Last weekend’s report in the Financial Times claiming that China tested a globe-circling hypersonic weapon has the Washington national security community in an uproar, with fears that the Chinese now have a weapon against which the U.S. cannot defend itself. Although there has been no official confirmation of the flight, there are numerous responses to the FT’s account.
The system is being described as a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), a concept first developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, combined with a maneuverable hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) mounted on an ICBM launch vehicle to be able to attack any target anywhere on Earth from any direction. The FOBS launches the warhead into a sub-orbital trajectory, instead of the highly predictable ballistic trajectory of an ICBM, giving it unlimited range, while the HGV adds a further element of unpredictability. U.S. missile warning and defense systems are oriented to defend against ballistic trajectories coming over the North Pole but the FOBS-HGV combination allows an attack from any direction, including from over the South Pole, making such an attack virtually undetectable and thus impossible to defend against.
Defense One reported that Air Force officials have been unnerved about China possibly developing such a capability for some time. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall commented on it to a conference of the Air Force Association last month, saying that not only is the FOBS a potential, but so is putting weapons in space. “If you’re going Mach 13 at the very northern edge of Hudson Bay, you have enough residual velocity to hit all 48 of the continental United States and all of Alaska,” said Gen. Paul Selva, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in 2019. “You can choose [to] point it left or right, and hit Maine or Alaska, or you can hit San Diego or Key West. That’s a monstrous problem.”
