be seen. No timeline for either fix has been announced.