Boosting U.S. Hypersonic Capabilities

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.  

OPINION — The Senate last week added $1.2 billion to the fiscal 2019 Defense Appropriations Bill to increase the Pentagon’s offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities.

It was done as a direct response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s March 1, speech in which he claimed Russia was working on hypersonic weapons and had already developed “a high-precision hypersonic aircraft missile system.”

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