The Department of Defense is beginning to emphasize the importance of developing the capability to defend against hypersonic missiles as opposed to developing our own such missiles.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks met with more than a dozen industry leaders to promote the development of hypersonic weaponry last week.
The “participants identified a need to expand access to modeling capabilities and testing facilities in order to adopt a ‘test often, fail fast, and learn’ approach, which will accelerate the fielding of hypersonic and counter-hypersonic systems,” Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said in a readout of the meeting.
Even though the Pentagon has honed in on offensive hypersonic technology, as opposed to primarily focusing on defensive measures up until this point, the United States is still losing the hypersonic race against foreign powers, including China and Russia.
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“As a department, we’ve chosen to focus on offense first because a good offense is the best defense and offense is a lot easier,” Gillian Bussey, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office, explained during a Center for Strategic and International Studies roundtable on Monday. The discussion focused on defensive strategies against hypersonic weapons.
A hypersonic missile defense system would “require an integrated, layered, system-of-systems approach, new sensing and interceptor capabilities, different operational concepts, doctrinal and organizational changes, and modified policy expectations,” a new report from CSIS about hypersonic defense said.
Bussey also noted the importance of a “layered defense system,” arguing that the U.S. has “too many threats to deal with to depend on terminal defense,” which she called “not sufficient” because the Pentagon is “expecting to see a large number of missiles coming at us.”
The pace of China’s military developments is “stunning,” according to Gen. John Hyten, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also acknowledged in October that the Chinese military has conducted “hundreds” of hypersonic tests in the last five years, while the U.S. conducted only nine such tests.
China’s military has accelerated the pace of its nuclear expansion program to the point where it could “have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads” within roughly five years, according to the Defense Department’s “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” report, released at the beginning of November.
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The U.S. is years away from having a defensive system in place that would prevent a hypersonic missile attack, according to the report, which found that at the current level of DOD investment, it could take until the end of the decade or into the 2030s to have functioning defense capabilities. That timetable could be sped up possibly with an increase in funding over the next two fiscal years, the CSIS report argued.
