The news of China’s recent hypersonic test garnered even more attention when Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used the phrase “Sputnik moment” in connection to it.
Even though missiles that travel at hypersonic speed have been around for roughly half a century, Milley said it was “very close to” a “Sputnik moment” — not that it was one, just that it got people’s attention.
Over the summer, China tested “a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile” that “circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating advanced space capabilities that caught U.S. intelligence by surprise,” the Financial Times reported last month. However, Chinese government officials have denied it.
Hypersonic missiles travel at a minimum of five times the speed of sound, while anything under that barometer is subsonic, and supersonic is anything greater than the speed of sound, Matt Kroenig, a former Defense official and current Georgetown University professor, told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
The difference between the alleged Chinese missile test and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which also reach hypersonic speed and date back to the 1960s, is maneuverability, Kroenig explained.
Older such missiles are launched the same way, but they would travel on a ballistic trajectory, and it’s just “their speed and their direction that determines where they’re going and where they’re going to land,” and as a result, “You can do the calculations to figure out where it’s going to be, and we can shoot up a missile to intercept it,” he added, referencing defense tactics.
However, the newer hypersonic missiles travel on a glide vehicle that allows them to fly “at lower altitudes, closer to the surface, and then go in and hit the target,” making hypersonic missiles significantly more challenging to defend against, he continued.
Milley elaborated on China’s test and whether it should be considered a “Sputnik moment” during the Aspen Security Forum last week.
“I would just say that that test that occurred was a very significant test. Is hypersonic new? No, they’re not new, so in that limited, narrow sense, it’s not a Sputnik moment because Sputnik was new at the time,” the chairman said.
John Venable, a senior research fellow for defense policy at the Heritage Foundation, agreed that “it is not an earth-shattering Sputnik moment,” but he noted that “the fact that we don’t” have the capabilities of the Chinese “should be a wake-up call to the United States.”
He also compared hypersonic missile defense to the Houston Astros cheating scandal, in which they orchestrated a way for players to signal to a batter about what pitch was coming from the opposing team’s pitcher.
“I know it’s gonna be a fastball,” Venable explained. “And they just started tattooing these fastballs, right? Well, the same thing is true with hypersonics, right? … They don’t generate a lot of heading crossing like a baseball batter would face facing a curveball. There’s no change in that. And the way that ball was going to come across the plate because of that missile system, like the Patriot can actually hit these as long as they know they’re coming. And as long as Washington, D.C., is the target.”
Kroening, who described his “main” concern as “not this specific weapon” but of “China’s modernizing [of] its entire military,” also stated that the Chinese are “more comfortable rushing technologies into the field before they’re really ready,” while the U.S. waits because it doesn’t “want any failures in testing.”
Both Venable and Kroening said the context of China’s military growth is more of the issue at play than the test itself, and the Department of Defense’s “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” report, released last week, relayed many of those same concerns.
The Chinese have accelerated the pace of their nuclear expansion program to the point where they could “have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads” within roughly five years, while the report alleges that the country “likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, exceeding the pace and size the DoD projected in 2020,” the report outlines.
Similarly, Gen. John Hyten, the outgoing vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently acknowledged that the Chinese military has conducted “hundreds” of hypersonic tests in the last five years, compared to the nine that the U.S. military has launched, further illustrating why the Department of Defense has repeatedly called the adversarial nation a “pacing challenge.”
