Department of Defense officials sought to answer this week the question of how the United States fell behind in hypersonic weapon development and what it is now doing to catch up with Russia and China.
“That’s one we get a lot, really,” Mike White, assistant director for hypersonics at the Pentagon, said at a Monday press briefing, responding to a question from the Washington Examiner as to how Russia already has tested weapons and the U.S. is still in the experimental phase of hypersonic missile development.
“In past decades, we’ve been world leaders in hypersonics technology, 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,” he said.
But the Russians and Chinese have.
Hypersonic speed is defined as five times that of sound. Modern hypersonic cruise missiles can travel up to 15 times the speed of sound and maneuver while in flight, making them very difficult to counter.
Russia started hypersonic research around the same time as the U.S. in the late 1940s, building on a Cold War Soviet Union legacy.
Today, Russia reportedly has tested several hypersonic weapons that can be launched from ships, submarines, ballistic missiles, or through the air.
China has caught up in hypersonics, too, by studying U.S. research and investing heavily, said Mark Lewis, the Defense Department’s director of defense research and engineering for modernization, who also sat on the press briefing Monday.
“We’ve published extensively, and they’ve read our papers,” Lewis said. “So, we made it relatively easy for people to pick up the ball from us.”
China showed off its new anti-ship hypersonic missile at a military parade last fall and is working on extending its range.
Lewis said fielding hypersonic weapons was now a top U.S. priority, echoing comments by Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in February.
In his testimony, O’Shaughnessy said the U.S. had to invest in defensive and offensive hypersonic weapons and research to catch up with China and Russia.
In response to a Washington Examiner question about why the U.S. waited to invest in hypersonic weapons when it knew Russia was making the transition to the weapons, White said that “the world has become a place where our great power competitors have watched us over the last several decades.”
Noting U.S. dominance in space, land, and sea, he said, “It’s really driven by the build-up of our great power competitors and their attempts to challenge our domain dominance.”
White said it comes down to the fact that the U.S. cannot allow an adversary to have an asymmetry, or one-sided capability.
Lewis said the 2018 National Defense Strategy called for a new focus on peer competitors, thereby redirecting officials to look at “Great Power” competitors and make sure the U.S. keeps up.
A $928 million Air Force hypersonics program awarded to Lockheed Martin in 2018 for a program known as the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, or “Hacksaw,” was canceled last month. Instead, the 2021 Air Force budget calls for $382 million for hypersonics and a shift in focus to its Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon, or “Arrow.”
The difference has to do with boost glide versus cruise missile. Cruise weapons are smaller and can be distributed to a greater number of platforms, the experts said.
Lewis and White assured much was learned from Hacksaw and is shared across services and with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is pursuing alternative launch platforms.
Lewis said flight tests for an Army/Navy delivered hypersonic vehicle would happen “later this year.”
But it’s not about getting to a specific weapon, the two civilian researchers said. It’s about a broadly applicable capability.
“It’s not going to be one or two hypersonic weapons,” Lewis said. “It’s a range of capabilities. It’s intermediate range. It’s long-range. It’s things coming off of ships. It’s things coming off of trucks. It’s things coming off of wings of airplanes and out of bomb bays. It’s a full range of capabilities.”
But, the experts admitted, the “things” won’t be ready until the mid-2020s.
