A Super Hornet armed with LRASM doesn't need to approach a well-defended warship anymore. It needs to reach a release point more than 370 kilometers away from one. That distinction, more than any single test result, is what Australia's Department of Defence actually changed on September 11, when the Royal Australian Air Force declared initial operational capability for two long-range cruise missiles on its F/A-18F Super Hornet fleet: the AGM-158C LRASM against ships, and the AGM-158B JASSM-ER, reaching out to 900 kilometers, against targets on land.
Neither missile is new technology, both trace back to a common American development program launched in 1995, and JASSM-ER has been flying with the US Air Force since 2014. What changed this month is that an Australian aircrew can now actually be tasked with them in a real operational setting, rather than only during controlled test campaigns. Getting there took two years of live-fire validation: two LRASMs launched at California's Point Mugu Sea Range in February 2025, two JASSM-ERs fired at Woomera in South Australia that November, and a further test this July when a P-8A Poseidon fired an LRASM during Exercise Medusa Fury in Hawaii, confirming the weapon works from a maritime patrol aircraft, not just a fighter jet. Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Stephen Chappell framed the milestone plainly: the RAAF has "demonstrated it is ready to conduct long-range, survivable and lethal maritime and land strike... against highly defended targets."
Both missiles share the same low-observable, subsonic, turbofan-powered airframe lineage and a notably heavy 450-kilogram warhead, considerably larger than most other Western anti-ship missiles carry. That combination, real stealth shaping plus a genuinely large payload, is what lets an aircraft launch from outside a target's own effective defensive range and still deliver enough explosive force to do serious damage once it arrives. The dual-platform integration matters just as much as the missile specs: a Super Hornet gets a fast, forward-deployed strike option, while the P-8A, an aircraft built primarily for maritime patrol and submarine hunting, now doubles as a genuine long-range strike platform without needing a dedicated fighter escort nearby to actually deliver the weapon.
The policy language wrapping around this declaration is worth taking at face value rather than dismissing as boilerplate. Australia's Department of Defence tied the milestone directly to its National Defence Strategy, which calls explicitly for "long-range strike capabilities" to support "deterrence through denial as an integrated, focused force." That's a specific doctrine, not generic language, deterrence by denial means convincing an adversary that an attack simply won't succeed, rather than deterrence by punishment, which threatens retaliation after the fact. A missile that lets Australian aircraft threaten a warship or land target from thirty seconds outside its own effective defensive envelope is a fairly direct expression of exactly that doctrine in hardware form.
The dollar figures behind this program show how long Canberra has been building toward this specific week. Washington approved a foreign military sale of up to 200 LRASMs worth $990 million back in February 2020, and 80 JASSM-ER missiles worth $235 million in July 2022, sales that took roughly four to six years to move from approval to a declared operational capability. Australia's own 2024 guided weapons plan separately allocated A$895.5 million for LRASM and A$575 million for JASSM-ER specifically. None of that spending guarantees unlimited supply, Lockheed Martin's production capacity for both missiles remains the practical ceiling on how many Australia, and everyone else buying the same weapons, can actually stockpile. But after six years of procurement and two years of live testing, the RAAF now has a genuinely credible answer to the question that's shaped this entire program from the start: how do you strike a well-defended target without flying anywhere near it.
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