Raytheon is developing a new 1,500-pound long-range missile, the AIM-424 LRAAM, to extend the reach and survivability of Navy and Marine aviators.
Page A6From§Eachthe late evening edition — 31 August 2026
Pentagon Names New Missile 'MALICE' Days After Report It Secretly Pays Online Influencers
As it ran on the front
Grab your clipboards, folks, we're following the paper trail today, and today's paper trail names a missile. All together now — exhibit one: the United States Navy unveils a new weapon built to strike enemy aircraft from extreme range, and the official name they picked for it, printed in the release, is MALICE. Not a code number. Not a saint's name, not a state bird. Malice. Somebody in procurement signed off on that.
Exhibit two, filed the same week, from a different desk: a report finding the Pentagon quietly hired online influencers to push the Defense Secretary's agenda. Quietly. That's the word in the document, not mine. This reporter simply reads what's typed.…
…(cont) Follow the ball with me now. On one hand, the department wants you to know, loudly, in a press release with a name like a movie villain, exactly what it built and what it's for. On the other hand, the same building wants you to not know, quietly, who's been paid to tell you it's all going well. One office is shouting. The other office is whispering. Both offices report to the same guy.
I want to be fair to the record here — the report doesn't say the missile budget and the influencer budget came out of the same line item. It doesn't have to. They just have to come out of the same building, in the same season, and they did.
Worth reading twice: an agency that names its own hardware after cruelty, in public, on purpose, and pays people privately to say nice things about the guy in charge of it. You don't need a redaction to see that. You need a highlighter.
This reporter isn't accusing anyone of a strategy. This reporter is just telling you what two press releases, filed the same week, happen to say, back to back, in order, the way the Pentagon itself chose to release them. Nobody made them call it MALICE. Nobody made them do it quietly. They did both, on their own paper, with their own words.
That's the file. This reporter's just here to read it out loud.
“They put 'malice' on the missile in plain English and then quietly cut checks to randos to make the war look popular online - that's not messaging, that's laundering opinion. When the ad budget for the war is bigger than the honesty budget, you already know who's paying for both.”
“The name reflects the weapon's intended effect on enemy aircraft, that's just straightforward terminology, it's not a statement, it's a spec sheet. And the outreach program is about ensuring accurate information reaches the public through trusted voices - trusted, paid, same thing, basically - I don't think I meant to say that part out loud.”
The receipts
‘Answering this call was my duty and the fulfillment of my oath’
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.