The Hypersonic Arms Race is Heating Up

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

The Pentagon’s fiscal 2024 budget shows that the U.S. – as a late starter — has fully entered the hypersonic weapons arms race with China and Russia, in hopes of producing its first 24 hypersonic missiles in 2024 – eight for the Navy and the rest for the Army.

According to fiscal 2024 budget documents, the Army plans to deploy its first long-range hypersonic weapon battalion next year, while the Navy plans to put its first hypersonic system on Zumwalt class destroyers by fiscal 2025. The Air Force will not purchase hypersonic missiles in fiscal 2024, but will continue research and development of proposed systems.

As was readily admitted by Pentagon officials at a March 10 House Armed Services Strategic Subcommittee hearing on U.S. and adversary hypersonic programs, both Russia and China are currently ahead when it comes to these weapons.

Hypersonic systems are capable of flying at speeds greater than five-to-25 times the speed of sound (761 mph) and provide a combination of speed, maneuverability, and altitude that
enables highly survivable, rapid defeat of time-critical, heavily-defended, and high value enemy targets.

There are two primary categories of hypersonic weapons: Hypersonic glide vehicles (HGV), launched from a rocket into low-earth-orbit before re-entering the atmosphere and gliding at hypersonic speed to a target; and hypersonic cruise missiles, powered by high-speed, air-breathing engines, or so-called “scramjets,” after acquiring their target. 


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The history of hypersonic weapons dates to the 1960s, when the Soviet Union began to develop a nuclear warhead delivery system that used a missile-launched low-earth-orbiting vehicle launched and then had the nuclear warhead de-orbit and glide toward the target. Known as a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), it was deployed by the Soviets in 1968 after some 20 tests. Eventually, 18 FOBS, Soviet nuclear-armed missiles were in silos in Kazakhstan and considered operational.

Meanwhile, U.S. scientists began working with space aircraft and eventually the Space Shuttles as rocket-lifted bodies going into space and then returning at hypersonic speeds as they glided back to earth. In early 1980s, the U.S. created out of such lifting body research the Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (MaRV) which had a warhead-carrying re-entry vehicle that changed its flight pattern at high speed enabling it to hit targets beyond the initial arc of ballistic trajectory. The Pershing II medium-range ballistic missile with a MaRV warhead was deployed to Europe in 1983 with maneuverable warheads, but withdrawn and retired after the May 1988 Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty with the Soviet Union was ratified.

Meanwhile, American intelligence was watching the Soviet testing that developed FOBS. During a November 1987 press conference, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara discussed the Soviet FOBS and said it was not a worry, given the U.S. deployed ICBMs were more reliable as a nuclear deterrent.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty went further. It seemed to outlaw any orbiting, nuclear Soviet system. And yet it was not until 1983 that the Russians dismantled their 18 FOBS in silos.

Current U.S. attention and renewed interest in hypersonics date back to October 2021 when the Financial Times first reported that China in the previous July and August had tested two hypersonic nuclear weapons “that [each] circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught U.S. intelligence by surprise.”

That China had developed its own FOBS, using its Long March ICBM and a nuclear-capable intercontinental-range hypersonic glide vehicle was not immediately confirmed. But Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the time, “What I can tell you is that we watch closely China’s development of armaments and advanced capabilities and systems that will only increase tensions in the region…China is a challenge, and we’re going to remain focused on that.”

It turns out China had also tested medium-range ballistic missiles that could launch conventional or nuclear hypersonic glide vehicles and had created what the Congressional Research Service described as “a robust research and development infrastructure devoted to hypersonic weapons.”

As for Russia, since the 1980s, it had continued working on hypersonic weapons, primarily because their speed and maneuverability offered a means to penetrate what Moscow feared from the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative the possible creation of an impenetrable missile defense.

Russia has pursued three hypersonic weapons programs — the Kinzhal (“Dagger”), a maneuvering air-launched ballistic missile; the Tsirkon, a ship-launched hypersonic cruise missile capable of striking both ground and naval targets; and the Avangard, a hypersonic glide vehicle launched from an intercontinental ballistic missile. Both systems are said to be tested, operational and deployed.

The Ukraine military has reported that during the night of March 8, during one of Russia’s biggest attack on Ukraine targets, six air-launched Kinzhal hypersonic missiles were among the weapons used.


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Back here in the U.S., it is clear that the Pentagon not only wants to catch up to China and Russia, but also try and take the lead in hypersonics.

As Vice Adm. Johnny R. Wolfe Jr., Director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, told the House subcommittee March 10, “Potential strategic competitors have rapidly developed highly capable systems to challenge our dominance on the battlefield. They have spent two decades investing in capabilities and modernizing their militaries … Hypersonics is one of the highest priority critical technology areas the Department of Defense is pursuing to ensure our continued battlefield dominance.”

Michael White, Principal Director for Hypersonic, Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (Modernization), told the subcommittee, “We are also working to ensure the U.S. remains a global leader in hypersonics far into the future.” 

A Pentagon Joint Hypersonic Transition Office has been established to invest in future technologies and train the next generation workforce, White said. Some 100 universities along with industry, Federal government laboratories and research centers are participating in implementing “the next phase of our strategic approach,” he added.

Meanwhile, to accelerate the current catch-up phase, the Navy and Army have partnered to produce a non-nuclear, hypersonic weapon system using a Navy-developed hypersonic missile for launching, and a common hypersonic glide body (C-HGB) re-entry system developed by the Army and Sandia National Laboratories to deliver a conventional, but maneuverable warhead. 

The Navy will integrate the missile booster with the C-HGB, and each service will develop their respective conventional weapon systems on corresponding sea- or land-based launch platforms.

The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office has led the prototyping of the first ground-based long-range hypersonic weapon (LRHW), along with a road-mobile battery that will consist of four transporter erector launchers and an operations center for command and control.

Lt.Gen. Robert Rasch, Army Director for Hypersonics, Directed Energy, Space, told the subcommittee that all ground support equipment for the first LRHW battery had been delivered and “hands on” training had been “successfully completed,” including deployment of the battery “by C-17 [air transport] in a combat-like environment.”

When the first LRHW prototype weapons are delivered this year, Rasch said, this first battery will be turned “over to the [Army’s] Program Executive Office Missiles and Space, which will then be responsible for the development and fielding of the follow-on batteries training.”

The Navy version of the LRHW will be first deployed aboard Zumwalt destroyers in the mid-2020s and later, in the early 2030s, aboard Virginia-class attack submarines.

To prepare for the underwater launching of the hypersonic missile, Vice. Adm. Wolfe said the Navy was building “an Underwater Test Facility in Crane, Indiana…[to] conduct submerged tests to ensure we understand how the missile flies through the water” for launching from a Virginia submarine.

Lt. Gen. Donna Shipton, Military Deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, told the subcommittee the Air Force was prototyping an Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon which would be “a hypersonic boost-glide
weapon that provides a long range, conventional air-to-surface, precision-guided, prompt strike
capability from standoff ranges in contested environments.”

The Air Force is also working on a Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile which she described as “an air-launched, air-breathing weapon that can be integrated on current and future fighters, as well as provide expanded capacity on bombers. The plan is to begin flight testing in fiscal 2025.

There remain some questions about hypersonic weapons.

A January 2023 report of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which analyzed the hypersonic weapons, said they “would be more expensive than similar ballistic missiles and pose much greater technical challenges.” The CBO estimated, “Hypersonic missiles would cost roughly one-third more than ballistic missiles with maneuverable warheads that had the same range and accuracy and traveled at similar speeds.”

The CBO report also said, “Given their cost, hypersonic weapons would provide a niche capability, mainly useful to address threats that were both well-defended and extremely time-sensitive (requiring a strike in 15 minutes to 30 minutes). If time was not a concern, much cheaper cruise missiles could be used.” In February 2022, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall was quoted saying, “Hypersonics are not going to be cheap anytime soon … [and thus] we’re more likely to have relatively small inventories of [hypersonic missiles] than large ones.”

At the March 10, hearing, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), ranking Democrat on the panel and a former Marine officer who served four tours in Iraq, raised another issue. “After years of development, the [Defense] Department can’t even make a clear case to our committee for how these weapons will be employed, [and] we also have not seriously examined the results of whether — of whatever that employment might be.  – what is the mission?” 

He also raised another somewhat similar question about hypersonics that we all should agree requires a good answer: “What matters is how we will use them, not chasing after what our adversaries have just because they have it?”


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