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HYPERSONIC MISSILES FUEL NEW GLOBAL ARMS RACE

At a meeting in Arlington, Virginia, in late 2018, one of the Pentagon's top officials told an audience of defense executives that the U.S. is locked in a tight race with Russia and China to develop a new, game-changing weapon that could fly at many times the speed of sound and could be used to launch a devastating attack upon an enemy in a matter of minutes.

The assemblage was told by Michael D. Griffin, the Department of Defense’s undersecretary for research and engineering, that of all the technological marvels that the Pentagon hoped to create, developing a hypersonic missile was his highest priority.

Indefensible Speed

It's not hard to understand why. Hypersonic missiles – a technology that could be deployed as soon as the mid-2020s – sound like the sort of exotic menace a villain would dream up in a James Bond thriller. As this 2017 Rand Corporation report details, hypersonic missiles would have the ability to fly and maneuver at speeds of between 3,106.9 miles (5,000 kilometers) and 15,534.3 miles (25,000 kilometers) per hour, and travel at a range of altitudes, including as high as 62.1 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth's surface, on the edge of orbital space. These capabilities could make it a nightmare to defend against them, because they would be moving so fast that it would be difficult to predict where they were about to strike until the last few minutes before impact.

And because the missiles travel at such a high speed, their sheer kinetic energy alone would enable them to wreak destruction without even carrying any conventional explosives or nuclear warheads.

As the Rand report explains, there are different methods of attaining that fantastic speed. One approach is to fire a conventional missile that in turn would release a smaller hypersonic glide vehicle, which would fly up into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Another approach would utilize a rocket or an advanced jet engine such as a scramjet.

Military visionaries have been contemplating hypersonic weapons for decades, but it wasn't until recently that the concept began to seem close to fruition. "There has not been any one technology breakthrough, but rather a combination of steady progress along with strong political motivation," Iain D. Boyd, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan and author of this recent article in The Conversation on the hypersonic arms race, says via email.

"To develop a missile, you first have to show that the platform can fly a mission of interest," Boyd expains. "That was demonstrated in the U.S. in 2010-2014 by the Air Force X-51A scramjet-powered demonstration flights. While the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)'s two flight tests of their HTV-2 boost glide vehicle ended in failure, significant progress was demonstrated and important lessons learned. In an overlapping time period, the Pentagon demonstrated longer range hypersonic vehicle capabilities in their Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) program. DARPA and the Air Force then partnered to mature many of the systems needed on a platform to make it into a weapon such as GNC (guidance, navigation and control), materials, structures and rocket boosters."