Could Ukraine Ever Get the Ninja Bomb? A Realistic Look
The US hasn't actually confirmed its existence - officially
In the long and bloody story of American drone warfare, the Hellfire missile has earned a place of infamy and fascination.
Originally designed to punch through Soviet tanks during the Cold War, the AGM-114 Hellfire evolved into the precision tool of the Global War on Terror, launched from Predator and Reaper drones against high-value targets around the world.
But tucked inside the labyrinth of Hellfire variants is a strange, surgical offshoot: the Hellfire R9X, a missile with no explosives and six monstrous blades that deploy just before impact.
Nicknamed the “Flying Ginsu” and the “Ninja Bomb” by operators and analysts, the R9X represents a radical rethink of what it means to strike a target cleanly. And it has changed the rules of engagement for counterterrorism.
The Origins of the Blade-Wielding Hellfire
The R9X was born in the late 2000s, under the Obama administration, in response to mounting criticism over civilian casualties from drone strikes. American policymakers wanted something that could surgically eliminate an individual terrorist without leveling an entire building or killing innocent families caught nearby.
The result was deceptively simple: remove the high-explosive warhead from a standard Hellfire missile and replace it with a kinetic kill mechanism.
Specifically, six hardened steel blades that spring out just before impact, using sheer velocity, not an explosion, to shred the target with terrifying precision.
Think of it as the sniper rifle of missiles. One shot, one kill, and nothing else touched.
In 2022, when Ayman al-Zawahiri, the heir to Osama bin Laden, was eliminated while standing on the balcony of a safe house in downtown Kabul, observers noted something odd.
There was no crater, no widespread blast damage, and no shattered buildings. Just one man, precisely targeted, gone.
The US never officially confirmed it, but it was clear to anyone who has studied the R9X that this was its work.
The logic behind the R9X is brutally elegant. In traditional kinetic warfare, explosions are messy. A typical AGM-114 Hellfire’s warhead delivers an enormous blast radius, great for armored vehicles but terrible for minimizing civilian casualties in urban areas.
The R9X bypasses that entirely. Upon approach, the missile deploys its six blades outward, each nearly the size of a samurai sword. The weapon relies on kinetic energy alone, the energy of mass and velocity, to kill. There is no fiery explosion, no blast wave, just cold, mechanical destruction focused precisely on the intended target.
The result is a missile that can kill a passenger in a moving car without harming the driver. It can destroy a terrorist hiding in a second-story apartment without knocking down the building. It is surgical warfare taken to the extreme.
To understand the R9X’s place in the US arsenal, you have to understand the broader Hellfire family. Originally developed in the 1970s as a helicopter-launched "tank buster," the AGM-114 Hellfire grew into the workhorse precision strike weapon for everything from helicopters to drones to coastal patrol ships.
Most Hellfire variants are laser-guided, meaning they home in on a laser designator illuminating the target. Others, like the AGM-114L "Longbow Hellfire," use millimeter-wave radar to lock on independently, even through weather, smoke, or dust.
Over time, modular designs allowed Hellfires to swap warheads: shaped charges for tanks, blast fragmentation for infantry, and metal augmented charges for fortified structures.
By the 2010s, the Hellfire II "Romeo" variant was replacing earlier versions, capable of hitting a moving car at nearly seven miles away with a Circular Error Probable (CEP) of under three feet.
But even the most precise blast warhead was still a blast. That left room for something even cleaner: the R9X.
Operational Use: Surgical Strikes from the Shadows
The United States rarely confirms the use of the R9X, and that is by design. Precision assassination is a touchy subject in international law and geopolitics. But careful observers can spot its signature.
When senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Khayr al-Masri was killed in Syria in 2017, his car was found with a perfect, circular hole punched through the roof; no blast damage, no surrounding destruction.
Photos showed a scene so precise it looked unreal.
That was no ordinary Hellfire. That was a blade-wielding ninja falling from the sky.
Likewise, reports in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan have pointed to similar ultra-clean strike patterns, high-profile individuals taken out with minimal collateral damage.
If drones brought about a revolution in "remote warfare," then the R9X brought about a refinement: death with plausible deniability, visible only to the people who needed to know.
The R9X is not just a tool of counterterrorism. It is a symbol of how modern warfare is shifting.
Precision is king. The days of carpet-bombing entire cities to kill one man are over, at least they were before Trump.
A US airstrike on an important oil port held by Yemen’s Houthi rebels two weeks ago killed more than 70 people and wounded many others, mainly civilians.
So much for the moral high ground.
Ideally, the United States military recognizes that every civilian casualty creates a propaganda victory for the enemy. But the current administration doesn’t seem to grasp that.
The R9X gives commanders a weapon that can reach out and eliminate an enemy leader, even in a packed urban environment, without turning the neighborhood into rubble.
That capability saves lives, prevents political blowback, and maintains the ethical high ground.
And in a future where drones are everywhere, satellites can see everything, and every strike is filmed, analyzed, and broadcast globally within minutes, that kind of surgical precision is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
Could Ukraine Ever Get the R9X?
First, here is the hard truth: technically, yes — but politically, almost certainly no, at least not anytime soon.
Here’s why:
The R9X is Ultra-Classified and Politically Sensitive
The R9X is not just another missile off the shelf. It is a highly classified, compartmentalized weapon developed for the CIA and US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for very specific high-value kill missions, typically under covert authorization.
Unlike HIMARS, Javelins, or even the F-16s, the R9X is a scalpel reserved for extreme counterterrorism scenarios where the United States has direct national security interests.
Sharing the R9X with a foreign government, even an ally like Ukraine, would risk compromising the missile’s capabilities, operating methods, and technical secrets.
Washington is extremely risk-averse when it comes to losing control over how R9Xs might be used, especially since every strike could cause political blowback if civilians are unintentionally harmed.
If an R9X were ever misused or captured, it could severely damage US credibility, not to mention destroy the deniability associated with the weapon system.
In short, it is not a battlefield tool; it is an assassination asset, which, in turn, makes it an intelligence asset. That makes it highly unlikely Ukraine will ever see them transferred casually.
Technological Safeguards and End-Use Monitoring
Weapons like the R9X typically come with heavy End-Use Monitoring (EUM) requirements under US arms export law. This means the US would have to track every single missile, audit their storage, verify targets beforehand, and sometimes even insist on US personnel supervising the launch process.
That level of oversight is difficult to maintain in a chaotic, dynamic war like Ukraine's, especially when strikes often happen within minutes of new intelligence.
In practice, Ukraine has had to "own" a lot of its own targeting in real time.
Allowing a Ukrainian drone operator or pilot to independently fire a CIA-designed assassination missile at a Russian officer (even a valid target) would cross too many political red lines for Washington.
Ukraine Has Other Precision Options
Ukraine is already receiving a ton of extremely precise Western munitions that serve a similar role without the political baggage.
Weapons like GBU-62 JDAMs, AASM Hammer bombs, and GMLRS (HIMARS rockets).
These weapons are more conventional, easier to integrate with Ukraine's military, and critically, do not require the secrecy and hand-holding the R9X would demand.
If Ukraine were ever to get something like the R9X, it would most likely happen under one of these scenarios:
Highly Secret Covert Ops: A small number of R9Xs, operated exclusively by US personnel embedded in Ukraine or from US drones operating outside Ukrainian airspace.
Modified Export Variant: A "de-tuned" version of the R9X without sensitive components, perhaps less effective but safer to transfer.
Post-War: If Ukraine becomes a NATO member or an extremely trusted partner postwar, future access could be possible under tightly controlled conditions.
Reverse-Engineered Equivalent: Ukraine, with Western assistance, could develop its own kinetic, non-explosive missile concept based on the same principles but with different classified technology.
But today, right now in 2025, the honest answer is: it is extremely unlikely.
Ukraine Does Not Need the R9X (Yet)
Ukraine's current threats are Russian tanks, trenches, aircraft, and massed troop formations.
The R9X is not really suitable for that environment. It is a tool for targeted assassinations, not battlefield attrition. And in any case, Ukraine is having no problem brutalizing Russian command posts. My Wednesday article this week here on Substack is about precisely that – how Ukraine has been absolutely murdering Russian officers over the past two weeks with F-16s and Mirages. So be sure to subscribe for that!
If someday Ukraine needs to surgically eliminate a Russian general without dropping half a block of Donetsk in the process, then it becomes a more relevant conversation.
But until then, Ukraine's focus remains on quantity, speed, and mass effects, not a single silent missile with six spinning blades.
Still, it is a fascinating “what if,” and if the war stretches on long enough, and Ukrainian special operations forces evolve even further, never say never.
Слава Україні!
Note: Hey friends, Wes here. I’m temporarily allowing only paid subscribers to leave comments until the Russian MAGA trolls fuck off. Apologies for the inconvenience. I still love ya.