Amid a backdrop of nonstop coronavirus news coverage, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy wanted to highlight a major step in America’s hypersonic missile arms race with China and Russia.
“I’d likely point out today that the Army, in a joint effort with the Navy, conducted a successful long-range flight of a hypersonic glide body missile,” McCarthy said Friday in a briefing dominated by questions about how the Army Corps of Engineers would help address things such as coming hospital shortages.
“This is a significant milestone for our number-one priority, long-range precision fires,” McCarthy said.
A C-HGB rocket on Thursday pierced the skies over Kauai, Hawaii. It created explosive smoke flumes similar to those of a space shuttle launch because the joint Navy- and Army-developed hypersonic glide body does reach space.
To reach speeds of Mach 20, or 20 times the speed of sound, the glide body that will carry the nation’s fastest land-based missile passes between the upper atmosphere and space.
“There is no missile defense system from sensor to interceptor in the world, including the United States, that has been developed and is capable of defeating hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) like the C-HGB,” wrote Riki Ellison, the head of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, the day after the launch.
The test conducted at the Pacific Missile Range facility brings the military a step closer to catching up with adversaries who already have hypersonic missiles in their inventory.
Russia reportedly has tested several hypersonic weapons that can be launched from ships, submarines, ground sites, or midair. China already has an anti-ship hypersonic missile.
“In past decades, we’ve been world leaders in hypersonics technology,” Mike White, the assistant director for hypersonics, told the Washington Examiner at a March 2 Pentagon briefing. “But we have consistently made the decision to not transition that to weapon applications and build weapons systems out of hypersonic technologies that we were working on in the laboratory.”
But as McCarthy hinted at Friday’s press conference, the Department of Defense is investing heavily now with hopes to have weapons in inventories across the services by the early to mid-2020s.
The services and DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have a combined $3.2 billion devoted to hypersonics development in fiscal year 2021, according to congressional testimony from Defense Secretary Mark Esper earlier this month.
Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett said at a Feb. 21 Johns Hopkins discussion that the effort is coordinated across all the services.
“So much of the advancing technology is very much a joint effort,” she said. “If we did it individually, we would be finding duplication and inefficiencies that we wouldn’t — that we cannot afford.”
McCarthy explained during the same discussion that hypersonics research is not centrally managed but rather draws on each service’s work and the strong relationships among the service secretaries.
“If you look at the hypersonics effort, it’s joint interest, not a joint program like a big, joint program office with a coin and a seal and all that stuff,” he said. “What we do is we share information, and we look at the test regime, and we share the data.”
The Missile Defense Agency monitored and tracked data from the flight experiment conducted last Thursday. That data will be used to design a hypersonic weapon to defend against peer adversaries such as China and Russia.
The Pentagon has had false starts in the development of hypersonic missiles, canceling a $900 million program last year before starting a new one earlier this year.
Lately, the department has said it is focused on a glide body, which brings a missile to hypersonic speeds before it breaks away toward its target.
The DOD called the March 19 test a “major milestone” that builds on a test in October 2017.
”In this test, we put additional stresses on the system, and it was able to handle them all,” said Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, in a statement about the Navy-led program.
When ready, the C-HGB will carry a conventional warhead, guidance system, and thermal protection shield.
In his congressional testimony, Esper tried to assuage Senate Armed Services Committee concerns that we are far behind China and Russia.
“I’m very confident that in the next few years, we’ll be deploying hypersonic weapons as the commanders need them throughout the theater, but in the Indo-Pacific theater in particular,” he said in response to a question from Sen. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican. “We are doing very innovative work, and I would tell you, it’s more innovative than what you would see coming out of Russia or China — I can assure you that.”
