Hypersonic missile test off Kauai aimed at countering Russia, China

The Defense Department said it successfully tested a hypersonic “glide body” — a key and emerging weapon in the “great power” competition with Russia and China — in a flight experiment conducted Thursday night from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.

The Navy and Army jointly executed the launch of the vehicle, which flew at least Mach 5 — or five times the speed of sound — to a designated impact point.

That success comes amid an arms race among the United States, Russia and China — and other countries — to develop hypersonics.

The Pentagon called the test a “major milestone” toward using the war-fighting capability in the early to mid-2020s.

“This test builds on the success we had with Flight Experiment 1 in October 2017,” in which a glide body achieved sustained hypersonic flight at “target distances,” Vice Adm. Johnny R. Wolfe, director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, said in a release.

In that test, also off Kauai, the U.S. military used a prototype missile mounted with a modified hypersonic boost-glide vehicle. Officials said the missile could one day be fired from Virginia-class submarines.

In Thursday’s test, “additional stresses” were placed on the system, “and it was able to handle them all,” Wolfe said. He added that “we validated our design and are now ready to move to the next phase towards fielding a hypersonic strike capability.”

Hypersonic weapons, capable of flying at speeds of at least Mach 5, or 3,800 mph, but also much, much faster, are highly maneuverable and operate at varying altitudes.

“This provides the warfighter with an ability to strike targets hundreds and even thousands of miles away, in a matter of minutes, to defeat a wide range of high-value targets,” the Pentagon said. “Delivering hypersonic weapons is one of the department’s highest technical research and engineering priorities.”

The United States has actively pursued the development of hypersonic weapons since the early 2000s, focusing in recent years on hypersonic glide vehicles, which are launched from a rocket before gliding to a target, and hypersonic cruise missiles, which are powered by high-speed, air-breathing engines during flight, the Congressional Research Service said Wednesday in a report.

Russia and China both have hypersonic weapons programs. Unlike those countries, the United States is not currently considering nuclear warheads for its hypersonic weapons.

“As a result, U.S. hypersonic weapons will likely require greater accuracy and will be more technically challenging to develop than nuclear-armed Chinese and Russian systems,” the CRS report said.

The Navy is the lead designer and the Army has the lead for production for what’s known as the “common hypersonic glide body.” Both services will use the weapons with launchers on land and at sea.

Riki Ellison, chairman of the nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, said the hypersonic glide body “bounces between the upper atmosphere and space to further increase its speed and choosing an entry point to come in at the target at 20 times the speed of sound — Mach 20 — and greater.”

The Kauai test flight, Ellison said, is an indication of the “hyper pace that the United States has set” for rapid acquisition “and sends an unequivocally clear strategic message to China and Russia in this vulnerable time for the United States and the world in fighting the pandemic of the coronavirus.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin previously said the United States did not “have systems which can hold (China and Russia) at risk in a corresponding manner, and we don’t have defenses against (their) systems.”

CRS suggested that Congress should ask, “What missions will hypersonic weapons be used for? Are hypersonic weapons the most cost-effective means of executing these potential missions?”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in January that many of the claims made for hypersonic weapons are overstated, “and much of what they can do could be accomplished more easily and cheaply using better-established technology, typically via the modification of ballistic missile warheads.”