Why is it that both Russia and China have placed into service hypersonic weapons, but the United States can’t even complete a successful test program? That’s the question the Wall Street Journal attempts to answer in a somewhat lengthy article dated Sept. 15. “For more than 60 years, the U.S. has invested billions of dollars in dozens of programs to develop its own version of the technology,” the Journal notes. “Those efforts have either ended in failure or been canceled before having a chance to succeed.
“The Pentagon’s problems with developing hypersonics run up and down the decision chain, from failed flight tests and inadequate testing infrastructure to the lack of a clear, overarching plan for fielding the weapons,” it adds a few paragraphs later. “The situation is raising alarms among some former officials.... While the U.S. military may still be the most powerful in the world, hypersonic missiles could help an adversary challenge that superiority by evading U.S. early warning systems designed to detect attacks on North America, or striking U.S. naval assets, including aircraft carriers, as well as key bases abroad.”
The article particularly focuses on Chinese developments. It starts with the Summer 2021 flight test of a hypersonic vehicle that circled the globe and landed near China, and sent shockwaves through the Pentagon. “Over the past decade, China has conducted hundreds of flight tests of this new generation of weapons,” it says. “Beijing already has hypersonic weapons ready to deploy in its arsenal, as does Moscow, which has used them against Ukraine.”
As for the question as to why the United States does not have a hypersonic weapon ready to use in war, the Journal attributes the problem to a lack of focus in the Pentagon, that the DOD hasn’t been able to decide what sort of hypersonic capabilities it wants in its arsenal. The Pentagon is funding about a half dozen different hypersonic weapons-though the exact number is secret-and some former officials suggest there is no clear plan for deciding which of these to field and how. “There wasn’t a strategy during my time at the Pentagon,” William Roper, the former head of Air Force acquisition, told the Journal. “And from what I can see from the outside, there doesn’t appear to be one now.”
Just the lack of a strategy, we’re to believe. But Admiral Rickover himself could not have made the breakthrough to a submarine driven by “a new physical principle,” if he’d had the current American R&D and physical economy to work with.
