China has tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic vehicle, leading some to worry that the United States is falling behind its preeminent global adversary.
Their concerns are misplaced.
Washington shouldn’t be worried about a missile gap with Beijing. Rather, it should be concerned about an intelligence gap between the two superpowers.
On Oct. 16., the Financial Times reported that China had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic vehicle in August, “demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught U.S. intelligence by surprise.” Jerry Hendrix, a retired U.S. Navy captain and defense analyst, said that the Chinese test “ought to be our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into space. That test, Hendrix observed, led to then-President Dwight Eisenhower working with Congress to address shortfalls in science and engineering in government, industry, and schools.
Hendrix is right. The U.S. should work in a bipartisan fashion, just as it did in Eisenhower’s day, to boost our capabilities. But Sputnik has another relevant legacy. The test prompted concerns of a “missile gap” between the two countries — a “gap” that didn’t actually exist, but which then-Sen. John F. Kennedy skillfully exploited in his successful 1960 run for the presidency against Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon.
There isn’t a hypersonic capability “gap” either.
The U.S. has a variety of hypersonic vehicle programs in various phases of testing. Indeed, the U.S. successfully conducted a test in September 2021. By contrast, while China’s recent launch was successful, it nonetheless missed its target by about two dozen miles. The U.S. would still maintain deterrence even if China gained a short-term hypersonic weapons advantage.
The real cause for concern lies in the fact that Beijing’s new capabilities apparently caught U.S. intelligence by surprise. As Ian Easton, the senior director of D.C. think tank the Project 2049 Institute, noted: “If our intelligence and military officials are indeed stunned by China’s developments in areas like space, missiles, [and] nukes — things that Washington has been obsessively tracking for decades — one wonders how much worse the knowledge gaps are in areas that receive little or no attention.”
The U.S. remains the world leader in intelligence gathering, with tremendous technological capabilities. But when it comes to China, the U.S. has experienced several significant setbacks. From 2010-2012, China’s Ministry of State Security managed to identify and execute dozens of U.S. spies. As Reuters reported: “The breach was considered particularly damaging, with the number of assets lost rivaling those in the Soviet Union and Russia who perished after information [was] passed to Moscow by spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hannsen.”
The U.S. has spent the last decade trying to rebuild its human intelligence capacity on the mainland. Although it may have lacked eyes and ears in China, the same can’t be said for Beijing. According to a 2021 Center for Strategic and International Studies survey, from 2010-2021 there were three times as many cases of Chinese spies operating in the U.S. compared to the previous decade. Admittedly, the CSIS study could indicate that U.S. counterintelligence efforts have improved, but as the survey itself only utilized open-source information, there are likely many more cases — and many more spies.
After the Cold War ended, the West was stunned by revelations in books like The Haunted Wood and the Mitrokhin Archive, which showed a more capable KGB than previously thought. Facing China, the U.S. cannot afford to come second in the intelligence game.
The writer is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
