Led by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation office Rapid Dragon is a palletized munitions experimentation campaign exploring feasibility and operational advantages of airdropping long-range palletized munitions from existing airlift platforms, such as the C-130 and C-17, without aircraft modifications.
The multi-phase program brings together nearly 30 stakeholders from across DoD, Air Force Major Commands, Test and Evaluation enterprise, program offices, and industry to develop and demonstrate the capability through modeling, simulation, analysis, demonstration and flight tests. The program, established in December 2019, and achieved powered flight/live fire test from an MC-130J in December 2021.
