New US Administration, New Wonder Weapons for Ukraine

August 30, 2025 (NEO – Brian Berletic) - The US has announced plans to ship 3,350 air-launched Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) missiles to Ukraine in yet another escalation amid a war the current Trump administration vowed during the 2024 US presidential campaign to end in “24 hours.”

As another example of US foreign policy continuity of agenda, the ERAM program began under the previous Biden administration and has simply been continued without interruption under current US President Donald Trump.  

The ERAM (not to be confused with the anti-air RIM-174 Standard Extended Range Active Missile also referred to as ERAM or SM-6) is essentially a turbine engine-powered glide bomb. A likely candidate for the arms program is the Boeing PJDAM  which literally stands for “powered joint direct attack munition.” The ERAM is similar to glide bombs the US has already shipped to Ukraine in large quantities but with a longer range expected to reach between 240-450 kilometers according to The War Zone (TWZ). 

The powered glide bomb would be used to strike much further behind Russian lines than previous Western weapons have allowed including HIMARS, ATACMS, various air-launched cruise missiles, and the standard glide bombs the ERAM is likely based on, but with limitations. 

Hype Versus Reality 

Reporting on the ERAM’s delivery to Ukraine has been particularly ambiguous amid flagging fortunes for Ukraine’s US-sponsored (and directed) armed forces on the battlefield and chronic weapons shortages owed to the collective West’s inadequate military industrial base. 

Headlines claiming 3,350 missiles are on their way to Ukraine belie the likely details of the arms program with production only having just started and the first 1,000 missiles likely to reach Ukraine over the course of 2 years, and the rest over a period of up to 3 years or longer. 

Even if 3,350 missiles were available today to send Ukraine, the fact that these are air-launched missiles means the most significant bottleneck for use on the battlefield will be combat aircraft and pilots available to deliver the weapons on target. 

Limitations regarding Ukrainian airpower have prevented other air-launched and air-dropped munitions from reaching their full potential on the battlefield including Storm Shadow and SCALP air-launched cruise missiles (with ranges of up to 250 km) as well as the aforementioned US-made JDAM glide bombs and even French-made AASM Hammer glide bombs which are powered with a solid rocket motor but fall far short of the ERAM’s longer range of 240-450 km at only 70 km.  

Ukrainian airpower, beyond issues of quantity, also face significant challenges from active Russian measures to defend against their use including extensive air defense capabilities targeting both Ukrainian warplanes and the munitions they launch, but also constant efforts to target Ukrainian military aviation on the ground where they operate from.

The longer range of the ERAM will afford Ukrainian warplanes greater safety while conducting stand-off attacks in ways US JDAM and French Hammer munitions cannot, but the low quantities of ERAM missiles and aircraft to deliver them means that – at least in the first 2-3 years -  only about 1 missile could be launched per day, or more likely, 1 larger-scale coordinated attack carried out once a week, every other week, or even more infrequently. 

A larger number of ERAMs would be required per strike to saturate Russian air defenses in the hopes that at least some of the munitions would make it to their targets. 

Compared to Russia’s tempo of airstrikes, missile strikes (ballistic and cruise) as well as long-range drone strikes, the inclusion of ERAMs for Ukraine will make no noticeable difference in terms of the balance of military power on and above the battlefield. 

A Battle of Attrition Russia is Still Winning 

By the end of 2023 alone, Reuters would report Russia had carried out 7,400 missile and 3,700 Geran-2 drone strikes alone. Since then, Russia has drastically increased the production and use of both. 

By 2025, Russia would launch a staggering 6,400 missiles and drones into Ukraine in just a single month, ABC News would report. 

According to Ukrainian media based on Ukrainian intelligence reports, Russia is producing anywhere from 720-840 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 120-180 hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, 300-360 Kalibr cruise missiles, 720-840 Kh-101 cruise missiles, 240-360 Iskander-K cruise missiles along with a variety of other cruise and hypersonic missiles annually.

This adds up to between 2,100 to over 2,580 missiles a year, with production numbers continuing to climb. The opening phase of Russia’s Special Military Operation drew from large stockpiles of missiles. Russian missile production is now reaching levels enabling a similar but sustainable scale of missile strikes. 

The very nature of the ERAM program represents an admission of and an attempt to overcome the obvious shortcomings of America’s military industrial base and the many doctrines that have up until now shaped it, versus the vast and still growing size of Russian military production.    

Implications of ERAM: Facing the Reality of Attrition Warfare 

For decades, the United States has pursued the role as sole global superpower following the Cold War. This worldview, laid out explicitly in Pentagon documents reported on by the New York Times as far back as 1992, aimed to perpetuate American primacy through a combination of military might and economic influence. This policy set the stage for decades of US wars of aggression, political interference, and an ever-expanding series of confrontations, focused specifically on a reemerging Russia and a rising China.

This narrative of uncontested American military supremacy was carefully maintained through a series of conflicts with significantly weaker nations. The wars in Iraq and the toppling of the Libyan government were held up as proof that American precision and technology were vastly superior. America’s military industrial base worked along two premises, “quality over quantity,” and profit over purpose, based on a belief that expensive, precision-guided munitions could achieve with one round what would otherwise require dozens of less-profitable conventional munitions. 

Washington’s proxy war with Russia, however, has revealed American weapons, while technologically advanced, are often not produced in sufficient numbers to counter a peer adversary capable of waging a war of attrition. The myth of quality over quantity has unraveled on and over the battlefield in Ukraine.

The staggering volume of Russian firepower ranging from artillery shells to missiles, rockets, drones, and glide bombs, have ground down the US-European trained and armed Ukrainian armed forces over the course of the 3+ year war – a staggering volume of firepower the US and its European client states have so far failed to match both in terms of quantity, but also quality.

Russian precision-guided weapons have turned out to be at least as effective as US weapons, cheaper, and many times more numerous. 

This emerging paradigm has resulted for a variety of reasons, chief among them is the very organization of the collective West’s arms industry under a for-profit model versus the network of for-purpose state-owned enterprises that Russia’s arms industry consists of – within a society that likewise prioritizes purpose over profit. 

Russia’s arms industry produces munitions of quantities and quality required to meet the objectives of the state whether or not they produce a profit, while the West’s arms industry produces munitions of quantities and quality to maximize profit. 

The fundamental for-profit vs. for-purpose mindset extends further beyond just the arms industry alone into areas like education and infrastructure that provide essential inputs for the arms industry. 

According to a 2017 Forbes article, Russia (despite having a population half the size of the United States) had a comparable number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates per year – meaning that Russia had (and still has) a larger number of STEM graduates per capita than the US, despite fluctuating numbers since 2017.

Russia’s close partnership with China and India further enhances its access to industrial inputs produced by even larger pools of highly skilled labor collectively dwarfing those of the West.  

The creation of the ERAM program and others like it, seek to shift the established paradigm of “quality over quantity” in terms of military industrial production. While the ERAM represents a more effective approach, the US and its European client states still fall far short in terms of either quantity or quality precisely because the fundamental differences between the collective West’s approach to military industrial production and Russia’s have not been fully addressed.

The ERAM and other programs like it seek to narrow the existing gap between Western and Russian military industrial production (as well as China’s), however, currently, Russia continues to expand its own production as well as invest in contributing factors like education and infrastructure to expand skilled labor and supply chains even further. 

The ERAM program, therefore, is one part of a wider attempt to pivot from the myth of absolute Western technological supremacy to the reality of attrition warfare, one that the West’s for-profit military-industrial model is fundamentally ill-equipped to win. While Washington’s political machine continues to wage a fierce and highly effective campaign of information warfare and covert interference far beyond the battlefield, its ability to back these efforts with tangible military power is visibly waning. 

The ERAM is not a “wonder weapon” that will change the course of the conflict; it is a belated, and likely inadequate, response to a strategic reality that Russia and its allies have already established. 

For the emerging multipolar world, the key to navigating this new era is not to simply match or exceed Western military power, but to continue building a more resilient, purpose-driven industrial and societal foundation – one that is as apt at defending against US influence and interference as it is at outproducing it in terms of artillery shells, missiles, and drones. 

In America’s pursuit of full-spectrum dominance, only full-spectrum defense will prevail. 

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.