The U.S. Air Force has confirmed that a recently released rendering of the AIM-260A does indeed reflect the actual design of what is also known as the Joint Advanced Tactical Missile (JATM). The JATM, details about which are still highly classified, is expected to ultimately supplant the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) in U.S. military service.
The new AIM-260A rendering was included in an unclassified U.S. Navy industry day briefing that the service posted online earlier this month. The complete briefing provides an overview of projects that fall under the broad umbrella of Naval Air Systems Command’s (NAVAIR) Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aviation & Strike Weapons (PEO U&W). JATM is more specifically within the purview of PEO U&W’s Air-to-Air Missile Office, or PMA-259. The AIM-174B air-launched version of the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), which was only formally unveiled last year, as well as the AIM-120, AIM-9 Sidewinder, and AIM-7/RIM-7 Sparrow missiles, are also in PMA-259’s portfolio.
As its name makes clear, JATM is also a joint program that the Air Force is directly involved in. When asked for more information about the AIM-260A rendering and for a more general update on the missile’s development, NAVAIR redirected TWZ to the Air Force.
“This is a rendering of the AIM-260A,” an Air Force spokesperson subsequently told TWZ. “A higher-resolution rendering is not available for public release.”
“Specific programmatic and technical details of the program are classified,” they added. “JATM milestones and capabilities are classified.”
In 2022, now-retired Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly, then head of Air Combat Command (ACC), also shared artwork of upgraded F-22 Raptors with new stealthy sensor pods and drop tanks seen below. One of the jets was depicted firing a then-unknown missile now definitively established to be a JATM. At least one other official AIM-260A rendering has emerged previously, which also aligns with the design seen in the PEO U&W briefing.
All three AIM-260A renders show the same core missile design optimized for high speed and low drag with just four fins at the tail end. For comparison, the existing AIM-120 has four tail fins and another four along the middle of its body.
There are some minor detail differences between the AIM-260A renders that are now available, including the number and location of what appear to be conformal antennas along the front end of the missile’s body. The latest depiction of the JATM from the PEO U&W briefing also has markings that point to a rocket motor that is substantially longer than the one found on the AMRAAM. Per U.S. military-standard munition markings, brown bands denote the presence of low-order explosives like solid-fuel rockets. On missiles, a pair of brown bands typically reflects where the rocket motor starts and ends within the body. Yellow bands mark the location of high-explosives used in warheads. Training missiles with inert rocket motors and/or warheads have blue bands instead.
An advanced rocket motor with highly loaded propellant has long been seen as a likely route to give the AIM-260A significantly greater range, as well as speed, over the AIM-120 without making the new missile larger. A core known requirement for the JATM is that it has to have the same general form factor as the AMRAAM, in large part to ensure that it can fit inside the internal bays on stealth fighters like the F-22 and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. In addition to crewed aircraft, AIM-260As are expected to arm future stealthy drones like the ones under development under the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.
“The Next-Generation Highly Loaded Grain project team has matured the technology and seeded the development of future mission-modular propulsion systems that can increase weapon ranges by up to 1.5x while maintaining inner boundaries for short-range and time-critical missions,” according to a factsheet detailing notable achievements by NAVAIR’s Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCAD) in 2023.
PMA-259 has been similarly looking at highly loaded grain rocket motors as part of work toward a possible improved Block III version of the AIM-9X Sidewinder in recent years, as TWZ has explored in detail in the past. As part of the annual defense policy bill for the 2025 Fiscal Year, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was passed and signed into law last year, Congress has demanded the Air Force and the Navy look into whether extended-range variants or derivatives of the AIM-9X and the AIM-120 could also help meet future air-to-air missile needs.
The AIM-260A’s rocket motor is also likely to be a dual-pulse design that retains energy across the flight envelope to further extend range and help dramatically with endgame maneuverability. Thrust vectoring capability would also be a requisite to give the missile sufficient agility in the absence of additional control surfaces.
If the renders of the AIM-260A prove fully accurate, the missile will also have a high-explosive warhead rather than be a hit-to-kill design intended to destroy its target through sheer force of impact. At the same time, if the AIM-260A’s rocket motor is longer than that of the AIM-120, but the two missiles are roughly similar in size, this will reduce the space inside JATM for other components. This, in turn, could point to a smaller, but more advanced warhead designed to produce suitable destructive effects with less mass. A broadly similar rearrangement of internal space has also been observed on the AGM-88G Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER) compared to the preceding AGM-88E AARGM.
Details about the AIM-260A’s capabilities otherwise remain limited. An active electronically scanned array radar (AESA) seeker is likely. Multi-mode seeker capability, potentially with imaging infrared and passive radiofrequency (RF) guidance capabilities, could be extremely valuable in the face of an ever-expanding countermeasure ecosystem, although we have no idea if this is a feature now or not. It’s also possible it could be introduced in later variants. Advanced networking capabilities would be a key feature, allowing the missile to get additional targeting information from an array of third party sources. This is especially imported for engaging targets beyond the reach of the launch platform’s own sensors and it can allow the aircraft firing the missile, especially a stealthy one, to avoid having to switch on its radar and increase its vulnerability to detection as a result. Multiple networked JATMs might even be able to prosecute engagements cooperatively.
As TWZ has written in the past:
“The U.S. military has said explicitly in the past that concerns about increasingly longer-range Chinese air-to-air missiles have been a key driver behind work on the AIM-260. Even an extra 50 miles would give JATM a huge boost in capability over the AIM-120D. Better end-game energy state and multi-mode seeker would further boost its comparative abilities. As such, it would sit atop the AIM-120 as a long-range air-to-air weapon, with some significant overlap. Networking capabilities on all these weapons also give them the ability to leverage third-party targeting and all the guileful tactics that come with that feature set.”
It’s also it’s unclear when the first JATMs might enter the U.S. military arsenal. When the program first emerged publicly in 2019, the goal was to begin fielding the missiles in 2022. However, there have been no indications publicly that this has occurred despite active testing of the missile, including live-fire shots, and other work to support its entry into service. No imagery of a real AIM-260A has emerged to date.
What we do know for sure now is that the rendering in the recently released Navy briefing, as well as ones that have merged in the past, do show the AIM-260A JATM design.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com