What good is stealth if the other side can still shoot first? That question sits behind the U.S. Navy’s embrace of the AIM-174B Gunslinger, a very long-range air-to-air missile built from the SM-6 family and carried by the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. More than a new round on a pylon, it marks the Navy’s return to a mission it largely abandoned after the F-14 Tomcat and AIM-54 Phoenix left service in 2004. Since then, carrier aviation has had speed, sensors, and networking, but not a dedicated weapon for reaching deep into the air battle and threatening the support aircraft that keep an opponent’s combat jets effective.
The Navy has already confirmed the missile’s status as operationally deployed. That matters because the Indo-Pacific rewards range more than almost any other theater. Vast distances, thin tanker support, and the need to protect fleets across huge stretches of ocean all push air wings toward weapons that can strike first and do it from farther away.
Vice Admiral Dan Cheever captured the operational logic in straightforward terms, writing that the weapon gives the Super Hornet the ability to “out-stick” adversary fighters and operate inside the weapons engagement zone. In practical terms, the missile is built for the opening phase of a fight, when getting a shot at an airborne early warning aircraft, tanker, command-and-control platform, or bomber can unravel the rest of the air picture.
The missile’s size alone explains part of its appeal. Photos from RIMPAC showed just how outsized it is beside an AIM-120, with the AIM-174B weighing about 1,890 pounds, more than five times the mass of an AMRAAM. Open-source reporting also points to a confirmed range of 150 miles, with broader estimates running much farther depending on launch altitude and speed. A fighter releasing a missile at altitude gives it a head start a ship never can, and that changes the geometry of the engagement in a major way. The missile is also credited with speeds around Mach 3.5, which is enough to compress an opponent’s reaction window and complicate escape maneuvers. This is not a dogfight weapon. It is a tool for dismantling the airborne scaffolding behind the dogfight.
That also explains why the Gunslinger fits naturally into naval “combat network” thinking. A Super Hornet does not need to be the platform that sees everything first. It can be cued by other nodes, including the E-2D Hawkeye, surface combatants, and stealthy F-35s operating farther forward. The F-35C cannot hide the missile internally, but it can still play a crucial role by pushing targeting data to shooters behind it. That tag-team arrangement gives the carrier air wing a mix of stealth, sensing, and reach that it did not have when the Phoenix disappeared.
The strategic backdrop is just as important as the missile itself. China’s long-range air-to-air inventory, especially weapons such as the PL-15 and PL-17, has shifted air combat away from classic fighter-versus-fighter encounters and toward attacks on enablers. The Navy’s answer is not simply to match missile for missile, but to reconnect its fighters to a weapon that can reach into that same battlespace. There are also signs the AIM-174B may retain some of the SM-6 family’s wider versatility, including interest in counter-hypersonic roles, which would make it more than a single-purpose interceptor. The real significance of the Gunslinger is not nostalgia for the Phoenix era. It is that the Navy once again has a missile sized for the scale of the Pacific and for the kind of networked air war carrier aviation expects to fight.
