china hypersonic cruise missiles

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Pentagon: Yes, we are still lagging behind China’s hypersonics

House Armed Services Committee members grilled Pentagon leaders Tuesday on why the U.S. military continues to lag behind China in developing hypersonic missiles and defenses that can counter the next-generation ordnance.

One of the leaked Pentagon intelligence documents, obtained by Navy Times, shows that Beijing tested a hypersonic missile this year that could hit targets beyond Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam, where U.S. forces are based, and carry a “high probability” of besting American ballistic missile defenses.

It’s the latest reminder that despite billions of dollars spent, and a defense budget that keeps growing, the U.S. still trails China’s progress developing key cutting-edge weaponry, raising uncomfortable questions about how America would fare in a shooting war in the Pacific.

Beijing’s February test saw the DF-27 cover 2,100 kilometers, or 1,300 miles, in just 12 minutes, according to the leaked records. Past Defense Department assessments have warned of even longer DF-27 ranges .

“Their progress is undeniable,” Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., said at the hearing. “By contrast, our progress has been slow and has lacked urgency.”

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command leader Adm. John Aquilino admitted the Pentagon is behind Beijing on hypersonic weapons and the systems to defend against them, agreeing that progress “needs to go faster.” The man charged with potentially leading a war against the ascendant power called the velocity of China’s nuclear breakout “concerning,” but said direct conflict is not inevitable.

ARRW hypersonic missile test failed, US Air Force admits

While the Defense Department has declined to confirm the authenticity of the leaked records, such systems could negate a U.S. aircraft carrier’s ability to even get into a Pacific fight for fear of getting sunk, raising questions about whether carriers could help defend against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The leak is not the first warning about China’s burgeoning hypersonic power , but it’s the latest indication that the United States has fallen behind on this technology. The Air Force reported in March that a recent U.S. hypersonic weapon test “was not a success.”

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash. , the committee’s ranking member, noted that hypersonic funding has lagged through administrations on both sides of the aisle, even as money is now being poured into the effort.

The defense officials declined to comment when Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., asked whether China has surpassed the United States in the hypersonic race, saying they could only talk about that in a classified briefing.

“Well, it’s been sort of unclassified without our consent,” Gates said, holding up a printed page that appeared to be from the leaked Pentagon intelligence records showing a Chinese hypersonic traveling 2,100 kilometers in 12 minutes.

A 2021 Defense Department assessment of China's capabilities shows its DF-27 hypersonic missile being able to strike U.S. forces in Guam and beyond. (Defense Department)

Gaetz noted that Aquilino testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year that the U.S. was falling behind.

“We need a capability in the near term that we do not have,” Gaetz said. “What this leak shows is that China has it, and we don’t.”

While condemning the leaks, for which the FBI arrested Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira last week, the Florida Republican asked whether more people should be held accountable for the sorry state of American hypersonics.

“Who’s going to be punished more, the knucklehead who leaked this information, or the generals and admirals and so-called experts who have sat before this committee and the Senate for decades saying that these capabilities that we were funding with gajillions of dollars were going to sufficiently deter China?” Gaetz said. He also questioned the wisdom of building U.S. aircraft carriers for the last 30 years that may never enter battle because they are unable to defend against the Chinese hypersonic threat.

Geoff is the editor of Navy Times, but he still loves writing stories. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at [email protected].

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What's the big deal about hypersonic weapons and why are major powers vying for this capability?

The US has confirmed that China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle from a near-orbital trajectory in August, after the Chinese government denied that it was a weapon and said it was merely a space vehicle. 

The test comes amid an intensifying global race for the next generation of long-range weapons that are harder to detect and intercept.

In recent months, the United States and Russia have both conducted tests of hypersonic weapons, with North Korea saying it too had tested a newly developed hypersonic missile.

How the missile works

Hypersonic missiles travel at more than five times the speed of sound in the upper atmosphere — or about 6,200km per hour.

This is slower than an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) but the shape of a hypersonic glide vehicle allows it to manoeuvre toward a target or away from defences.

Hypersonic missiles can also travel for longer without being detected by radar.

Combining a glide vehicle with a missile that can launch it partially into orbit — a so-called fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) — could thus strip adversaries of reaction time and traditional defence mechanisms.

ICBMs, by contrast, are long-range missiles that carry nuclear warheads on ballistic trajectories that leave the earth's atmosphere before re-entry, pursuing a parabolic trajectory towards its target – but they never reach space.

Both the US and USSR studied FOBS during the Cold War, and the USSR deployed such a system starting in the 1970s. 

It was removed from service by the mid-80s.

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles had many of the advantages of FOBS — reducing detection times and making it impossible to know where a strike would come from — and were seen as less destabilising than FOBS.

Who leads the race?

The Financial Times first reported that China had launched a rocket carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle that flew through space, circling the globe before cruising down toward its target, which it missed by about two dozen miles.

In July, Russia successfully tested a Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic cruise missile , which President Vladimir Putin touted as part of a new generation of missile systems. Moscow also tested the weapon from a submarine for the first time.

The United States said in late September that it had tested an air-breathing hypersonic weapon — meaning it sustains flight on its own through the atmosphere like a cruise missile — marking the first successful test of that class of weapon since 2013.

Days after the US announcement, North Korea fired a newly developed hypersonic missile, calling it a "strategic weapon" that boosted its defence capabilities, though some South Korean analysts described the test as a failure.

Why it matters

The recent tests are the moves in a dangerous arms race in which smaller Asian nations are striving to develop advanced long-range missiles, alongside major military powers.

Hypersonic weapons, and FOBS, could be a concern as they can potentially evade missile shields and early warning systems.

Some experts cautioned against hype surrounding missiles such as the one China tested in August.

"China already has ~100 nuclear-armed ICBMs that can strike the US," said Jeffrey Lewis, a missile specialist at the US-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, responding to the FT report on Twitter. 

"Although the glider is a nice touch … this is an old concept that is newly relevant as a way to defeat missile defences," Mr Lewis said.

Reuters/ABC

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China’s Hypersonic Future

China maintains the largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the world. Since the end of the Cold War, Beijing has rapidly modernized its missile force, growing from a small arsenal of cumbersome, inaccurate ballistic missiles into a formidable force of precision-guided ballistic and cruise missiles, loitering munitions, and—most recently—hypersonic weapons.

China’s deployment of hypersonic weapons has attracted significant attention, and for good reason. Hypersonic weapons combine the extreme speeds of ballistic missiles with the maneuverability and lower-altitude flight of cruise missiles, stressing traditional means of early warning and defense. While ballistic and cruise missiles make up the vast majority of China’s missile arsenal, even a small number of hypersonic weapons pose new and unique threats. This challenge highlights the need to reconceptualize the United States’ approach to air and missile defense. This means investing in space-based sensors and the various ways we can disrupt Chinese attack plans, both offensively and defensively. In doing so, we can better posture our forces against missile threats of all kinds.

What are Hypersonic Weapons?

Hypersonic weapons are weapons capable of sustained flight in Earth’s atmosphere at speeds greater than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. There are currently two main types. The first, hypersonic cruise missiles, use a high-speed scramjet engine to provide power throughout their flight. The second, hypersonic glide vehicles, use a rocket booster to launch into space and maintain speed after gliding back into Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike ballistic missiles, which encounter no air resistance while traveling through space, hypersonic weapons must contend with extreme temperatures and pressures in the atmosphere. These requirements make hypersonic weapons difficult to design and manufacture.

Hypersonic weapons are useful against distant, time-sensitive, or defended targets. They offer speeds comparable to ballistic missiles, compressing engagement times from hours to minutes. To evade ballistic missile defenses, however, hypersonic weapons fly low, where the curvature of the Earth obscures them from detection by ground-based radar, but at an altitude higher than most lower-tier air defenses. Combined with their ability to maneuver unpredictably in flight, hypersonic weapons stress the United States’ ability to defend its deployed forces. These characteristics are the primary motivations driving Chinese investment.

China could seek significant U.S. concessions in exchange for hypersonic weapon limits. This may come in the form of limits on U.S. homeland or regional missile defenses, U.S. support for Taiwan, or other demands.

China’s missile arsenal already plays a major role in its “active defense” strategy, which seeks to keep U.S. and allied forces far away from Chinese territory. In an active conflict, China’s thousands of long-range and precision-guided missiles would threaten U.S. forces and assets, forcing them to retreat to safer distances or risk getting hit. Hypersonic weapons add a new dimension to this threat, with their ability to quickly engage critical, heavily defended assets. As one Pentagon official  explained , “When the Chinese can deploy [a] tactical or regional hypersonic system, they hold at risk our carrier battle groups. They hold our entire surface fleet at risk. They hold at risk our forward-deployed forces and land-based forces.” Hypersonic weapons could paralyze or disintegrate U.S. military operations in the critical first moments of battle.

Chinese hypersonic weapons may also pose a new threat to the U.S. homeland. While China can strike the United States with its nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, non-nuclear hypersonic weapons would offer China a less escalatory way of attacking the United States. The United States may not be able to credibly deter such attacks with the threat of nuclear reprisal. Beyond its immediate military use, a Chinese capacity to conventionally strike the U.S. homeland could also inject doubt into Washington’s willingness to defend its Pacific allies. By opening this option below the nuclear threshold, China’s leadership may believe it can deter U.S. intervention in a regional conflict.

These threats are real.  According to the U.S. Defense Department , China deployed its first hypersonic weapon, designated the DF-17, sometime in 2020. The missile, which incorporates a hypersonic glide vehicle, is thought to range around 2,000 km and is nuclear-capable. Additional hypersonic weapons are sure to come. Just last July China reportedly tested another hypersonic glider that entered orbit and circled the globe before splashing down to Earth. China denies this was a hypersonic weapon test.

Responding to the Threat

In theory, U.S.-Chinese arms control could limit the hypersonic threat. Beijing has little incentive to limit its hypersonic weapons development, however, as China benefits disproportionally from hypersonic weapons compared to the United States. China has invested far less in the missile defense systems that hypersonic weapons do so well to undermine. In a regionally focused conflict, China would also have the home-field advantage, only needing to neutralize a few key U.S. installations as opposed to the many Chinese targets that U.S. forces may need to hit. China may also see itself ahead in this hypersonic tech race, producing more research in the field and conducting far more testing of hypersonic weapons.

China could therefore seek significant U.S. concessions in exchange for hypersonic weapon limits. This may come in the form of limits on U.S. homeland or regional missile defenses, U.S. support for Taiwan, or otherwise. It remains unlikely that American leadership is willing or able to make such concessions or offer alternatives that can satisfy China’s leadership.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is beginning to respond to the threat. Currently, U.S. sea- and land-based radars cannot persistently track hypersonic weapons after launch. The Defense Department is therefore investing heavily in space-based sensors to provide a global detection and tracking capability, from missile launch to targeting data for striking hypersonic weapon launchers. Various government entities are working on related satellite constellations, including the Missile Defense Agency, the Space Development Agency, Space Force, and Space Command. The ability to track where a hypersonic weapon is heading is a critical first step, and all else absent, at least provides early warning that can save lives and contribute to attribution.

Once we can track hypersonic weapons, the next step is to shoot them down. This might come in the form of kinetic interceptors that collide directly into an incoming missile, or blast-fragmentation interceptors that explode at close distance, spraying shrapnel into the hypersonic vehicle. Alternatively, future technologies may include lasers, high-powered microwaves, rail guns, or particle clouds designed to disrupt hypersonic flight.

Each of these technologies has different levels of maturity. Some are in development, others still on the drawing board—none are risk-free. They might prove too expensive or complex to develop, too large to deploy in combat, or face any number of other challenges. We therefore ought to devote more time and attention to so-called “passive” defenses.

Passive missile defense covers a range of efforts that the U.S. military could start today. The main concepts can be summed up as  distribution ,  resiliency , and  deception . Distribution emphasizes the need to spread military bases, assets, and personnel across conflict zones to complicate enemy attack plans and reduce the impact of any given strike. The United States currently relies on a few large bases in the Pacific that are prime targets for Chinese missile attacks at the start of a conflict.

Resiliency refers to the ability to repair or replace assets after a missile attack. Resilient airfields able to conduct operations during or soon after an attack, for example, would force China to keep using resources to disrupt operations. Finally, deception refers to old but needed practices of camouflage and decoys to confuse the adversary.

The U.S. military is incorporating these practices in its operating concepts and training. The Marine Corps has perhaps taken on the most serious reforms, divesting from tanks and bridge companies to develop small, stealthy, and mobile expeditionary teams able to operate in contested environments. Should conflict with China draw near, these Marines will scatter to various key maritime islands and chokepoints across the Pacific. We find similar initiatives in the Navy’s “ Distributed Maritime Operations ” operational concept and ongoing conversations about the  Army  and  Air Force’s  role in the Pacific fight.

Lastly, missile defense doesn’t have to be purely defensive. The United States can and should develop disruptive, offensive counters to China’s hypersonic “kill chain”—all the necessary things, people, and processes involved in launching missiles and guiding them to their targets. Attacking Chinese kill chains means working in the electromagnetic spectrum, preparing to disrupt, degrade, or deceive communication networks between missiles, off-board sensors, and command centers. It may also mean targeting threat missiles and missileers while they are still in their silos, trucks, or bunkers. Attack operations certainly come with escalation risks but are legitimate options in wartime.

Defense analysts have long advocated for these reforms. In fact, conversations on the need for space sensors, robust passive defenses, and kill chain-focused warfare were common long before the hypersonic threat emerged. This is because such capabilities apply to more than just hypersonic weapons. Reconceptualizing air defense in these ways would also help counter the full spectrum of Chinese air and missile threats, including thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles, suicide drones, and artillery rockets. Improving missile tracking, force distribution, base resiliency, and deceptive, offensive, and disruptive capabilities will therefore not just help counter hypersonic weapons but may help deter conflict at large.

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What China’s hypersonic test launch reveals about the global arms race

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Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington, Kathrin Hille in Taipei and Sylvia Pfeifer in London

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Revelations by the Financial Times that China tested two hypersonic weapons in recent months have sparked alarm among US defence officials because it suggests Beijing is making faster progress than expected on a new class of missile defence system-busting arms.

One test in particular, conducted on July 27 , has intrigued US government scientists. China launched a Long March rocket that used a system to propel a highly manoeuvrable, nuclear-capable glider into orbit, allowing it to speed towards its target at five or more times the speed of sound, according to people with knowledge of the test who declined to be identified because the information is classified.

An unknown element in the test has prompted US scientists to suspect Beijing may have achieved a new military capability, suggesting that China is making even quicker progress developing weapons that could shift the balance of power between the two countries.

Here is a guide to what is known about the weapon and the other hypersonic arms under development around the world.

What’s the technology behind the Chinese test?

During the cold war, the Soviet Union developed an orbital bombardment system that could carry a nuclear weapon into orbit at a lower trajectory than a traditional fixed-trajectory ballistic missile. The traditional device is sent to outer space, where it can be detected and intercepted.

Called a “fractional orbital bombardment system”, or Fobs, by Moscow, it was designed to evade missile defence systems. The term “fractional” was used to back up Russia’s claim that the weapon did not breach the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans the deployment of nuclear weapons in space.

However, the Chinese version of the system that was tested last summer comes with a twist: a so-called hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), which can travel at more than five times the speed of sound (hence the hypersonic label) and go much further than a ballistic missile once it has detached from the rocket.

The glider’s lower trajectory, speed and ability to manoeuvre as it approaches its target make it much harder to intercept. It differs from hypersonic cruise missiles, which are powered by high-speed engines that use oxygen in the atmosphere for propulsion during flight — so-called air-breathing engines.

“The easiest way to think about [the glider combined with the Fobs] is to imagine the space shuttle, put a nuclear weapon in the cargo bay and forget the landing gear,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Who is developing hypersonic weapons?

The US, Russia and China are leading the development of hypersonics. But notably, only China and Russia are developing nuclear-capable gliders.

Other nations, including the UK, France, Australia, India, Japan and North Korea, are also working on the technology. Meanwhile, Iran, Israel and South Korea have conducted basic research, according to a recent report by the US Congressional Research Service.

Funding for hypersonic weapons in the US has increased in recent years, in part due to advances in these technologies in Russia and China. Russia recently said it had test-launched a hypersonic missile from a submerged submarine for the first time.

The Pentagon’s recent budget request for hypersonic research in 2022 is for $3.8bn — up from its $3.2bn request for 2021. The Missile Defense Agency has additionally requested $247.9m for hypersonic defence.

Many of the world’s largest defence companies, including America’s Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon as well as Britain’s BAE Systems, have been investing in hypersonics and are working with governments to test and develop different capabilities.

Why might China want this technology?

Fractional orbital systems can evade US early warning systems. They can also fly over the South Pole, putting them out of reach of the Pentagon’s interceptor missiles, which are based in Alaska.

Some experts have questioned why China would develop this capability since US missile defences are tailored to repel states such as North Korea that have relatively small long-range missile capabilities and are not designed to overcome large attacks from countries like China.

David Wright, a nuclear weapons expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said China knew it could overcome US missile defences, but it might want to convince American officials who believe their systems are more capable that China has other ways to attack. “The other argument is that they don’t want to be caught out in the future,” said Wright, referring to the US continuing to develop its ballistic missile defence systems.

Joshua Pollock of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies said China might also be thinking about how to counter the sea-based missile defence systems the US has placed on Aegis ships, which are deployed in the western Pacific. He added that the manoeuvrable gliders would help evade those systems.

What does this mean for the balance of military power between the US and China?

Speaking to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in Germany this week, Admiral Charles Richard, the head of Strategic Command who oversees US nuclear forces, said China could “now execute any possible nuclear employment strategy”.

“We should be open to the reality that China is also capable of technological innovation,” Lewis said. “I would be careful about exaggerated characterisations that may help excuse a mundane intelligence failure. If we say some innovation is impossible to imagine, then no one is really responsible for missing it.”

Some experts have likened the investment rush into hypersonics to an arms race, as countries seek to match the capabilities of others. Cameron Tracy, a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, said while the US was spending a “great deal of money . . . on these weapons”, their role was not clear.

“The US Department of Defense has not articulated a clear role for what these weapons are meant to do, what mission they are going to fulfil that existing missile technologies couldn’t. That is a big open question on the US side — are we just building these because Russia and China are?” he said.

China said it had tested a space plane, not a weapon. But the timing of that plane launch in mid-July does not coincide with the July 27 test the FT revealed, which was not announced by Beijing.

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International Edition

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China builds advanced weapons systems using American chip technology

In a secretive military facility in southwest China, a supercomputer whirs away, simulating the heat and drag on hypersonic vehicles speeding through the atmosphere — missiles that could one day be aimed at a U.S. aircraft carrier or Taiwan, according to former U.S. officials and Western analysts.

The computer is powered by tiny chips designed by a Chinese firm called Phytium Technology using American software and built in the world’s most advanced chip factory in Taiwan, which hums with American precision machinery, say the analysts.

Phytium portrays itself as a commercial company aspiring to become a global chip giant like Intel. It does not publicize its connections to the research arms of the People’s Liberation Army.

The U.S. system created the world’s most advanced military. Can it maintain an edge?

The hypersonic test facility is located at the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center (CARDC), which also obscures its military connections though it is run by a PLA major general, according to public documents and former officials and analysts, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Phytium’s partnership with CARDC offers a prime example of how China is harnessing civilian technologies for strategic military purposes — with the help of American technology. The trade is not illegal but is a vital link in a global high-tech supply chain that is difficult to regulate because the same computer chips that could be used for a commercial data center can power a military supercomputer.

Hypersonics refers to a range of emerging technologies that can propel missiles at greater than five times the speed of sound and potentially evade current defenses.

On Thursday, the Biden administration placed Phytium and six other Chinese firms and labs involved in high-performance computing on an export blacklist , blocking technology of American origin from flowing to those entities. The aim, Commerce Department officials said, is to prevent U.S. goods and know-how from aiding China’s military modernization, in particular its development of advanced weapons, including nuclear and hypersonics.

Biden administration hits Phytium and other Chinese firms with sanctions for aiding PLA weapons development

Phytium did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Friday called the Commerce listings an abuse of American power to maintain U.S. “technological monopoly and hegemony.”

“The United States has long tried to technologically blockade Chinese supercomputing, but our supercomputers are still leaping to the leading position in the world,” Zhao told reporters in Beijing. “Containment and suppression by the United States cannot stop the pace of China’s scientific and technological progress. It will only strengthen China’s determination to innovate independently.”

American firms generally argue that export controls hurt their profits while encouraging China to send its business elsewhere and develop its own industries. But they say they obey U.S. rules and laws.

Analysts say curtailing future progress by the PLA is worth the cost in lost business. And, they warn, though the administration’s new export controls are a welcome step, China will find ways around them unless the Biden administration restricts access to foreign chip foundries that use American tools.

The Phytium case also spotlights the dilemma for Taiwan, a self-ruled liberal democracy perched strategically between the United States and China. Taiwan relies on Washington for defense against invasion by Beijing, which U.S. officials say is a growing risk. But Taiwan’s companies rely on the Chinese market, which accounts for 35 percent of Taiwan’s trade.

As tensions between China and the United States deepen, so too have questions over the proper limits for American and Taiwanese firms doing business with China.

Reaching the target in minutes

Semiconductors are the brains of modern electronics, enabling advances in everything from clean energy to quantum computing. They are now China’s top import, valued at more than $300 billion a year, and a major priority in China’s latest five-year plan for national development.

In January 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Tianjin, 70 miles from Beijing and home to Phytium, and touted the company’s importance to the country’s “indigenous innovation” effort. Today, Phytium boasts that it is “a leading independent core chip provider in China.” The company markets microprocessors for servers and video games, but its shareholders and main clients are the Chinese state and military, according to government records.

Phytium was founded in August 2014, according to business registration records in a public government database. It was created as a joint venture of the state-owned conglomerate China Electronic Corp. (CEC), the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin and the Tianjin municipal government, according to the records.

The national supercomputing center is a lab run by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), a premier military research institution whose current president and immediate past president were PLA generals.

In 2015, the Commerce Department placed both organizations on its trade blacklist list for involvement in nuclear weapons activity, a designation that bars U.S. exports to the firms unless a waiver is obtained.

Phytium’s ownership has changed hands over the years, but its shareholders often have links to the PLA, records show.

“Phytium acts like an independent commercial company,” said Eric Lee, a research associate at the Project 2049 Institute, a Northern Virginia think tank focused on strategic Indo-Pacific issues. “Its executives wear civilian clothes, but they are mostly former military officers from NUDT.’’

U.S. tries to narrow loophole that allowed China’s Huawei to skirt export ban

In China’s rugged hinterland lies Mianyang, a city in southwest Sichuan province that is a center for research in nuclear weapons. It is also home to the country’s largest aerodynamics research complex.

CARDC, which says it has 18 wind tunnels, is heavily involved in research on hypersonic weapons, according to former U.S. officials and U.S. and Australian researchers. Its director, Fan Zhaolin, is a major general, but he is pictured in civilian clothes on the center’s website.

The center has been on the U.S. trade blacklist — called the “entity list”— since 1999 for contributing to “the proliferation of missiles.” In 2016, Commerce further tightened restrictions on the facility.

CARDC, said Tai Ming Cheung, director of the University of California at San Diego’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, is “a beating heart of Chinese hypersonic research and development.”

The research center and Fan did not respond to emails seeking comment.

China’s major investments in hypersonics is a major concern at the Pentagon.

“The only way to reliably see a hypersonic vehicle is from space, which makes it a challenge,” said Mark J. Lewis, until recently the Pentagon’s director of defense research and technology. If it is traveling at hypersonic speeds — going at least a mile per second — it gives a missile defense system very little time to figure out what it is and how to stop it, he said.

Hypersonics is a critical, emerging military technology, said Lewis, the executive director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute. China could target Navy ships and air bases in the Pacific, he said, adding that a conventional cruise missile would take an hour or two to reach its target while a hypersonic missile could do so in minutes.

“It is a huge concern,” he said.

A million trillion calculations

In 2014, the U.S. Air Force released an unclassified report on the technology of air warfare that included hypersonics. “Anyone could pick up this document,” Lewis said. “Then we basically took our foot off the gas. There was no sense of hurry, of alacrity.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese read the American research. Their scientists began showing up at U.S. conferences. They started investing. “They saw that hypersonics could give them a military advantage,” Lewis said. “And they acted.”

China, unlike the United States, has fielded a hypersonic weapon: a medium-range hypersonic glide vehicle.

Hundreds to thousands of different configurations of heat, vehicle lift and atmospheric drag need to be analyzed to make a hypersonic missile work, which would be too expensive and time-consuming through physical testing alone, said Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “If you didn’t have supercomputers it could take a decade,’’ he said.

In May 2016, CARDC unveiled a “petascale” supercomputer that would aid the aerodynamic design of hypersonic missiles and other aircraft. A petascale computer can handle one trillion calculations per second.

In 2018 and 2019, CARDC scientists published papers showcasing their supercomputer and noting their calculations were done with Phytium’s 1500 and 2000 series chips, though the papers do not discuss research on hypersonic weapons.

CARDC, Phytium, the military university and the Tianjin supercomputing lab are currently developing an even faster computer — able to handle “exascale” speeds of a million trillion calculations per second. The supercomputer, dubbed Tianhe-3, is powered by Phytium’s 2000 series chips, according to Chinese state media.

To produce such chips, Phytium requires the newest design tools.

U.S. restricts tech exports to China’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer in escalation of trade tensions

Although CARDC and other PLA entities are under U.S. export controls, the Chinese military is still able to access U.S. semiconductor technology through companies like Phytium.

One Silicon Valley company that counts Phytium as a customer is Cadence Design Systems, which gave an award to Phytium at a 2018 conference for presenting the “best paper” on how to use its software for high-performance chip applications. Another is Synopsys, headquartered eight miles from Cadence in San Jose, Calif.

“I have not in my decade in China met a chip design company that isn’t using either Synopsys or Cadence,” said Stewart Randall, a consultant in Shanghai who sells electronic design automation software to top Chinese chipmakers.

Cadence did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In an emailed statement Thursday, Synopsys said, “We continue to abide by the U.S. government entity list restrictions.”

More loopholes

Phytium’s microprocessors are produced at gleaming factories outside Taipei by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which now makes the world’s most advanced chips, having surpassed the United States.

TSMC, the largest of several Taiwanese chipmakers, is in the unusual position of manufacturing chips “that end up being used for military purposes by both the United States and China,” said Ou Si-fu, a fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank co-founded by Taiwan’s defense ministry.

The company, for instance, makes chips used in advanced American weapons, including Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet. TSMC announced last year that it would build a $12 billion factory in Arizona in response to Trump administration concerns about the security of the semiconductor supply chain.

“These private companies do business and don’t consider factors like national security,” Ou said, adding that Taiwan, as a small country, lacks the leverage and will to enact export bans. “The United States has a relatively complete set of export control measures and regulations, while Taiwan is relatively loose and has more loopholes,” Ou said.

TSMC said in an email to The Washington Post that it obeys all laws and export controls. Earlier last week, company spokeswoman Nina Kao said, “We are not aware of a product manufactured by TSMC that was destined for military end-use as alleged in your email.”

On Thursday, Kao said the company had no comment on the Commerce Department action.

The final stage of Phytium chip design is handled by another Taiwanese company, Alchip, which deals directly with TSMC’s factories on Phytium’s behalf.

Daniel Wang, Alchip’s chief financial officer, said Phytium signed an agreement stipulating its chips are not for military use. Phytium has told Alchip that its clients are civilians and that the 1500 and 2000 series chips are made specifically for commercial servers and personal computers, Wang said.

However, a 2018 Alchip news release notes the firm has worked with “China’s National Supercomputing Center,” which had been on Commerce’s blacklist for three years at that point for involvement in “nuclear explosive activities.”

Alchip did not respond to a request for comment on the Commerce listing.

Mark Li, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, said that unless Phytium is placed under sanctions, TSMC is in no position to cut it off.

“It’s not TSMC’s job to be a policeman for the United States,” he said. “That’s for politicians to decide. China is the biggest semiconductor market. If you give that up when the business is legally allowed, you can’t explain that to shareholders.”

Shih reported from Taipei, Taiwan. Pei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.

China successfully tested hypersonic weapon in August: report

Chinese officials deny the allegation, claiming the mission tested reusable spacecraft tech.

China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon two months ago, making strides with the technology that surprised and alarmed U.S. officials, according to a media report.

In August, China launched a Long March rocket topped with a hypersonic glide vehicle, which ended up missing its target by just 24 miles (39 kilometers) or so, The Financial Times reported on Sunday (Oct. 17).

The newspaper cited five unnamed people familiar with the launch, two of whom "said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than U.S. officials realized."

Related: The most dangerous space weapons ever

China has denied the report, claiming that the August mission was nothing to be concerned about. 

"This test was a routine spacecraft experiment to verify the reusable technology of spacecraft, which is of great significance for reducing the cost of spacecraft use," Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said during a press briefing on Monday (Oct. 18), CNN reported . 

"It can provide a convenient and cheap way for humans to use space peacefully," Zhao said. "Many companies in the world have carried out similar experiments." 

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Hypersonic vehicles are widely viewed as the next frontier in military technology. They fly at least five times faster than the speed of sound and are highly maneuverable, making them more difficult to track and intercept than intercontinental ballistic missiles , which follow predictable trajectories.

— How intercontinental ballistic missiles work (infographic) — The latest news about China's space program — Air Force's new hypersonic missile fails to launch during key test flight

China, Russia and the United States are all actively developing and testing hypersonic vehicles. Just two weeks ago, for example, Russia announced that it had test-fired its new Zircon hypersonic missile from a nuclear submarine for the first time . And in September, the U.S. military said that one of its designs, the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC), achieved hypersonic speeds during a recent flight test.

"The HAWC free-flight test was a successful demonstration of the capabilities that will make hypersonic cruise missiles a highly effective tool for our warfighters," Andrew "Tippy" Knoedler, HAWC program manager in the Tactical Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said in a statement late last month . "This brings us one step closer to transitioning HAWC to a program of record that offers next-generation capability to the U.S military."

And hypersonics aren't the exclusive realm of big global powers, either. Last month, North Korea announced that it had just tested its new Hwasong-8 hypersonic weapon . North Korean state media declared that flight a success, but outside experts don't think the vehicle reached hypersonic speeds.

Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook . 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with  Space.com  and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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China tested hypersonic weapons twice, ‘stunned’ US: Report

US President Biden concerned about the report but one expert says technology is not new as he warns of another ‘pointless’ arms race.

China conducted not one, but two tests of new hypersonic weapons in July and August, the Financial Times (FT) newspaper has reported, raising more concerns in the United States about the growing military capabilities of its geopolitical rival.

The London-based Financial Times reported on Thursday that Beijing launched a rocket that employed a “fractional orbital bombardment” system to propel a nuclear-capable “hypersonic glide vehicle” around the Earth for the first time on July 27, according to four people familiar with US intelligence assessments.

Keep reading

China denies report of hypersonic missile test, china tested new space capability with hypersonic missile: report, north korea says it tested hypersonic missile.

More than two weeks later on August 13, China conducted a second hypersonic test, the report said citing two people familiar with the matter.

The newspaper initially reported, in a story published over the weekend that the first test was done in August, instead of the end of July.

The latest report said that the missile test “stunned” American military and intelligence officials about the Chinese military advance.

It further said that US scientists “were struggling to understand” the hypersonic weapon’s capability, “which the US does not currently possess”.

In response to the FT’s initial report, China’s Foreign Ministry said that it had only launched a space plane and the test took place on July 16.

“It’s understood that this was a routine test of a space vehicle to verify technology of spacecraft’s reusability,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Monday.

Zhao was quoted by state-owned broadcaster CGTN as saying that the test was “essential” for reducing the cost of spacecraft use, and providing a convenient and inexpensive way for humans to use space for “peaceful purposes”.

US ‘very concerned’

In a statement earlier this week, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that the administration of President Joe Biden was very concerned about the latest development in China’s nuclear arms capability and “novel delivery systems”.

Reporters travelling with Biden on Wednesday also asked him if he was concerned by the report, and he replied, “Yes”.

According to estimates and analysis, hypersonic weapons travel in the upper atmosphere at speeds of up to 6,200 kilometres per hour (3,853 miles per hour) – more than five times the speed of sound, which travels at about 1,235 km/h (767 mph) and evade even the most advanced radar systems.

#China #Hypersonics SCOOP China conducted 2 hypersonic weapons tests this summer. One stunned US officials because China demonstrated a capability the US does not have & government scientists do not understand how China pulled off the unspecified feat. https://t.co/M24rXrYwxM — Demetri Sevastopulo (@Dimi) October 20, 2021

On Monday, US Senator Angus King described the new weapon as a “strategic game-changers with the dangerous potential to fundamentally undermine strategic stability as we know it”.

“The implications of these weapons under development by China or Russia could be catastrophic,” the senator from Maine was quoted by reports as saying.

The US is also said to be racing to develop its own hypersonic weapon technology.

According to reports, US military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies are involved in the missiles’ development.

Writing for the Foreign Policy magazine, Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said that China’s test was “unwelcome news”, but he added that the technology was “not new”, pointing out that the Soviet Union deployed the same system during the Cold War.

Lewis, however, warned that the latest development “is yet another step in a pointless, costly, and dangerous arms race”.

An Exploratory Analysis of the Chinese Hypersonics Research Landscape

• Published Dec. 5, 2022
• China Aerospace Studies Institute

According to reports, China conducted tests of hypersonic glide vehicles in July and August 2021, which Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley described as “concerning.”1 China’s hypersonic weapons program has drawn significant global attention and research interests in recent years. DOD’s Annual Report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China first mentioned hypersonic glide vehicles in 2015. The hypersonic glide vehicle-equipped DF-17 missile, unveiled at China’s 2019 National Day Parade, further fueled speculation and interest about China’s hypersonic research and development (R&D) program. Subsequent reporting indicates that units with these missiles have already been deployed. Other evidence suggests that China is engaged in a wide range of hypersonic weapons programs including wave-riders and cruise missiles.

To date, open-source English-language analysis of the subject has focused heavily on the strategic drivers and disruptive impacts of the program. Other studies that looked at technical aspects focused on a small set of technologies. This report adopts a different approach, using a framework developed by Chinese scientists for prioritizing technologies for development, and then applying machine-learning-enabled analytics to analyze China’s hypersonic research and development activities in those areas over time. It investigates the following research questions: ● Does the HV development framework proposed by Cai and Xu align with subsequent Chinese research activity? ● Who are the institutions, researchers, and international collaborators leading China’s HV research programs? ● How has China’s HV research activity evolved over time?

By adopting this approach, the goal is not only to provide an assessment of the state of hypersonic R&D for the China-analysis community, but also for the broader U.S.-scientific research community who wishes to understand China’s research approach and progress in this key technology area.

Click here for the full report

How hypersonic missiles work and the unique threats they pose – an aerospace engineer explains

Director, Center for National Security Initiatives; Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

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Iain Boyd receives funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, Lockheed-Martin, and L3-Harris.

University of Colorado provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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An updated version of this article was published on May 24, 2023. Read it here .

Russia used a hypersonic missile against a Ukrainian arms depot in the western part of the country on March 18, 2022. That might sound scary, but the technology the Russians used is not particularly advanced. However, next-generation hypersonic missiles that Russia, China and the U.S. are developing do pose a significant threat to national and global security.

I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems, including hypersonic systems. These new systems pose an important challenge due to their maneuverability all along their trajectory. Because their flight paths can change as they travel, these missiles must be tracked throughout their flight.

A second important challenge stems from the fact that they operate in a different region of the atmosphere from other existing threats. The new hypersonic weapons fly much higher than slower subsonic missiles but much lower than intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. and its allies do not have good tracking coverage for this in-between region, nor does Russia or China.

Destabilizing effect

Russia has claimed that some of its hypersonic weapons can carry a nuclear warhead. This statement alone is a cause for concern whether or not it is true. If Russia ever operates this system against an enemy, that country would have to decide the probability of the weapon being conventional or nuclear.

In the case of the U.S., if the determination were made that the weapon was nuclear, then there is a very high likelihood that the U.S. would consider this a first strike attack and respond by unloading its nuclear weapons on Russia . The hypersonic speed of these weapons increases the precariousness of the situation because the time for any last-minute diplomatic resolution would be severely reduced.

It is the destabilizing influence that modern hypersonic missiles represent that is perhaps the greatest risk they pose. I believe the U.S. and its allies should rapidly field their own hypersonic weapons to bring other nations such as Russia and China to the negotiating table to develop a diplomatic approach to managing these weapons.

What is hypersonic?

Describing a vehicle as hypersonic means that it flies much faster than the speed of sound, which is 761 miles per hour (1,225 kilometers per hour) at sea level and 663 mph (1,067 kph) at 35,000 feet (10,668 meters) where passenger jets fly. Passenger jets travel at just under 600 mph (966 kph), whereas hypersonic systems operate at speeds of 3,500 mph (5,633 kph) – about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) per second – and higher.

Hypersonic systems have been in use for decades. When John Glenn came back to Earth in 1962 from the first U.S. crewed flight around the Earth , his capsule entered the atmosphere at hypersonic speed. All of the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the world’s nuclear arsenals are hypersonic, reaching about 15,000 mph (24,140 kph), or about 4 miles (6.4 km) per second at their maximum velocity.

ICBMs are launched on large rockets and then fly on a predictable trajectory that takes them out of the atmosphere into space and then back into the atmosphere again. The new generation of hypersonic missiles fly very fast, but not as fast as ICBMs. They are launched on smaller rockets that keep them within the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Three types of hypersonic missiles

There are three different types of non-ICBM hypersonic weapons: aero-ballistic, glide vehicles and cruise missiles. A hypersonic aero-ballistic system is dropped from an aircraft, accelerated to hypersonic speed using a rocket and then follows a ballistic, meaning unpowered, trajectory. The system Russian forces used to attack Ukraine, the Kinzhal , is an aero-ballistic missile. The technology has been around since about 1980.

A hypersonic glide vehicle is boosted on a rocket to high altitude and then glides to its target, maneuvering along the way. Examples of hypersonic glide vehicles include China’s Dongfeng-17 , Russia’s Avangard and the U.S. Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike system. U.S. officials have expressed concern that China’s hypersonic glide vehicle technology is further advanced than the U.S. system.

A hypersonic cruise missile is boosted by a rocket to hypersonic speed and then uses an air-breathing engine called a scramjet to sustain that speed. Because they ingest air into their engines, hypersonic cruise missiles require smaller launch rockets than hypersonic glide vehicles, which means they can cost less and be launched from more places. Hypersonic cruise missiles are under development by China and the U.S. The U.S. reportedly conducted a test flight of a scramjet hypersonic missile in March 2020.

Difficult to defend against

The primary reason nations are developing these next-generation hypersonic weapons is how difficult they are to defend against due to their speed, maneuverability and flight path. The U.S. is starting to develop a layered approach to defending against hypersonic weapons that includes a constellation of sensors in space and close cooperation with key allies . This approach is likely to be very expensive and take many years to implement.

With all of this activity on hypersonic weapons and defending against them, it is important to assess the threat they pose to national security. Hypersonic missiles with conventional, non-nuclear warheads are primarily useful against high-value targets, such as an aircraft carrier. Being able to take out such a target could have a significant impact on the outcome of a major conflict.

However, hypersonic missiles are expensive and therefore not likely to be produced in large quantities. As seen in the recent use by Russia, hypersonic weapons are not necessarily a silver bullet that ends a conflict.

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• Ballistic missiles
• Missile defence
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• Cruise missiles
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• Ukraine invasion 2022
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China test-fires new YJ-21 hypersonic missile

The plan (people’s liberation army navy) just released a video showing the launch of a new hypersonic missile from a type 055 cruiser. the missile is likely the eagle strike yj-21....

Tayfun Ozberk 20 Apr 2022

Naval News regular contributor and analyst H I Sutton identified the missile as the hypersonic YJ-21 anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), based on the CM-401 design.

“The new missile outwardly resembles the CM-401 design, with the addition of a large booster phase. The CM-401 is roughly analogous to the Iskander missile although its diameter is only 600mm. It is possible that the new missile is related to the older CM-401 family, although the resemblance may be coincidental. And it may have a smaller diameter.” H I Sutton, Naval Analyst and Naval News contributor

The YJ-21 characteristics are unknown because there has been no official notice of the test launch. The footage, on the other hand, implies a cold-launched (possibly two-stage) missile, implying an ant-ship ballistic missile with HGV. The control surfaces are rather small which means this is likely not an anti-air missile. According to open data, the VLS fitted aboard the Type 055s can accommodate missiles with the following maximum measurements: Length of 9 meters and diameter of 0.85 meters.

If this missile turns out to be the hypersonic YJ-21, the Type 055 cruisers would arguably become the most heavily armed warships worldwide.

The Chinese PLA Navy for the first time showed footage of the launch of a new hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile from a Project 055 destroyer. pic.twitter.com/Tdb6cz3UNR — rohan panchigar (@rohanpanchigar) April 19, 2022

The missile was fired form a Type 055 Renhai-class cruiser. With  8 ships already in the water ,  the Chinese Navy’s Type-055 Renhai Class cruiser is making waves. It is undoubtedly the most impressive surface combatant in the PLAN (Chinese Navy) line-up, making it a natural focus of observers. New intelligence suggests that at least two more are under construction in Dalian, China.

To learn more about these surface combatants, check out:

Bigger Than A U.S. Navy AEGIS Cruiser: China Is Building More Type-055s

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China's stealth drones and hypersonic missiles surpass — and threaten — the U.S.

The celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China at the beginning of this month promised plenty of pomp and power projection. In the days leading up to the grandiose parade through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Chinese citizens began sharing photos of tarp-covered vehicles and missiles being rolled into Beijing for a rehearsal.

The event Oct. 1 didn’t disappoint. The People’s Liberation Army unveiled brand new high-tech drones, robot submarines and hypersonic missiles — none of which have an equivalent in operational service elsewhere on the planet.

China’s new military capabilities are tailored to its plans to become the dominant military power in Asia and the western half of the Pacific.

China’s rapid modernization is increasingly forcing the Pentagon to face the sclerosis in its own procurement pipeline arising from shifting program goals, endemic cost overruns and delays. Despite starting technologically well behind the United States, China has developed new systems faster and more cheaply.

They are doing so to counter American influence in East Asia, meaning U.S. ships and bases in the region are vulnerable to the advanced weapons systems in ways they weren’t just a decade earlier. There are some lessons in this for the Pentagon, and they need to be learned quickly.

After falling behind during the 1960s and the ’70s, China’s military spending rose in tandem with extraordinary economic growth that began in the 1980s — and in recent years has outpaced the broader economy , growing 7.5 percent in 2019 . In addition, China has taken shortcuts by acquiring technology from abroad. Sometimes, this involved importing technology from France , Russia and Israel and reverse-engineering the components . But industrial espionage has also played a major role, including hacking that has stolen blueprints for F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters and top-secret Navy cruise missiles .

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But the recent parade shows that it’s wrong to assume there’s no innovation taking place. Chinese scientists are performing cutting-edge research on quantum radar , laser-based submarine detection , hand-held laser guns designed to blind or burn , and particle teleportation with applications to communications and encryption. China still lags behind in jet engine design and submarine acoustic stealth, but it’s advanced in terms of radars, jammers and digital networking.

Beyond the new items shown off in the parade, China in the last year has also fielded its first entirely home-built aircraft carrier, its first amphibious landing carrier , new carrier-based radar and jamming planes and a cutting-edge light tank for use in the Himalayas, while developing an advanced long-range stealth bomber .

The weapons systems unveiled this month include the eye-catching “Sharp Sword” stealth drone shaped like a manta ray with two internal bays that could be used to carry weapons. While Russia, the U.S. and Europe have developed stealth attack-drone prototypes, none have any that are openly operational.

The even more exotic-looking supersonic DR-8 drone on display was designed for release from another plane in order to fly ultra-fast spy missions to determine whether China’s unique land-based anti-ship missiles have managed to hit their targets.

Perhaps even more troubling were the next generation of missiles on view. China’s new hypersonic missiles — which travel faster than a mile a second but have flatter trajectories than high-arcing ballistic missiles — will reach their targets faster and be harder to track and shoot down. While Russia and the U.S. are busily developing hypersonic weapons, neither has any land-based weapons in service.

The bizarre-looking DF-17 missile , for example, has a range over a thousand miles but can land within meters of its targets. DF-17s could strike U.S. bases in Japan and Korea within minutes of launch, destroying command centers and parked warplanes. China also sprung a new DF-100 hypersonic missile shrouded in mystery, but supposedly designed to sink large warships from over 1,000 miles away.

The piece de resistance was the reveal of two large HSU-001 unmanned underwater vehicles — robot spy submarines designed to patrol the depths without human direction, since a submarine can travel faster, deeper and more quietly when it doesn’t have to provide life support for human crew members. The U.S. only just awarded the contract to build its own long-range autonomous submarines .

China’s new military capabilities are tailored to its plans to become the dominant military power in Asia and the western half of the Pacific. Comfortably outgunning neighbors such as India and Japan . Having faced invasion by sea during the Opium Wars and World War II, Beijing sees U.S. warships and aircraft operating from bases in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines and Guam as its chief military threat.

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In contrast, the United States exists in a different strategic environment. It is flanked by two oceans without enemies nearby, and so relies on air and sea power to exert force abroad. Moreover, until July 2019 it was party to the INF treaty with Russia constraining land-based missiles.

Still, the U.S. hasn’t done itself any favors with a slow, bureaucratic and politicized process to develop new capabilities. It took the Pentagon more than two decades and more than $55 billion to develop the F-35 stealth jet before the cost of purchasing any gets counted. The number of orders of the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt stealth destroyer have both been drastically downsized after failing to live up to their promise. The Army spent $19 billion on two attempts to replace its Bradley fighting vehicles without result.

Opinion We want to hear what you THINK. Please submit a letter to the editor.

On the other hand, the Chinese approach also faces pitfalls. New systems may be rushed into service before they’ve been thoroughly tested, or lacking critical components. Many of China’s new jet fighters suffer from high accident rates and make do with stop-gap engines imported from Russia , as Chinese engineers struggle to get their home-built turbofans to perform at acceptable levels.

It’s also important to keep perspective on what China has achieved. The People’s Liberation Army is playing a massive game of catchup with the U.S., and it doesn’t expect to reach parity with the U.S. military until 2050 . China’s official $177.5 billion military budget for 2018 is roughly a quarter of the U.S.’ estimated $693 billion budget (though some estimate the true figure in excess of $200 billion ).

Nor is military modernization evenly distributed. Roughly a third of the PLA’s combat aircraft and tanks are of 1950s-era designs . Furthermore, the PLA has not fought in a war since 1979 , and its leadership is painfully aware that training and doctrine need overhauling.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon is now trying to buy faster and smarter, while chopping away at funding for dated systems . The Navy is moving ahead with plans for drone warships and a heavily armed frigate. The Army has a six-point modernization plan that includes new short-range air defenses , missiles and a Bradley armored vehicle replacement that can optionally run without a human crew onboard .

Due to profoundly different social, economic and political contexts, America can’t entirely match the speed and cost of China’s defense buildup.

The new agile approach means quickly adopting off-the-shelf solutions to meet pressing needs, rather than developing super-weapons from scratch with Swiss Army knife’ capabilities. Even software upgrades can be sped up by removing red tape.

The trend favoring fast and practical solutions to operational needs rather than pie-in-the-sky wonder weapons that take decades to produce marks a positive shift — especially given the technological sea-change that’s occurring due to the proliferation of unmanned systems and long-range precision missiles.

Due to profoundly different social, economic and political contexts, America can’t entirely match the speed and cost of China’s defense buildup — particularly because China can more easily focus on projecting power across regional, not global distances. But the U.S. can still learn a few lessons from its new superpower rival while staying true to its unique strengths.

Sébastien Roblin writes about the technical and historical aspects of international security and conflict for The National Interest, War is Boring and other publications. He tweets @sebastienroblin .

Title: China’s Hypersonic Weapons

Beijing is making a major investment in hypersonic missiles.  China’s military leadership see this technology as an important element of its regional warfighting strategy and possibly its strategic deterrent.   China possesses one operational hypersonic missile, has tested several others, and maintains an active research and development program.  While China’s specific plans for fielding such systems are unclear, it is possible to identify potential strategic and operational issues that will need to be addressed as its capabilities mature.

What are hypersonic weapons?

Hypersonic weapons travel faster than Mach 5, or a speed of approximately 1.6 kilometers per second.  Many traditional ballistic missiles re-enter the atmosphere at higher speed, but hypersonic boost-glide vehicles and cruise missiles (HGV, HCM) follow less predictable paths and are capable of a high degree of maneuverability before reaching their targets. These attributes make attack warning and assessment more difficult for the defender, posing a challenge to existing air and missile defenses.  Hypersonic weapons can also be gun-type systems such as electro-magnetic railguns , but these are outside the scope of this article.

What do we know about China’s program and capabilities?

In its 2020 report on Chinese military power, the Department of Defense (DoD) noted the emphasis Beijing has placed on developing and testing hypersonic glide vehicles.   This is one element of a robust missile program that has led to the fielding of numerous medium- and intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles in support of China’s regional warfighting capability. The same report noted that in 2019 China launched “…more ballistic missiles for testing and training than the rest of the world combined.”  Unconstrained by treaty limits to which the United States adhered for decades, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has fielded a diverse family of missiles that it believes will create operational advantage in a future military confrontation.

As others have noted, hypersonic systems appeared late in this broader missile program, but are now being developed at an aggressive pace , characterized by a large investment in test facilities and engineering expertise and by frequent testing.  China has successfully tested the DF-17, a road-mobile medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) designed to launch an HGV.  The DF-17 has an assessed range of 1,800-2,500 kilometers.  Its accompanying HGV, designated as DF-ZF (previously WU-14), is reported to possess a range of 1,600-2,400 kilometers and can achieve speeds of Mach 5 – Mach 10 with high degrees of maneuverability and accuracy .  Some reports suggest that China is also considering deploying HGVs on DF-21 and DF-26 theater-range ballistic missiles.

China reportedly conducted successful tests of the Starry Sky-2 (Xingkong-2) hypersonic cruise missile in 2018.  This system, believed to have a range of 700-800km and a top speed of Mach 6, appears to make use of an experimental “waverider” design that uses powered flight after launch and creates shockwaves to sustain its lift.  In its test phase, the Starry Sky-2 vehicle was sent into space by a multi-stage rocket before separating from its booster for maneuvered flight back to Earth.  Some analysts have suggested that this technology could emerge in the mid-2020s as an advanced anti-ship missile .

Little is known about other developmental programs for hypersonic vehicles, but China’s ambitious test program points to the PLA’s intent to field additional capabilities with varied aerodynamic attributes.  As an example, in 2015 China reportedly successfully tested a hypersonic unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), presumably as a future intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platform.  Whether this emerging family of hypersonic vehicles will perform “as advertised” by Chinese government agencies remains to be seen.  Arguments that characterize these developments as inherently “game changing” should be assessed cautiously.

What role will hypersonic weapons play?

Regional warfighting .  China’s current emphasis appears to be developing and fielding conventionally-armed hypersonic vehicles that can support regional warfighting.  This  represents a natural evolution of China’s investment in conventional precision strike capabilities dating back to lessons learned from the first Gulf War and the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996.  While the emergence of hypersonic systems does not alter China’s basic approach to key warfighting tasks, these capabilities will provide enhanced options to rapidly target United States air, land, and naval forces in the Indo-Pacific.  The goal would be to impede these forces as they seek to project power and maneuver to block a Chinese military campaign focused on achieving a quick victory or fait accompli .

In support of a counter-intervention objective designed to raise costs for the United States or a US-led coalition, hypersonic systems would be part of the PLA’s broader array of capabilities described by the DoD as “anti-access/area denial (A2AD)” – which include, among other systems, integrated air and maritime defenses and a variety of ballistic and cruise missiles configured for tailored strike missions.  While China’s traditional ballistic and cruise missiles would have to contend with US regional missile defenses, US theater forces today and in the near-term have no or limited capability to actively defend against hypersonic vehicles, according to US senior military leaders.  Of course, as the United States begins to field its own hypersonic missiles, China’s systems will become more vulnerable to rapid US attack.

Strategic Deterrence.  There has been some speculation that China could deploy a hyperglide vehicle with a nuclear payload on its newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the DF-41.  Were it to do so, this would be a clear indication that China sees hypersonic technology as important to ensure the credibility of its strategic nuclear deterrent by providing the means to overcome US homeland missile defenses.  While these defenses today are neither intended nor configured to defeat a large-scale Chinese nuclear missile strike, China could be sufficiently concerned about a possible US “breakout” in missile defenses to warrant developing this hypersonic option for its strategic arsenal.  This would parallel Russia’s recent fielding of the Avangard HGV atop an ICBM for this purpose.  One analyst notes that a survey of Chinese technical studies on hypersonic systems reveals that roughly one quarter are focused on defeating US missile defenses, while roughly one half concentrate on the development of long-range platforms.  This suggests the need to consider Chinese hypersonic capabilities beyond the use of conventional payloads to support regional warfighting.

Another possibility posited by students of Chinese strategic forces is the deployment of a nuclear-armed HGV on China’s JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM).  These missiles have insufficient range today to pose a risk to most of the continental United States because the submarines on which they are deployed operate on patrol in an area (South China Sea) that maximizes their survivability. Theoretically, a nuclear-armed HGV atop these missiles would expand their range and, presumably, their deterrent effectiveness.  This would present significant technical challenges and difficult tradeoffs.  But as some analysts have noted, the technical direction of China’s HGV program may support consideration of this option at some point.

Conventional Prompt Global Strike .  Some experts also project that over time, China is likely to field conventionally-armed hypersonic vehicles with sufficient range to reach the United States in order to hold at risk key US military assets, critical infrastructure, and other high value targets.  Beyond posing a coercive threat to the United States, China’s military leaders may see conventionally-armed HGVs as important to developing a global power projection capability.

What issues are raised by an emerging China-US competition in hypersonic weapons?

If China and the United States are entering what some analysts believe will be an “intense offense-defense competition” in hypersonic systems, a number of questions arise.  At the strategic level, stability implications depend on the choices made by Beijing and Washington.  If China fields a modest number of nuclear-armed HGVs on long-range missiles to bolster confidence in its ability to deliver a retaliatory strike in the face of US missile defenses, this should not significantly alter the current bilateral strategic balance.  An obvious question for the future is how this status quo could change if the United States is successful in developing an active defense capability against such platforms.  How might China respond and with what impact on nuclear stability?

More challenging from the US vantage might be a decision by China to field a force of conventionally-armed intercontinental-range hypersonic missiles.  Analysts have noted that HGVs for prompt global precision strike could threaten key strategic assets such as homeland missile defense sites and overall provide China with a more flexible deterrence capability . Here the key question is: could this become an effective cost-imposing strategy for China, and how would the United States react to the emergence of such a capability?

Similar dynamics could play out at the regional level, where significant US deployments of theater-range hypersonic systems could begin to impose large costs on the PLA as it works to adapt its integrated air defense systems to a new class of threat.  Conceivably, these costs China could divert resources from other capability investments and thereby help the United States maintain an overall favorable balance of power in the region.

But beyond what are likely to be competing cost-imposition strategies lie deeper risks for nuclear stability in the context of regional warfighting.  Large inventories of hypersonic vehicles on each side capable of inflicting high levels of damage against critical assets early in a conflict conceivably could offset one another.  But just as likely is that one side will achieve an operational advantage that creates pressures to escalate the conflict, including to the possible use of nuclear weapons on a limited scale. To the degree both sides see hypersonic weapons as enabling doctrines of surprise, shock, and seizing the initiative, the widespread use of these systems could create escalation risks even in a war being waged over ostensibly limited political objectives.

The DoD must consider these risks as it develops operational concepts for emerging hypersonic systems and defines its broader joint warfighting concept for China.  Research agendas, wargames and exercises, and net assessments must also devote attention to the ways in which hypersonic warfare could shape not only the balance of power in East Asia, but the dynamics of deterrence and escalation, as well.

Paul Bernstein is Distinguished Fellow and Dain Hancock is Policy Fellow at the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Defense University, Washington, DC.  The views expressed here are those of the authors and are not an official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.

Image Credit: 颐园居 ,  CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

• Asia & Oceania ,
• Military & Defense ,
• Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Visual explainer: How China's hypersonic missile compares to conventional ballistic weapons

Fast-moving missile gives u.s. military a near 'sputnik moment' and may trigger new arms race.

China’s recent test of a hypersonic missile – a weapon described as faster, more maneuverable and a greater threat to air-defense systems than a conventional intercontinental ballistic missile – has increased tension between the U.S. and China.

It’s “a very significant event of a test of a hypersonic weapon system, and is very concerning,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a Bloomberg TV interview Oct. 28. Milley's statement was the first official U.S. acknowledgement of the test.

Hypersonic missiles travel at Mach 5 , five times the speed of sound while maneuvering in the atmosphere. That's faster than 3,800 mph. Ballistic missiles can reach 15,000 mph while ascending into space. Warheads travel at about 2,000 mph once they re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.

China's test in August was initially reported by the Financial Times on Oct. 16. The Times said the missile circled the Earth at a low altitude before descending to its target, which it missed by about 19 miles.

Trajectory of China's hypersonic and ballistic missiles

The test is significant because it shows China has made unexpected progress on its hypersonic weapons systems and may initiate a new arms race , the Guardian reported. 

The test prompted comparison of a " Sputnik moment ," an historical reference to the 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union. That was a shock to Americans who were forced to realize the U.S. was being challenged for technological superiority.

“I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. It has all of our attention,” Milley told Bloomberg.

However, it's not just the hypersonic vehicle and its maneuverability that has attracted attention, as Foreign Policy reports: It's how the vehicle entered orbit .

It used a version of the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, a low-orbit missile delivery method developed by the Soviets during the Cold War. A missile descending from low orbit gives less time to be detected.

That method of delivery also means the U.S. could be attacked by flights over the South Pole. American defense systems concentrate on missile attacks from the north.

How weapons compare

Though both can carry nuclear warheads, hypersonic missiles are different from ICMBs.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles are long-range guided weapons that are fired into space in an arc called a parabolic trajectory. They reach an altitude of 800 to 1,200 miles before they descend back to Earth, traveling more than 3,400 miles to hit a target. Existing radar systems are used to detect them.

There are two main types of hypersonic weapons. The U.S. is developing both, according the Congressional Research Service :

• Hypersonic glide vehicles , also called boost-glide systems, which are launched by rocket boosters to the upper atmosphere. They separate from the booster at about 62 miles high, the altitude where Earth's atmosphere ends. They dive on their own momentum and glide to a target at a speed of Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, about 3,836 mph or 1 mile per second. They can maneuver in the atmosphere, making them difficult to detect and destroy.
• Hypersonic cruise missiles , which use high-speed engines called scramjets to reach hypersonic speeds. Their altitude range is about 19 miles high.

China's test involved a hypersonic glide vehicle, according to reports. China has officially denied testing a hypersonic missile, saying it was a routine test of a reusable spacecraft.

Hypersonic missile development

The U.S., Russia and China lead in hypersonic missile programs. But China's test has heightened anxiety between it and the U.S., where relations are already strained over Chinese military activity near Taiwan , its island fortifications in the South China Sea , trade disputes , and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other nations developing hypersonic weapons include India, France, Germany, Japan, Australia and North Korea , reported the Washington Post.

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Associated Press; Congressional Research Service; Joint Air Power Competence Centre; National Security Technology Accelerator; spacenews.com; Defense News; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; NASA

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Mike Griffin critical of U.S. response to China’s advances in hypersonic weapons

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WASHINGTON — China’s successful demonstration of a hypersonic glide vehicle — a weapon that is boosted to space, orbits the Earth and reenters the atmosphere before it strikes a target — is a “disruptive technology” designed to overmatch the U.S. military, Mike Griffin, former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said Nov. 30.  

These advanced weapons likely to be deployed by China and Russia are not intended for nuclear war but are hugely disruptive because the United States does not have the means to predict where they will strike, Griffin said at a virtual event hosted by the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance Deterrence Center.  

Griffin was undersecretary of defense during the Trump administration and led the Pentagon’s effort to deploy a space-based network of missile-defense sensors to detect and track hypersonic missiles.  

Russia and China “don’t want a nuclear exchange any more than we do,” he said. Their conventional military forces are less advanced than the United States’ so a hypersonic glide vehicle gives them an edge, Griffin added. “They can take us down to their level with the right kind of disruptive technology. Hypersonic weapons is exactly that kind of disruptive technology.”

Griffin said the United States now has to play catchup and needs to increase funding for the Space Development Agency and the Missile Defense Agency which are developing sensor satellites to detect and track hypersonic missiles.  

“When your adversaries are telling you that they are out to take you down, we should listen,” he said. “We don’t listen well, but maybe we should.”

A rival nation equipped with a a boost glide vehicle is just “20 or 25 minutes from a target,” he said.   And the cost exchange ratio — meaning what the U.S. spends versus what the enemy spends — “from our point of view is horrific,” Griffin added. “They launch a missile costing maybe a few million dollars or even 10s of millions of dollars, and two or three of those can take out an aircraft carrier.”

In the global race for geopolitical dominance, hypersonic glide weapons level the playing field “not by improving their own capabilities, but by removing ours,” said Griffin.

With a boosted glide weapon, “once you’re in orbit, you don’t have to land immediately. You can land at the time and along the azimuth of your choosing. It can come up from the south or from the west and essentially create an all azimuth multiple salvo conventional strike.”

Kelley Sayler, analyst in advanced technology and global security at the Congressional Research Service, said hypersonic glide vehicles that are launched into space before de-orbiting and approaching their targets would give China the ability to deploy vehicles over the South Pole where they are less likely to be detected by U.S. early warning sensors.  

“U.S. early warning assets were oriented towards threats coming over the North Pole, which is where we generally expect them to come,” Sayler said. “If the threat instead comes over the South Pole, it could further reduce the amount of warning time that we would have.”

For years Russia has been concerned that the United States has the capability to intercept its traditional ballistic missiles, she said. “They believe that pursuing hypersonic weapons could give them assured means of penetrating U.S. missile defenses and restoring some of that strategic stability. It’s sort of similar to what we’ve heard from China.”

U.S. developing hypersonic weapons  

The Pentagon currently is developing both hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles which are powered by high-speed air breathing engines so they don’t require a separate booster.

Sayler said the Pentagon’s budget for 2022 includes $3.8 billion for hypersonic weapons research, which is more than last year’s $3.2 billion budget. “They’re at various stages of development, but none of them have been fielded yet,” she said. By some estimates, the earliest the United States would field a hypersonic weapon would likely be around 2023.

Griffin said these programs should be accelerated. When he left DoD, the U.S. military services were on track to produce two hypersonic rounds per month. “We need to up that by a factor of 10,” he said. “The Chinese are not going to be scared by a few dozen rounds a year. They need to be facing hundreds of new rounds per year.”

The Pentagon also needs to innovate and come up with new concepts. “There are air breathing and boost guide systems. That’s great. But let’s go beyond that thinking. What are the disruptive technologies to disrupt what they can do?”

Tom Karako, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he agreed with Griffin’s concerns but warned against misinterpreting the extent of the threat.

“We see lots of scary click bait-y headlines about this, about hypersonic missiles being silver bullets, being ‘quote unquote’ unstoppable,” he said. “I think this is not helpful.”

Hypersonic glide vehicles and cruise missiles are aimed “at the gaps and seams and the weaknesses of U.S. power projection,” said Karako. But there are ways to fill those gaps using existing and emerging technologies. These more advanced threats give DoD an opportunity to develop “the missile defense system of the future.”

Sandra Erwin

Sandra Erwin writes about military space programs, policy, technology and the industry that supports this sector. She has covered the military, the Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry for nearly two decades as editor of NDIA’s National Defense... More by Sandra Erwin

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ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Voice for the army - support for the soldier, hypersonic weapons development in china, russia and the united states: implications for american security policy.

by Larry M. Wortzel Land Warfare Paper 143, March 2022

In Brief China and Russia have developed hypersonic missiles capable of low-earth orbit, and China’s nuclear posture is shifting. A fractional orbit like the one used in China’s test does not violate the Outer Space Treaty. The burden of defending against the new threat posed by what appear to be maneuvering, hypersonic warheads orbiting in space falls on the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC). Responding to these new threats will be costly and time consuming for the United States and will require cooperation among the Army and the Departments of Defense and Energy.

Introduction

According to the Financial Times of 16 October 2021, “China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise.” 1 The remarkable thing about the test is that the warhead was launched into orbit, orbited Earth and reentered the atmosphere, approaching its target at hypersonic speed. Such a weapon would be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The United States has established defenses against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in Alaska, but the method used to attack the target by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) missile would be capable of evading fixed U.S. defenses by avoiding the expected polar ballistic trajectory that the U.S. defenses are designed to intercept. 2  

This test by China has direct influence on the Army because the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) is responsible for detecting strategic attacks and protecting the U.S. homeland. 3 SMDC defense systems are deployed to intercept ballistic missile warheads from only one direction, using a polar, or arctic, approach. 4 Another SMDC mission is to enhance deterrence and detection of strategic attacks. 5 The hypersonic threat is not only from China; Russia has successfully tested a naval hypersonic missile, the Zircon 6 , and North Korea claims to have tested a hypersonic missile. 7  

Financial Times ( FT ) sources were surprised that China achieved the capability for such a weapon because the hypersonic glide vehicle carrying the warhead stayed in low-earth orbit, 8 circling the globe before reentering the atmosphere to attack its target. Even though the warhead missed its target by a wide margin, 9 China is far ahead of the United States in developing such capabilities; 10 the United States has experienced a number of failures in developing hypersonic weapons. 11 

Why U.S. officials were so surprised by the test is a little bit of a mystery. China has been working on these missiles for decades, and the United States knew it. According to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2019 China Military Power Report , the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “is developing a range of technologies to counter U.S. and other countries’ ballistic missile defense systems, including maneuverable reentry vehicles (MARVs), MIRVs [multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles], decoys, chaff, jamming, thermal shielding, and hypersonic glide vehicles ” (emphasis added). 12 If senior U.S. officials were surprised, it is because the intelligence community apparently underestimated China’s capabilities in this area and failed to follow or appreciate years of mentions in Chinese research reports about work on hypersonic missiles in China, and perhaps underestimated the emphasis the PLA put on their development. 13  

Although the PRC warhead in the test missed its target by a wide margin of about two dozen miles, the FT article quotes U.S. experts and officials as saying that “China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realized.” As noted previously, however, U.S. officials should not have been surprised by the development of hypersonic warheads in orbit by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Rocket Forces (PLARF). China has been conducting research on such hypersonic technology and weapons for some time. 14  

Put into practical defense and security terms, this involved putting warheads into low-earth orbit and having them seek targets on Earth. The strategy is not new. The Soviet Union experimented with this type of warhead in the early 1960s. The United States called it a “Fractional Orbital Bombardment System” during the Cold War period, but the U.S.S.R. eventually moved to other forms of deterrent systems designed to threaten the United States and China. 15 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara declared in November 1967 that the Russian Fractional Orbit Bombardment System tests did not violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. 16 

The PRC denied that any such test had been conducted. 17 China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the August test was “a spacecraft, not a missile,” according to multiple media reports. 18 U.S. officials do not believe Zhao’s denial. 19  

China Fields a Hypersonic Weapon: The Dong Feng 17

On 1 October 2019, the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, in a parade that reviewed the PLA’s troops and weapon systems, the PLA revealed a new hypersonic missile, the Dong Feng (DF) 17. 20 An article in the newsfeed for one of China’s leading internet agencies, 163.com, described the DF-17 as a “nightmare predator” designed to attack the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet; it said that the defenses against hypersonic missiles were the weakest link in the U.S. defense system. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the section of a report that discussed regional missiles in the DoD 2019 Missile Defense Review contained only a passing reference to “a previously unpublicized Chinese missile designated ‘CSS-X-22.’” 

Once the PRC’s 2019 70th anniversary parade was held and the PLA showed the missile, it became obvious that this was the DF-17 medium-range, hypersonic glide vehicle that the PLA had tested in 2017. 21 The IISS analysis was that the DF-17 warhead also could theoretically be a new intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) design in development. It also is probably a design related to the warhead of the hypersonic warhead that the PRC put into orbit; that is the main topic of this paper.

A review of the parade in a PRC blog devoted to military affairs described the DF-17 as a “combat ready hypersonic weapon.” 22 The article also noted that both Russia and the United States were developing hypersonic weapons and had “stepped up” research on hypersonic systems. According to the article, Russia had test-fired its “Zircon” hypersonic missile several times (the article mentioned four test flights) as a naval weapon system, although the system had not yet entered active service. The last test flight was on 6 October 2020, the results of which were reported to Russian president Vladimir Putin the next day. 23 The 6 October flight test had the missile flying 450 kilometers in 4.5 minutes with speeds between 5,700 kilometers per hour and 9,500 kilometers per hour. President Putin announced that Russia also should develop a land-based version of the Zircon. The United States, according to the 163.com article on the Zircon launch, was in a “more miserable position” and was experiencing problems in the design of a hypersonic weapon.

Unfortunately, once a hypersonic missile is tracked and located, shooting it down or stopping it is not an easy task for defenses. For warheads entering from space, the heat and plasma surrounding the reentering warhead make the use of directed energy practically impossible, but the use of “kinetic interceptors that collide directly into an incoming missile, or blast-fragmentation interceptors that explode at close distance, spraying shrapnel into the hypersonic vehicle” is feasible. In the future, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies report, “lasers, high-powered microwaves, rail guns, or particle clouds designed to disrupt hypersonic flight” are possibilities, but they are in development. 24 And what is true about the difficulties of intercepting a PRC hypersonic missile or warhead is true of a Russian system.

It appears that China may have already developed a hypersonic, ship-launched cruise missile that is similar to the Russian Zircon, making the development of defenses even more critical for the United States. 25 This ship-launched missile could also be launched from land. It is designated the CM-401 and is “intended for rapid and precision strikes against medium-size ships, naval task forces, and offshore facilities,” according to a Chinese industry representative. It also appears that China has developed another version of an anti-ship cruise missile, the DF-100, designed to bolster its “counter-intervention (反介入)” strategy, keeping U.S. or other enemy forces away from its coast. This new cruise missile is “a hypersonic, regional-level anti-ship missile that will impose a new, challenging threat-vector for long-range attacks against large warships over a thousand miles of China’s coastline.” 26 A warhead from a ballistic missile may enter the atmosphere at speeds of Mach 22, but, depending on the size of the warhead and atmospheric conditions, it may approach its target at a speed of 16,000 kilometers per hour, or Mach 13, much faster than a hypersonic missile or warhead that is launched inside the atmosphere and travels inside the atmosphere. 27 The sea- (and land-) launched cruise missiles strengthen what the United States calls China’s antiaccess/area denial strategy, which the PLA calls a counter-intervention campaign. The cruise missiles are meant to complement the already operational DF-21D and DF-26 ballistic missiles designed to attack large naval task forces or land targets.

Relationship to the U.S. Prompt Global Strike

In a critique of the United States that justifies Chinese and Russian research on hypersonic missiles and warheads, the 163.com article noted that the United States had already embarked on a weapon system that provided a global strike capability with a hypersonic ICBM warhead called “Prompt Global Strike.” 28 The U.S. designation for the system is Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS), and it was described to Congress as a conventional system, not a strategic nuclear system. The description to Congress, however, does not highlight the fact that to make it a global nuclear system that fires a single ICBM against a specific target requires only changing the warhead. Both the PRC and Russia realized this as soon as the United States revealed the concept. 

According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS):

“The [U.S.] Air Force and Navy have both pursued programs that would lead to the deployment of conventional warheads on their long-range ballistic missiles. During the 2000s, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sought to develop a hypersonic glide delivery vehicle that could deploy on a modified Peacekeeper land-based ballistic missile, but test failures led to the suspension of this program; research continues into a vehicle that might be deployed on air-delivered or shorter-range systems. In the mid-2000s, the Navy sought to deploy conventional warheads on a small number of Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles.” 29  

This means that it is likely that while both China and Russia also were conducting research to develop hypersonic missile systems, they succeeded in fielding a system well before the United States. In fact, according to an article in the War Zone , which follows defense issues, after numerous tests of what would be a hypersonic warhead for the CPGS system, the Department of Defense is still having problems developing a hypersonic warhead. 30 The Navy and Air Force, which are working together to develop a hypersonic warhead, had earlier claimed three successful tests of the system, as noted in the article. 

There are advantages to a hypersonic warhead that is fired from a ballistic missile into space, according to the article on China’s 163.com. A hypersonic warhead in the atmosphere might take two hours in flight at five times the speed of sound to strike targets in China or Russia from the United States. A ballistic missile warhead, however, enters the atmosphere at 22 times the speed of sound, and a hypersonic warhead from such a ballistic missile would be four times faster than the DF-17 or the Russian Zircon, neither of which is an ICBM. 31 Further, as the article from China points out, it is difficult to defend against hypersonic systems at present. Meanwhile, the United States is working to develop defenses but appears to be experiencing as much trouble developing hypersonic missile defenses as it is in developing the warheads. 32 China is aware of the problems the United States is having with hypersonic warheads and has devoted coverage of the topic in the military newspaper PLA Daily . 33  

There is a certain amount of gloating in China about the success of its hypersonic missile program and the problems the United States is having. 34 In its 2019/2020 assessment of the international strategic situation and U.S. security, China’s Ministry for State Security notes that there is still a possibility of a regional conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, although it assesses the likelihood of a new world war as low. 35 Whether it wishes to reassess this opinion in light of the recent Russian invasion on Ukraine remains to be seen. 

China’s Nuclear Posture: Is It Shifting?

The PLA has set out its nuclear posture in authoritative documents in broad outline. 36 China also has published a series of white papers on strategy and defense that help illuminate China’s nuclear strategy and posture. 37 Put simply, China has maintained a strategy of maintaining a limited nuclear force designed to deter other countries from using nuclear weapons against China and to retaliate in the event that China is attacked with nuclear weapons. 38  

China’s policy, and that of the Permanent Five (P5) nations of the United Nations, was reaffirmed at the beginning of 2022, when the P5 nations issued the “Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races.” 39 The P5 state, “The People’s Republic of China, the French Republic, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America consider the avoidance of war between Nuclear-Weapon States and the reduction of strategic risks as our foremost responsibilities.” 40 The joint statement went on to pledge that they “reaffirm the importance of addressing nuclear threats and emphasize the importance of preserving and complying with our bilateral and multilateral non-proliferation, disarmament, and arms control agreements and commitments. We [the P5 nations] remain committed to our Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, including our Article VI obligation ‘to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.’”

According to the PRC-controlled English-language China Daily , Fu Cong , Director-General of the Department of Arms Control of the Foreign Ministry in China, reaffirmed that “China has always adopted the no first use policy and we maintain our nuclear capabilities at the minimal level required for our national security.” 41 He went on to say, “We do not deny that China has taken measures to modernize our nuclear arsenal, not for other reasons, but for reliability and safety reasons.” Fu dismissed claims that China is “dramatically expanding its nuclear capabilities” and told reporters that China “maintained its nuclear capabilities at the minimum level required for national defense.” Ultimately, Fu blamed the United States for changing the nuclear balance by “withdrawing from some treaties, and for upgrading and modernizing its own nuclear forces.” The charge by Fu that the United States had withdrawn from treaties is probably a reference to the 2019 U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty with the Russian Federation. 42  

Meanwhile, China is apparently developing, with Russian help, its own ballistic missile launch early warning system that will give it notice if another nation undertakes an attack on China. 43 Developing an early warning system will help China with its confidence that another country, like the United States, has not launched a preemptory ballistic missile strike against China. And if a launch is detected, such a system would allow China’s leaders to undertake decisions on its own readiness as well as how China might respond. However, the existence of such a system does not tell the PLA whether a nuclear-tipped missile was launched or if a conventional warhead was on the missile. This could prompt the leadership in China to consider the detection of a launch as a first strike and to depart from China’s “no first use” policy. Thus, while launch-detection systems can be stabilizing, there is not much time to decide on retaliatory actions if a launch is detected and the trajectory is headed toward China. Missile defenses may help stop an incoming warhead, but the detection of a launch can be destabilizing. Both Russia and the United States have ballistic missile launch early warning systems. 44  

A major dilemma in strategic stability is that if a weapon already in space was in orbit and could enter the atmosphere from any direction and maneuver, it would render most current early warning systems useless. Hence the attention to the alleged test of a hypersonic warhead in orbit by China. 

The Implications of the Hypersonic Warhead for China’s Nuclear Posture

For decades, China’s nuclear deterrence strategy depended on a limited number of nuclear weapons that could inflict heavy and unacceptable damage on an adversary if the country were attacked. However, despite claims of a limited deterrent, the number of Chinese nuclear-capable missiles has grown over the years, along with its stockpile of warheads. This growth is probably a response to improved and deployed ballistic missile defenses in the United States and other countries such as Japan. This led the PLA to develop additional technologies and systems to ensure it could maintain its deterrence posture. 

In her book Chinese Nuclear Proliferation , Susan Turner Hopkins does an excellent job of explaining China’s basic nuclear doctrine and posture. 45 She quotes Chinese sources, explaining that “China maintains a small but effective nuclear counterattacking force in order to deter possible nuclear attacks by other countries.” While Fu Cong used the word minimum to describe China’s nuclear arsenal, most analysts describe China’s nuclear force as a limited deterrent capability. Turner differentiates them by explaining that, in a limited deterrence policy, a nation may treat nuclear weapons and their use as similar to conventional weapons, and that nuclear use can be limited, perhaps even regionally. 46 In section 2 of its 2021 annual report to Congress, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission raised the possibility that China may be developing a strategy of nuclear first use on a limited or regional basis. 47 This is consistent with some of the positions on nuclear counter-deterrence taken in the PLA’s The Second Artillery Corps Science of Military Strategy (第二炮兵战役学) cited earlier in this paper. 48  

Among the approaches to maintain what it sees as an acceptable deterrent capability, China has developed a nuclear ballistic missile submarine force, developed nuclear-tipped cruise missiles for bombers, deployed new types of mobile ballistic missile systems with multiple warheads and equipped them with countermeasures like penetration aids to ensure they hit their targets. 49 The research and testing to develop hypersonic missiles and warheads is a natural development of the PLA’s nuclear posture. 50  

For the United States to offset the hypersonic threat, it will require not only new detection capabilities but also a hybrid approach of kinetic interceptors and perhaps other non-kinetic means to intercept and destroy incoming warheads and missiles. 51 U.S. ballistic missile defenses also will probably need a new command and control architecture capable of processing data quickly enough to respond to and neutralize an incoming hypersonic threat.

Today, aspects of China’s nuclear posture are changing as China develops hypersonic warheads, but the basic strategy and targeting will probably remain the same. The United States and Russia (first as the Soviet Union) started out with counter-value nuclear strategies designed to impose threats against large segments of an enemy’s population. After decades of this approach, between arms-control talks and changes in strategic thinking, the United States and the Soviets shifted to a counter-force strategy designed to attack the military and missiles forces of an opponent. Deterrence strategy for the United States and Russia is still a counter-force strategy. 52 China, however, has always maintained a counter-value strategy, which requires large, high-yield nuclear detonations that threaten millions of people. Such a strategy allows China to continue what it sees as a sufficient deterrent capability without building a missiles force of thousands of warheads and missiles like the United States and the Soviet Union did. As part of that nuclear strategy and posture, the PLA believes that “hypersonic technology is the commanding height of aerospace technology.” 53 Li Jun, the author of the 2017 PLA Daily article cited, argues that the combination of supersonic speed, a high likelihood of battle damage, the capability to penetrate armor with conventional warheads and a high capacity to penetrate defenses for the PLA means that cruise missiles and ballistic missile warheads can attack reinforced targets and improve on the deterrent capability a nation gets from subsonic kinetic warheads. 54  

The Effect on the Army and Its Space and Missile Defense Mission

The SMDC “develops and provides current and future global space, missile defense, and high altitude capabilities to the Army, joint force, and our allies and partners, to enable multi-domain combat effects; enhance deterrence, assurance, and detection of strategic attacks; and protect the nation.” 55 Ultimately, the burden of defending against the new threat posed by what appear to be maneuvering, hypersonic warheads orbiting in space falls on SMDC.

At present, SMDC has assets to defend the U.S. “homeland against long-range ballistic missile attacks” using a “sophisticated fire control system supported by an array of sensors and a ground-based, missile-launched exoatmospheric kill vehicle to track, intercept and destroy an enemy warhead in its midcourse phase of flight, outside the earth’s atmosphere.” 56 The dilemma for the future that SMDC faces is that its deployed interceptors are located in Alaska and designed to defend the United States against ballistic missiles and warheads that approach the U.S. homeland from over the Arctic or a northern trajectory. This dilemma is highlighted in a conservative American publication that states that “America’s ballistic missile defense systems are focused on the Arctic Circle and the North Pole. Hypersonic cruise systems might completely circumvent those defenses by flying over the South Pole and Antarctica while targeting locations anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.” 57  

This means that whether such a system is employed by China, Russia or even North Korea, U.S. defenses are not deployed to intercept missiles approaching from an Antarctic or South Pole trajectory. There are ways the United States could respond to this, but it would take time and a lot of money. Thus, while the existence of hypersonic missiles may not change the nuclear balance—the United States will be able to respond to an attack with part of its triad of missiles, bombers or ballistic missile submarines—the new threat is a serious cost-imposing factor for the United States. 

Congress could authorize U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and SMDC to construct defenses somewhere in the southern United States comparable to the 49th Missile Defense Battalion (GMD), an Alaska Army National Guard unit permanently on active duty at Fort Greely, Alaska. This battalion provides “operational control and security for the nation’s ground-based interceptors located at Fort Greely.” 58 But constructing the necessary radar systems, programming space assets, deploying ground-based interceptors and manning the defense system with active duty or National Guard Soldiers would come at a very high cost. During the Cold War, the United States had “approximately 265 Nike missile bases . . . across the United States. . . . Many were on Army National Guard bases who continued to use the property.” 59 Building seven sites in one county in Ohio alone cost $12 million in 1955 dollars. 60 It is unlikely that Congress would authorize an entire new defense system. Instead, existing retaliatory systems, policies and measures would most likely be used to deter attacks. 

Another defensive approach might be to deploy a cordon of Navy Aegis ballistic missile defense cruisers and destroyers around the United States. 61 However, that would mean fewer naval combatants deployed for traditional missions. Again, the cost to build new cruisers or destroyers, or even put the Aegis system on other naval platforms, would be very high and take a long time.

These dilemmas demonstrate why the PRC’s development and test of hypersonic warheads, and particularly the test of an orbiting warhead, present new security challenges for the Army and the United States.

The development and deployment of hypersonic missiles challenges all U.S. missile defense systems, whether land based or naval. The speed of the missile or warhead means the process of detection, intercept and kill of an incoming warhead must be orders of magnitude faster than for one approaching a target at a lower speed.

Another problem with intercepting and killing hypersonic warheads is that because of their speed they are surrounded by a plasma heat buildup caused by friction with the air. 62 That presents a problem for missile accuracy but also presents a major problem for defenses. Directed-energy weapons would probably be ineffective in penetrating the plasma effect, so destroying a hypersonic missile requires a direct hit with a kinetic warhead. 63 That problem caused by physics and heat puts the burden for defending the United States against hypersonic missiles and warheads back on the Army and SMDC.

However, as discussed in the preceding section, it is not likely that Congress will authorize a nationwide deployment of ground-based interceptors like the Army has in Alaska to try to intercept the type of missile warhead in orbit that China tested. Instead, U.S. policy will likely focus on improved deterrent capabilities.

Clearly, the United States must succeed in developing its own hypersonic capabilities, and, if it is to maintain a counter-force strategy, the warhead has to be accurate. That means that the Army’s SMDC and the other services’ hypersonic missile programs need adequate funding and the programs should be of high priority. Defenses alone are not enough to deter another nation from strategic attack.

Deterrence still works, and a strategic nuclear balance can be maintained if the United States has a credible retaliatory capability. Programs to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal are critical to this deterrence, and that responsibility is not the Army’s; it is the responsibility of the Departments of Energy and Defense. 64  

This is not to say that credible defenses are not a part of the strategic deterrence equation. Another approach for the Army and SMDC might be to work on variations of existing defense systems to make them mobile and capable against strategic missile systems. Imagine developing a strategic ballistic missile defense system like the Theater (Terminal) High Altitude Air Defense System (THAAD) system for the Army that is transportable and deployable. 65 Such an effort would take resources and time, however. For the near term, it is likely that maintaining the Army’s defenses in Alaska will complement a robust, modernized and credible strategic deterrent.

Dr. Larry M. Wortzel had a distinguished 32-year military career, retiring as an Army Colonel in 1999. A graduate of the U.S. Army War College, he earned his BA from Columbus College, Georgia, and his MA and PhD from the University of Hawaii. His last military position was the Director of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. He is currently a senior fellow in Asian security at the American Foreign Policy Council. 

• Demetri Sevastopulo and Kathrin Hille, “China Tests New Space Capability with Hypersonic Missile,” Financial Times , 16 October 2021.
• “ China Reportedly Testing Hypersonic Cruise Missile System ,” Conservative America Today .
• U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC); SMDC Fact Sheet .
• “ Current U.S. Missile Defense Programs at a Glance ,” Arms Control Association, October 2019.
• Reuters, “Russia says Zircon hypersonic missile hit target in latest test,” CNN , 29 November 2021; see also Oren Liebermann, “Latest US military hypersonic test fails,” CNN , 22 October 2021.
• Ryan Pickrell, “North Korea says latest weapon it tested was a hypersonic missile,” Business Insider , 28 September 2021. 
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration fact sheet, “ What Is LEO (Low-Earth Orbit)? ” According to NASA, generally a “Low-Earth orbit (often known as LEO) encompasses Earth-centered orbits with an altitude of 2,000 km (1,200 mi) or less. For the purposes of the Commercial Use Policy, low-Earth orbit is considered the area in Earth orbit near enough to Earth for convenient transportation, communication, observation and resupply. This is the area where the International Space Station currently orbits.”
• Sevastopulo and Hille, “China Tests New Space Capability.”
• Melissa Tan, “Frost & Sullivan Analyzes Hypersonic Technology Development in the United States,” Frost and Sullivan , 8 June 2021.
• Joe Saballa, “US Hypersonic Missile Fails Anew in Third Trial,” Defense Post , 20 December 2021; Liebermann, “Latest US military hypersonic test fails.”
• Defense Intelligence Agency, 2019 China Military Power Report (Washington, DC: Defense Intelligence Agency, 2019), 37, 115.
• “China hails first test of hypersonic nuclear missile carrier,” South China Morning Post , 15 January 2014; Li Jun (李准), “Hypersonic Weapons Allow War to Enter the ‘Countdown’ Era (高超声速武器让战争进入“读秒”时代),” People’s Liberation Army Daily (hereafter cited as PLA Daily), 5 May 2017, 11. 
• Yang Zhen (样珍), Fan Kun (范坤) et al., “ Study on Dynamic Load Protection of the Supersonic Monorail Rocker Sled (超音速单轨火箭雪橇).”
• Sevastopulo and Hille, “China Tests New Space Capability”; See Paul Diehl, “Ghosts of Arms Control Past,” Political Science Quarterly 105, no. 4 (Winter 1990–1991): 597–615; Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Estimate, “The Soviet Space Program,” December 1962, 22.
• “Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS),” Weapons and Warfare , 23 November 2015; National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 . The author thanks Dr. Mark Schneider of the National Institute for Public Policy for pointing this out in his review of the manuscript.
• Hannah Ritchie, “China denies testing a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, says it was a spacecraft,” CNN , 18 October 2021.
• Sinead Baker, “China denied a report that it tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, saying it was just a space vehicle,” Business Insider , 18 October 2021.
• CNN, “Top military leader says China’s hypersonic missile test ‘went around the world,’” ABC57 , 17 November 2021.
• “ Technology Surpasses the ‘Old Beauty’! Demystifying How China’s Hypersonic Missiles Have Become a Nightmare for Modern Warfare Technology Surpasses the ‘Old Beauty’! (技术反超老美！揭秘中国高速音速导弹， 如何成为现代战争噩梦),” 163.com, 1 October 2019; “Old Beauty” (老美) is a reference to the United States and China’s technology surpassing that of the United States. 163.com is one of China’s leading internet companies that devotes a lot of news articles to military issues.]
• Henry Boyd, “ 2019 Pentagon report: China’s Rocket Force trajectory ,” International Institute for Strategic Studies IISS Military Balance Blog , 15 May 2019.
• “Technology Surpasses the ‘Old Beauty.’”
• New China News Agency (新华), “Russia Successfully Test Fired the ‘Zircon’ Hypersonic Missile (俄成功试射“锆石”高速音速巡航导弹),” PLA Daily , 8 October 2020, 2.
• Shaan Shaikh, “ China’s Hypersonic Future ,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 12 December 2021.
• Ryan Pickrell, “China Has a New Hypersonic Anti-Ship Missile That It Claims Could Destroy a US Warship in One Hit,” Business Insider , 7 November 2018.
• Sebastien Robin, “Stay Back: China’s DF-100 Missiles Are Meant to Kill Aircraft Carriers,” National Interest , 24 July 2021.
• Debajit Sarka et al., “ What Is the Speed of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile? ,” Quora; Also see Dan Sales and Rachel Bunyan, “What Is the Speed of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile?” Daily Mail , 20 December 2021.
• See “ Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues ,” Congressional Research Service Report R41464, updated 14 August 2019.
• Amy Woolf, Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues , Congressional Research Service Report R41464, updated 14 August 2019, see the summary and pages 1–5.
• Joseph Trevithick, “ U.S. Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon Test Fails (Updated) ,” War Zone , 21 October 2021. 
• The DF-17 is probably an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), and the Zircon is a cruise missile.
• Congressional Research Service, “ Hypersonic Missile Defense: Issues for Congress ,” updated 11 June 2021.
• New China News Agency (新华), “The U.S. Military Conducts Hypersonic Glider Flight Tests (美军进行高素质音速滑翔体飞行测试),” PLA Daily , 22 March 2020, 4.
• Huang Ruxin (黄如昕) et al., “Hypersonic Weapons: Using Strength to Interpret ‘Only Fast is not Broken’ (高音速武器；用实力诠X唯快不破),” PLA Daily , 27 November 2020, 10.
• China Institute for Contemporary International Research (中国现代国际关系研究院), International Strategic and Security Review 2019/2020 (国际战略与安全形势评估 2019/2020) (Beijing: Current Affairs Press [事实出版社], 2020), 331–33. The China Institute for Contemporary International Research, or CICIR, is a bureau of China’s Ministry of State Security. The author has visited CICIR numerous times in his capacity as a military attaché and as a member of official congressional delegations.
• Wang Wenrong (王文蓉), The Science of Military Strategy (战略院) (Beijing: PLA National Defense University Press, 1999), 347–70; Shou Xiaosong (寿晓松), with Academy of Military Science Military Strategy Department (军事科学院军事战略研究部), eds., The Science of Military Strategy (战略院) (Beijing: PLA Academy of Military Science Press, 2013), 169–97; Zhang Yuliang (张玉良), The Science of Military Campaigns (战役学) (Beijing: PLA National Defense University Press, 2006), 616–36; Yu Jixun (于际训), ed., The Second Artillery Corps Science of Military Strategy (第二炮兵战役学) (Beijing: PLA Academy of Military Science Press, 2004), 303–26.
• See Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, China Arms Control and Disarmament , November 1995; for the White Papers from 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2019, see http://eng.mod.gov.cn/publications/node_48467.htm . 
• Larry M. Wortzel, China’s Nuclear Forces: Operations, Training, Doctrine, Command, Control and Campaign Planning (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, May 2007). 
• White House, “ Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races ,” 3 January 2022.
• White House, “Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States.”
• Zhao Jia, “Beijing dismisses claims of nuclear capabilities,” China Daily , 5 January 2022.
• C. Todd Lopez, “ U.S. Withdraws From Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ,” DoD, 2 August 2019. The United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Russian Federation because “Russia has failed to comply with its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and as such, the United States has withdrawn from the INF Treaty effective today, Aug. 2, 2019,” according to then Secretary of Defense Dr. Mark T. Esper. 
• Dmitry Stefanovich, “In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow was assisting Beijing in developing an early warning system,” Diplomat , 25 October 2019.
• See Stephen J. Cimbala and James Scouras, A New Nuclear Century: Strategic Stability and Arms Control (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 9–10, 38, 60–65. For an overview of ballistic missile early warning programs and the U.S. status, see Government Accountability Office, Missile Warning Satellites: Comprehensive Cost and Schedule Information Would Enhance Congressional Oversight , United States Government Accountability Office Report to Congressional Committees, September 2021.
• Susan Turner Haynes, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics Is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2016), 58–90.
• Haynes, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation , 62–64. On the possibility of limited nuclear war, see John K. Warden, Limited Nuclear War: The 21st Century Challenge for the United States , Livermore Papers on Global Security No. 4 , Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Center for Global Security Research, July 2018.
• See the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2021 Annual Report to Congress , “ Section 2: China’s Nuclear Forces: Moving Beyond a Minimal Deterrent ,” November 2021, 341–85.
• Yu Jixun (于际训), ed., The Second Artillery Corps Science of Military Strategy (第二炮兵战役学) (Beijing: PLA Academy of Military Science Press, 2004).
• Larry M. Wortzel, The Dragon Extends Its Reach: Chinese Military Power Goes Global (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013), 99–116, 155–56.
• See, for instance, Colin Clark, “Tackling Hypersonic Threats: Offence or Defense?” Breaking Defense , 11 March 2019; Hudson Institute, “ China’s Hypersonic Missile Advances and U.S. Defense Responses ,” YouTube video, 11 March 2019.
• Congressional Research Service, “Hypersonic Missile Defense.”
• For a brief explanation of counter-value versus counter-force nuclear strategy and targeting, see Navneet Bushan, “Agni-5: A True Game Changer,” Indian Defense Review , 28 December 2016.
• Li Jun, “Hypersonic Weapons Allow War to Enter the ‘Countdown’ Era,” PLA Daily , 5 May 2017, 11.
• Jun, “Hypersonic Weapons Allow War to Enter the ‘Countdown’ Era,” 11.
• See U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) and SMDC Fact Sheet .
• See the SMDC Fact Sheet for the 100th Missile Defense Brigade (100th MDB). 
• U.S. Army Alaska Fact Sheet: 49th Missile Defense Battalion . 
• List of Nike Missile Sites .
• “ Nike Missile Bases ,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
• See Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Program: Background and Issues for Congress , Congressional Research Service Report RL33745, 25 October 2016.
• Kyle Mizokami, “Hypersonic Missiles Just Aren’t Accurate,” Popular Mechanics , 10 March 2020. 
• Author interview with a physics professor at Princeton University, 18 July 2021; Kris Osborne, “Hypersonic Weapons: Everything You Need to Know About the Ultimate Weapon,” National Interest , 22 July 2017.
• “ Nuclear Weapons and Forces Sustainment and Modernization ,” Government Accountability Office. See also “ Nuclear Triad: DoD and DoE Face Challenges Mitigating Risks to U.S. Deterrence Efforts ,” Government Accountability Office Report GAO 21-210, 6 May 2021.
• “ THAAD Theatre High Altitude Area Defense—Missile System ,” Army Technology , 27 July 2020.

The views and opinions of our authors do not necessarily reflect the views of the Association of the United States Army. An article selected for publication represents research by the author(s) which, in the opinion of the Association, will contribute to the discussion of a particular defense or national security issue. These articles should not be taken to represent the views of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the United States government, the Association of the United States Army or its members.

China Allegedly Tested a Nuclear-Capable Hypersonic Weapon. Now What?

R evelations over a secret Chinese weapon test have stoked fresh fears in Washington that the two nations are approaching a strategic crossroads amid a sweeping build-up of Beijing’s nuclear arsenal.

The Chinese military, in the midst of a complete modernization of its strategic forces, is expected to at least double its number of nuclear warheads over the next decade. It has quietly constructed hundreds of new silos capable of launching long-range ballistic missiles. Now, U.S. officials say, China is fine-tuning the design of a new lightning-quick weapon system engineered to evade America’s multi-billion-dollar early warning and defense systems.

The Financial Times reported on Oct. 16 that a Chinese rocket this summer carried a sleek spacecraft into orbit where it separated, circumnavigated the globe, then re-entered the atmosphere at blistering speeds before plunging back to Earth. Although the glider reportedly missed its target by about 25 miles, the error would be negligible if, say, it was carrying a thermonuclear warhead targeting an American city.

The report sent tremors through U.S. national security circles because such a weapon, known as a “hypersonic glide vehicle,” came years before analysts believed China would be able to develop it. The term “supersonic” means that an object is traveling faster than the speed of sound, or Mach 1. The term “hypersonic” means a vehicle is going five times that speed or more. The U.S. currently has no way to stop such a weapon, especially if it were maneuverable.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told Bloomberg Television on Oct. 26 China’s test was “very concerning.” He compared the event to 1957 when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, that revealed the U.S. was behind in the space race. “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that,” he said. “It has all of our attention.”

What the test demonstrates is that China, like Russia before it , is intent on designing nuclear weapons that aim to nullify America’s globe-spanning missile defenses. Today’s systems are designed to blast apart nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that fly high into space releasing warheads which fall in a predictable, parabolic arc toward a target. A maneuverable weapon hurtling toward a target at hypersonic speeds is impossible for existing U.S. defenses to shoot-down.

The adversaries’ cat-and-mouse weapons developments, reminiscent of the Cold War , comes as China and the U.S. face off in hot spots like Taiwan, where the risk of miscalculation could catastrophically result in direct conflict. Unlike during the Cold War, the U.S. and China have failed to establish a robust series of treaties—which the U.S. and Soviet Union had in place—to keep communication channels open and growing weapons arsenals in check.

China’s new demonstrated capability does not yet fundamentally change the balance of military power, U.S. officials and analysts say, but it does underscore Beijing’s rapid expansion and diversification of its nuclear arsenal and should motivate the Biden Administration to meaningfully engage Beijing in non-proliferation talks. What’s needed is military transparency and diplomatic verification before these new weapon systems are fielded and become more challenging to control.

“We absolutely should find ways to engage China on nuclear arms control,” says Andrew Weber, who spent 30 years on nuclear-weapons issues in the State and Defense departments before retiring in 2015. “I am especially concerned that China might deploy so-called ‘nuclear war fighting systems,’ like nuclear-armed cruise missiles. We have a window of opportunity to prevent that through negotiations.”

Persuading China to limit its capabilities will not be easy. Even if Beijing doubles its stockpile over the next decade, as U.S. intelligence assesses it is on track to do, it will represent a fraction of those belonging to Washington and Moscow. Russia and the U.S. are capped at 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads under a bilateral treaty known as New START. China, however, is not part of that agreement and only has an estimated stockpile consisting of more than 200 warheads . China became a nuclear weapons power in 1964, but has restrained its strategic expansion—until recently. The nation is unlikely to want to limit its newfound capabilities to attack from land, air, and sea, which Russia and the U.S. have built-up over decades.

“These developments raise concerns about China’s nuclear intentions and signal the pursuit of significant expansion of the diversity and size of China’s nuclear arsenal,” says Shannon Bugos, a research associate at the non-profit Arms Control Association. “The (hypersonic) test highlights the importance of opening a dialogue with Beijing on matters related to strategic stability that is aimed at reducing the risk of conflict and escalation, increasing transparency, and tackling concerns that inspire the development of such systems in the first place.”

The Biden Administration has refused to comment directly about China’s alleged test. In fact, officials have said little overall about China’s increased nuclear weapons capacity and strategy. The White House may be awaiting the results of the Nuclear Posture Review, a policy document for the U.S. nuclear arsenal that every new administration produces after a top-to-bottom evaluation.

But the review underway hasn’t stopped Republicans from weighing in. “China’s test of a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle is one more milestone in China’s military modernization—designed to intimidate and bully the West,” Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Facebook on Oct. 18, two days after the Times report. “This is just the latest in a string of high-profile revelations about China’s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal.”

For decades, the strategy of Republican and Democratic Commanders in Chief alike to prevent nuclear war and the spread of weapons to non-nuclear states has been to reduce nations’ nuclear arsenals and forge new arms-control agreements. President Joe Biden told world leaders at the United Nations last month the U.S. was “not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” echoing what happened with the Soviet Union.

But by any measure, Washington’s relations with Beijing have been getting worse, not better. CIA Director William Burns this month called China the “most important geopolitical threat we face.” His agency announced the creation of a top-level working group on China as part of a sweeping effort to challenge Beijing, echoing previous responses to the threats from al-Qaeda and the Soviet Union. The Defense Department often refers to Beijing as “America’s pacing threat,” around the Pentagon. “It means that China is the only country that can pose a systemic challenge to the United States in the sense of challenging us, economically, technologically, politically and militarily,” Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said in June .

The largest potential flashpoint is currently in Taiwan , which politically split from the mainland in 1949 following China’s civil war. Earlier this month, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to pursue a peaceful reunification with the island, and Beijing has sent nearly 150 warplane sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Zone in recent weeks.

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The U.S. has consistently hinted it would defend Taiwan from Chinese attack but hasn’t publicly committed to intervene—the idea being that Beijing, amid the ambiguity, will not invade for fear of wider war with the United States. Earlier this month, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that around two dozen U.S. special operations troops and Marines have been training Taiwanese forces for over a year, having first been dispatched by the Trump Administration.

China wants to alter that U.S. calculus in the Asia-Pacific region, said Timothy Heath, a senior international defense researcher at the RAND Corporation. The nation’s military expansion, he said, demonstrates it can hurt the U.S. at home or abroad. “This hypersonic weapon adds to the growing inventory of Chinese nuclear-strike capabilities,” Heath said. “That, by itself, isn’t necessarily a game-changer, but what it suggests China is trying to raise the risk and cost of a potential conflict so high that the U.S. starts to rethink some of its regional security commitments.”

Beijing, for its part, insists the alleged hypersonic weapon test wasn’t ill-intentioned. Zhao Lijian, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, called it “ a spacecraft, not a missile ” at an Oct. 18 press conference. “This test was a routine spacecraft experiment to verify the reusable technology of spacecraft, which is of great significance for reducing the cost of spacecraft use,” he said. “It can provide a convenient and cheap way for humans to use space peacefully.”

Even if China is testing a hypersonic weapon system, it is not exactly a new, futuristic nuclear-armed technology. The Soviet Union deployed a similar system, called a “fractional orbital bombardment system,” in the 1960s . The U.S., Russia and China have all been developing hypersonic weapons programs with mixed success. In May, the Biden Administration requested $3.8 billion for its program in the fiscal year 2022.

The White House is also expected to continue heavily invest in defenses. The Missile Defense Agency received about $162.5 billion from 2002 through 2019, according to the Government Accountability Office . The agency requested about $45 billion over the next four years. As designed, the U.S. ground-based missile defense system is set up to intercept one or two ballistic missiles headed for the United States. There are just 44 interceptors, all arrayed in California and Alaska. The idea is if a rogue nation, such as North Korea—which is known to have limited numbers of ICBMs—launched a missile toward an American target, it could be destroyed before striking down.

But China, with an estimated arsenal of more than 100 ICBMs, could do far more damage. If it wanted, Beijing could easily overwhelm the U.S. system by blasting off dozens of missiles. What keeps them in-check, the argument goes, is the expectation that if it launches a nuclear strike, it will have to deal with the repercussions. The theory, known as mutually assured destruction (MAD), is what military planners have banked upon since the dawn of the atomic age.

“Do we accept mutual deterrence with China? If we do, then (the hypersonic weapon) doesn’t matter,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons analyst with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. “But a lot of people in the Pentagon don’t accept mutual deterrence. They do think our missile defenses can help take China’s deterrent away. For those people, this is a big deal. And for the rest of us, we’re hostage to the arms race.”

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Look out, US Navy carriers: China’s hypersonic rocket drone is seen in the wild

Even the largest warships in the world can be hard to find in the vastness of the Pacific

Something strange and new took flight over China recently, attached to the belly of a heavy bomber belonging to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force, the PLAAF. 

It might be a supersonic reconnaissance drone – one designed to hunt down US Navy aircraft carriers on the vast Pacific Ocean. Or it could be an even faster “hypersonic” vehicle. It’s hard to say from the single blurry image of the thing that has circulated on social media. All we can say for sure is that the Chinese military is up to something . And whatever it is, it’s bad news for the United States and the whole free world.

The photo in question depicts a Xian H-6 medium bomber flying high over the ground – so high that, from the vantage point of the photographer, it’s little more than a winged blur. Equally blurry: whatever the bomber was carrying under its fuselage. 

That indistinct payload is dark in color, shaped like an arrowhead and around 33 feet in length. It gives the general impression of a drone – but which drone?

The PLAAF is known to be developing at least two types of high-speed unmanned aerial vehicles that depend on a bomber to launch them. Both roughly match the basic shape of the object under the H-6 in the photo.

One is the AVIC WZ-8 . This supersonic UAV made its first public appearance at a rehearsal for a parade in Beijing in 2019. The UAV’s narrow fuselage and wings – ideal for fast supersonic flight – strongly imply the WZ-8 is a recon drone. One whose rocket engine isn’t suitable for takeoff from a traditional runway, and instead requires mid-air launch.

Chinese media concur with that impression. The WZ-8 “would be expected to play a key role should there be a conflict with US aircraft carrier strike groups in the South China Sea or western Pacific,” the South China Morning Post reported.

American carrier groups could lead any allied intervention on Taiwan’s behalf should China make good on decades of threats and launch an invasion across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. Stopping those carriers is one of the PLA’s top priorities.

The Chinese military has deployed an array of weapons specifically for attacking carriers: cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, in particular. But a missile is only as good as its targeting, and in the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, even something as large as a 1,000-foot-long aircraft carrier can be hard to find.

A camera-equipped satellite might be able to detect a carrier, but only when the satellite crosses the patch of ocean where the ship happens to be. Most satellites travel along orbits that allow them to surveil only narrow swathes of the Earth below. 

A drone could help fill the surveillance gaps. But a drone, unlike a satellite, is vulnerable to interceptions by a carrier’s planes and escorts. In developing the supersonic WZ-8, the Chinese are betting that high speed – potentially several times the speed of sound – might give the drone a fighting chance of penetrating a carrier’s defenses and pinpointing the ship’s location for its rocket crews.

PLA leadership in Beijing seems confident in the WZ-8’s basic design, which might be why – according to a leaked US intelligence report – the PLA Air Force has rushed the drone into front-line service with at least one regiment in Liu’an, in eastern China.

It’s possible the H-6 in the notorious photo was carrying a WZ-8 for further trials, or as practice for combat operations. But it’s also possible whatever the bomber was hauling wasn’t a WZ-8 at all. Joseph Trevithick, a reporter for The War Zone , quoted aviation expert Andreas Rupprecht claiming the payload in the photo is too large to be WZ-8.

Be skeptical. Reasonable assessments pin the rarely-seen WZ-8 at around 37 feet in length. An H-6 is 114 feet long – and the thing it’s carrying in the photo stretches along a quarter or third of its length. Which could mean 37 feet.

Trevithick posited that, instead of a WZ-8, the bomber’s payload might have been an MD-22, a hypersonic drone Guangdong Aerodynamic Research Academy is developing for possible military use. A hypersonic vehicle travels at least five times the speed of sound while still being able to manoeuvre.

We know almost nothing about the MD-22 except that it’s very fast and around 35 feet in length. If the thing under the H-6 was an MD-22, then the MD-22 looks a lot like the WZ-8. 

All this speculation might amount to a distinction without a difference. An operational MD-22 might perform the same role that the operational WZ-8 apparently does: penetrating US air defences in order to locate America’s most valuable warships, its carriers.

That the Chinese are testing or training with some kind of very fast recon drone – either a WZ-8 or MD-22 – is a reminder of just how serious they are about hunting American carriers. And it’s also a reminder of how important it is for the Americans to defend their carriers against high-speed drones.

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China’s Hypersonic Missiles: Methods and Motives

Publication: china brief volume: 21 issue: 15, by: richard weitz.

July 30, 2021 12:22 PM Age: 3 years

Introduction

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is pursuing various hypersonic delivery systems to augment its already impressive arsenal of precision strike capabilities. Hypersonic missiles are emerging as a highly valued weapon system for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and other advanced militaries due to their unique combination of attributes, which include: 1) sustained high speed (by definition flying at least five times the speed of sound after separation from launcher); 2) increased maneuverability, either through powered flight or during gliding descent toward a target; and 3) altitude—many hypersonic missiles fly in the upper atmosphere for much of their trajectory, which is higher than most cruise missiles but lower than the apogee of standard ballistic missiles.

China’s new hypersonic delivery vehicles, which could be armed with either conventional or nuclear munitions, could better attack many time-sensitive, mobile, or high-value targets compared with non-hypersonic missiles as well as crewed or uncrewed planes. Such capabilities would impact the existing security balance in the Indo-Pacific and potentially contribute to escalating regional tensions. Hypersonics’ attributes make them especially difficult to intercept for the existing air, sea, and land-based missile defense systems of the United States and its allies, which have been designed to counter ballistic missiles flying more predictable trajectories in outer space or slower cruise missiles flying closer to the earth’s surface.

Beijing’s Hypersonic Portfolio

The PLA has invested heavily in building a massive intermediate-range missile arsenal. Though the United States has more strategic missiles for delivering nuclear warheads at intercontinental ranges of 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles) or more, its forward-based forces in Asia rely primarily on shorter-range missiles developed during the Cold War, such as the Navy’s subsonic Tomahawk Land Attack Missile that are deployed on U.S. surface ships and submarines. Indeed, until its recent demise, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty prohibited the United States from manufacturing, deploying, or flight-testing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500–5,500 km (300-3,400 miles), which are generally thought to be more destabilizing to regional theater security. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2020 China Military Power Report estimates that China (unhindered by the INF Treaty) has deployed more than 1,250 intermediate-range missiles. [1] Some of these include the 1,500 kilometer (932 miles)-range DF-21D “carrier killer,” the 4,000 km (2,485 miles) DF-26 “Guam Express” ballistic missiles (东风, Dong Feng ), the YJ-12 and YJ-18 (鹰击, Ying Ji ) supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, and several types of subsonic cruise missiles ( CSIS , updated July 16, 2020).

The PLA is now researching and developing two basic types of hypersonic missiles, which can be categorized based on their means of propulsion. The first group, hypersonic cruise missiles (HCM), rely on powered flight with air-breathing engines. The second group, hypersonic glide vehicles (HGV), are launched into the upper atmosphere (50-80 kilometers, or 30-50 miles) and then glide unpowered toward a target. Both types can reach distant targets more rapidly than China’s existing subsonic or even supersonic cruise missiles and warplanes. And although China’s ballistic missiles can fly as fast as these hypersonic systems, HCMs and HGVs have more unpredictable maneuverability, allowing for better circumvention of some aspects of present-day U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems. [2]

The first public demonstration of China’s apparently operational hypersonic capability came when the PLA displayed several DF-17s, a solid-fueled medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) with a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles), designed to launch the DF-ZF (also known as the WU-14) HGV during a 2019 National Day parade ( Xinhua , October 1, 2019). PRC media sources have also discussed deploying HGVs on longer-range ballistic missiles, including the new DF-41 intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) that is capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, and noted that HGV technology has become “an integral part of nuclear strategy” ( Xinhua , January 3, 2018), and that its “sophisticated trajectory…[makes] penetrating enemy defense networks an easy job” ( China Daily , August 1, 2020).

In February 2020, General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, then-head of U.S. Northern Command, testified that China was already “testing…an intercontinental-range hypersonic glide vehicle—similar to…[Russia’s] Avangard” ( U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee , February 13, 2020). Having both a traditional reentry vehicle capable of delivering multiple warheads on one ballistic missile and a HGV capable of carrying fewer warheads but better able to maneuver in unpredictable ways will reinforce China’s ability to overcome its adversaries’ missile defenses. The PLA Navy (PLAN) might also seek to emulate Russia’s ship-launched Tsirkon hypersonic capabilities and equip its JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) with nuclear-armed HGVs to further improve strategic nuclear deterrence.

As in the space race and other high-technology fields, China has made a major effort to catch up to and perhaps overtake Russian and U.S. capabilities. PRC research into the military potential of hypersonic technologies used to lag far behind the efforts of Russia and the United States. But during the past decade, China has invested heavily in new hypersonic research, development, test, and evaluation programs and facilities, and now both Chinese and foreign analysts argue that PRC hypersonics research has surpassed the U.S. in some regards ( Xinhua , June 2; CRS , updated July 9). China is constructing some of the world’s fastest wind tunnels ( South China Morning Post , May 31), which can simulate hypersonic flight conditions on the ground and streamline testing ( Sina.com , December 23, 2020). It is also developing a large-scale supercomputer program that could enable the better simulation, modeling, and development of hypersonic technologies and other advanced weapons development ( South China Morning Post , April 10). The 10th Near Space Flight Research Institute under the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) previously led much of China’s HGV research and development efforts ( China Brief , April 21, 2016). Other organizations heavily involved in hypersonics research include the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Mechanics (中国科学院力学研究所, Zhongguo kexue yuan lixue yanjiusuo ) and the Academy of Military Science (AMS)-affiliated China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center (CARDC, 中国空气动力研究与发展中心, Zhongguo kongqi dongli yanjiu yu fazhan zhongxin ) ( ASPI , October 31, 2019; China Brief , May 29, 2019).

China seeks to build international prestige by becoming a leading innovator in the hypersonics field ( Science , January 8, 2020). In 2018, Chinese scientists tested three different designs of scaled-down hypersonic aircraft, codenamed D18-1S, D18-2S, and D18-3S. These possessed distinct designs: one with a single vertical tail, another with two, and the third with a single wing above its body. The variety of designs permitted Chinese scientists to evaluate how various aerodynamic features can affect flight performance ( Global Times , November 6, 2018). In August of that year, the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics (CAAA, 中国航天空气动力技术研究院, Zhongguo hangtian kongqi dongle jishu yanjiu yuan ) announced the first official test flight of Starry Sky-2 (星空-2, Xing Kong-2 ), a new hypersonic glider employing experimental “waverider” technology, in which a hypersonic delivery vehicle rides shock waves generated by its own flight to boost lift, and which media reports suggested could be used as part of a hypersonic strike platform “capable of evading all existing air-defense networks” ( China Daily , August 6, 2018).

The PRC military-industrial complex is also researching HCMs powered by supersonic combustion ramjet (or scramjet) engines, which compress and ignite high-speed incoming air to generate vigorous thrust. According to media reports, the Institute of Mechanics last year conducted a ground test in which a scramjet engine ran for a record 10 minutes. If successfully applied during high speed flight, the technology would allow a missile to travel at sustained hypersonic speeds for some 4,000km (2,500 miles) ( South China Morning Post , May 31, 2020). This could eventually be used to develop a global power projection capability. [3]

Implications for Warfighting and Strategic Competition

Hypersonic missiles launched on planes or ships can reach targets further away than equivalent ground-based systems launched from mainland bases. More importantly, they can approach a target from a wider range of locations than if launched from a land-based system, compounding their ability to evade existing BMD systems. In October 2020, an amateur video posted online appeared to suggest that the PLA was developing an air-launched HCM capable of being carried by a strategic bomber such as the H-6N (轰, Hong) missile carrier aircraft or possibly a more advanced successor ( Twitter , October 17, 2020). In March of this year, the Beijing Institute of Technology published a study entitled, “Network for hypersonic UCAV swarms” which discussed how groups of future Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs, aka drones) could act in coordinated operations through networked sensors and communications at hypersonic speeds. [4]

The PLA will likely employ hypersonic systems in combination with its subsonic and supersonic delivery systems. Because of their speed and unique trajectory capabilities, hypersonic missiles can, as first-strike weapons, facilitate follow-on attacks by non-hypersonic strike systems by disabling an adversary’s air and missile defense systems. One PRC defense expert specifically observed that the range of the DF-17 would enable the system to reach the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) BMD system in South Korea and the SM-3 BMD interceptor in Japan, “which are security threats to China” ( Global Times, October 1, 2019).

In addition to directly bolstering the PLA’s warfighting capabilities, China seeks hypersonic delivery systems to weaken Washington’s extended deterrence guarantees to its allies and partners in Asia. A recent report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission notes that, “Capabilities that can credibly threaten the U.S. military also support Beijing’s aim to intimidate and coerce regional states by fueling doubts about U.S. ability or willingness to intervene in a crisis.” [5]

The PLA’s hypersonic delivery systems intensify Beijing’s challenge to the U.S.’ political-military primacy in the Indo-Pacific region. The effectiveness of China’s hypersonic capabilities in battle is uncertain; in addition to the PLA being largely untested in combat, hypersonics are still an emerging military technology. Furthermore, we do not know whether China, like the United States, will choose to only arm its hypersonic missiles with conventional munitions, or whether Beijing will follow Moscow’s lead and load some of its hypersonic delivery systems with nuclear warheads. In any case, China’s novel hypersonic capabilities could, alongside the growing power of the PLA in general, make PRC decision-makers more confident about their ability to employ force successfully against the U.S. military. If Chinese leaders believe that they could employ these capabilities to preemptively destroy or disable key U.S. defense systems, then this would give Beijing greater incentive to strike first, raising the risk of escalation and war in a crisis. [6] If other Asian countries believed that China could more effectively fight U.S. forces, this could weaken the credibility of U.S. security guarantees to allies in Asia and further undermine regional stability.

Some of the measures that the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies are already taking to minimize damage from the PLA’s traditional missile strike capability will also enhance defense against hypersonic weapons, for example passive measures that the U.S. military is pursuing to decrease the vulnerability of U.S. forward-based forces and facilities to China’s ballistic and cruise missiles that include deception, dispersal, hardening, concealment, and mobility, as well as redundancy, recovery, and reconstitution. [7] In the future, more active (and expensive) responses could encompass disrupting hypersonic data links and sensors, space-based sensors that can track missiles in the upper atmosphere, and novel technologies for interceptors. The 2019 Missile Defense Review directs that, “Moving forward, the United States, allies, and partners will pursue a comprehensive missile defense strategy that will deliver integrated and effective capabilities to counter ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missile threats” ( Office of the Secretary of Defense , January 17, 2019).   But U.S. policymakers have yet to agree on the balance of funding for hypersonic weapons systems, enabling technologies, supporting research and development infrastructure, and hypersonic missile defense ( CRS , updated July 9).

U.S. responses to China’s hypersonic challenge should also encompass non-military measures. The PRC’s failure to sign on to the now-expired INF treaty allowed it to develop and deploy destabilizing ballistic and cruise missile systems. The United States should aim to prevent a recurrence of this gap in coverage by striving to include China in future missile limitation agreements. The U.S. government should also work with its allies and partners (including European states and Israel) to strengthen controls over the transfer of equipment, material, and technologies that could help the PRC develop hypersonic weapons. Additionally, U.S. officials could discuss limiting sales of hypersonic weaponry to rogue countries such as Iran and North Korea with China and other states pursuing research in the hypersonic space. [9] Policymakers and defense planners alike would do well to address the potential risks presented to regional stability as much as possible while also conducting further research into understanding Chinese strategic thinking on hypersonic technology as well as its emerging capabilities.

Richard Weitz, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.

[1] Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020 (Arlington, VA: Department of Defense, 1 September 2020), https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF .

[ 2] Margot van Loon, “Hypersonic Weapons: A Primer,” in American Foreign Policy Council, Defense Technology Program Brief, no. 18 (May 2019), p. 3.

[3] Paul Bernstein and Dain Hancock, “China’s Hypersonic Weapons,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, January 27, 2021, https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/01/27/chinas-hypersonic-weapons/ .

[4] Shixun Luo, Zhongshan Zhang, Shuai Wang, Shuo Zhang, Jibo Dai, Xiangyuan Bu and Jianping An, “Network for hypersonic UCAV swarms,” Science China Information Sciences , volume 63, Article number: 140311 (2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11432-019-2765-7 .

[5] Jacob Stokes, “China’s Missile Program and U.S. Withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Updated February 4, 2019, p.5, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/China%20and%20INF_0.pdf .

[6] John T. Watts, Christian Trotti, Mark J. Massa, “Primer on Hypersonic Weapons in the Indo-Pacific Region, Atlantic Council, August 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Hypersonics-Weapons-Primer-Report.pdf .

[7] U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Countering Air and Missile Threats,” Joint Publication 3-01, April 21, 2017; validated May 2, 2018, V-15-18, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp3_01_pa.pdf ..

[8] “ 2019 Missile Defense Review,” U.S. Department of Defense, https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2018/11-2019-Missile-Defense-Review/The%202019%20MDR_Executive%20Summary.pdf , p. 22.

[9] Richard H. Speier, George Nacouzi, Carrie A. Lee and Richard M. Moore, “Hypersonic Missile Nonproliferation,” (RAND Cooperation Report, RADN, 2018), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2137.html.

UK to develop hypersonic missiles to catch up with China and Russia by 2030 - report

Plans are at an early stage, according to a newspaper report, although there is no decision on whether the missile will be launched from land, sea or air.

Sunday 28 April 2024 05:29, UK

Britain plans to equip its armed forces with a homegrown hypersonic cruise missile by the end of the decade, according to a report.

Military chiefs are under pressure to catch up with China, Russia and the US by developing a weapon capable of flying at speeds higher than Mach 5 - five times the speed of sound, according to The Sunday Telegraph.

The Ministry of Defence wants the missile to be designed and built in the UK and to enter service by 2030.

Plans are at an early stage, the newspaper reported, although there is no decision on whether the missile will be launched from land, sea or air.

It comes after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to spend 2.5% of gross domestic product on defence by 2030.

Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News

Ballistic weapons can also reach hypersonic speeds but the difference is in manoeuvrability - ballistic weapons generally have fixed paths but the path of a hypersonic weapon can be changed after launch, making it difficult to destroy.

The US, Russia and China are the main players in the hypersonic weapons race but other countries, such as North Korea, claim to have tested hypersonic weapons.

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• Ministry of Defence

Read more: Sean Bell: Putin's 'undefeatable' missile was a costly illusion US tests hypersonic weapon with speeds 'five times greater than speed of sound'

The development of hypersonic capabilities is part of Pillar Two of AUKUS - a defence and security pact between the UK, Australia and the US.

Last month the US tested a hypersonic cruise missile on an atoll in the Marshall Islands in a message to its rival in the Pacific - China. It is the latest in a number of hypersonic weapons tests the country has completed in recent years.

A spokesperson for the MoD would not comment in detail on the development of Britain's hypersonic missile capability, citing national security, but confirmed "hypersonic technologies to further develop UK sovereign advanced capabilities" were being pursued.

"We continue to invest in our equipment to meet current and future threats," they added.

Related Topics

Look out, US Navy carriers: China’s hypersonic rocket drone is seen in the wild

S omething strange and new took flight over China recently, attached to the belly of a heavy bomber belonging to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force, the PLAAF. 

It might be a supersonic reconnaissance drone – one designed to hunt down US Navy aircraft carriers on the vast Pacific Ocean. Or it could be an even faster “hypersonic” vehicle. It’s hard to say from the single blurry image of the thing that has circulated on social media. All we can say for sure is that the Chinese military is up to something . And whatever it is, it’s bad news for the United States and the whole free world.

The photo in question depicts a Xian H-6 medium bomber flying high over the ground – so high that, from the vantage point of the photographer, it’s little more than a winged blur. Equally blurry: whatever the bomber was carrying under its fuselage. 

That indistinct payload is dark in color, shaped like an arrowhead and around 33 feet in length. It gives the general impression of a drone – but which drone?

The PLAAF is known to be developing at least two types of high-speed unmanned aerial vehicles that depend on a bomber to launch them. Both roughly match the basic shape of the object under the H-6 in the photo.

One is the AVIC WZ-8 . This supersonic UAV made its first public appearance at a rehearsal for a parade in Beijing in 2019. The UAV’s narrow fuselage and wings – ideal for fast supersonic flight – strongly imply the WZ-8 is a recon drone. One whose rocket engine isn’t suitable for takeoff from a traditional runway, and instead requires mid-air launch.

Chinese media concur with that impression. The WZ-8 “would be expected to play a key role should there be a conflict with US aircraft carrier strike groups in the South China Sea or western Pacific,” the South China Morning Post reported.

American carrier groups could lead any allied intervention on Taiwan’s behalf should China make good on decades of threats and launch an invasion across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. Stopping those carriers is one of the PLA’s top priorities.

The Chinese military has deployed an array of weapons specifically for attacking carriers: cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, in particular. But a missile is only as good as its targeting, and in the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, even something as large as a 1,000-foot-long aircraft carrier can be hard to find.

A camera-equipped satellite might be able to detect a carrier, but only when the satellite crosses the patch of ocean where the ship happens to be. Most satellites travel along orbits that allow them to surveil only narrow swathes of the Earth below. 

A drone could help fill the surveillance gaps. But a drone, unlike a satellite, is vulnerable to interceptions by a carrier’s planes and escorts. In developing the supersonic WZ-8, the Chinese are betting that high speed – potentially several times the speed of sound – might give the drone a fighting chance of penetrating a carrier’s defenses and pinpointing the ship’s location for its rocket crews.

PLA leadership in Beijing seems confident in the WZ-8’s basic design, which might be why – according to a leaked US intelligence report – the PLA Air Force has rushed the drone into front-line service with at least one regiment in Liu’an, in eastern China.

It’s possible the H-6 in the notorious photo was carrying a WZ-8 for further trials, or as practice for combat operations. But it’s also possible whatever the bomber was hauling wasn’t a WZ-8 at all. Joseph Trevithick, a reporter for The War Zone , quoted aviation expert Andreas Rupprecht claiming the payload in the photo is too large to be WZ-8.

Be skeptical. Reasonable assessments pin the rarely-seen WZ-8 at around 37 feet in length. An H-6 is 114 feet long – and the thing it’s carrying in the photo stretches along a quarter or third of its length. Which could mean 37 feet.

Trevithick posited that, instead of a WZ-8, the bomber’s payload might have been an MD-22, a hypersonic drone Guangdong Aerodynamic Research Academy is developing for possible military use. A hypersonic vehicle travels at least five times the speed of sound while still being able to manoeuvre.

We know almost nothing about the MD-22 except that it’s very fast and around 35 feet in length. If the thing under the H-6 was an MD-22, then the MD-22 looks a lot like the WZ-8. 

All this speculation might amount to a distinction without a difference. An operational MD-22 might perform the same role that the operational WZ-8 apparently does: penetrating US air defences in order to locate America’s most valuable warships, its carriers.

That the Chinese are testing or training with some kind of very fast recon drone – either a WZ-8 or MD-22 – is a reminder of just how serious they are about hunting American carriers. And it’s also a reminder of how important it is for the Americans to defend their carriers against high-speed drones.

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UK to develop hypersonic missile by 2030 to match China and Russia

Britain hopes to catch up with countries like russia and china, who have already developed hypersonic missiles.

UK military chiefs are putting together plans to equip the armed forces with a hypersonic cruise missile by 2030, a report has said.

Military chiefs have put plans in motion for a weapon capable of reaching speeds beyond Mach 5 – five times the speed of sound – in a bid to catch up with China, Russia and the US, according to The Sunday Telegraph .

According to the report, the Ministry of Defence wants the weapon to be both designed and built in Britain exclusively by 2030.

The Government has not yet decided whether the missile would be launched from land, sea, or air while the ministry has engaged up to 80 companies to come up with a design late last year, signing a Hypersonic Technologies & Capability Development Framework Agreement.

“Cutting-edge projects like this are only possible because of the massive new investment the Government has made this week in defence innovation,” a Government source said. It comes days after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to boost the defence budget by £75bn over the next six years.

That followed a pledge by Sir Keir Starmer who said a Labour government would aim to also increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

But the construction project is expected to be very difficult as not all of the materials needed to construct the missiles have been created yet, and crucially must be able to withstand high temperatures involved in hypersonic speeds.

UK will not reach 2.5% of defence spending until after General Election, ministers admit

The US, meanwhile, has already tested a hypersonic cruise missile as it tries to keep up with Russia and China.

Washington reportedly hopes to have its first hypersonic weapons in service by next year, despite a raft of delays.

US President Joe Biden has called Russian hypersonic missile attacks on Ukrainian cities “almost impossible to stop”. Russia has used the missiles in attacks against Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv, and Kyiv .

Russia’s Kinzhal hyperbolic missile can allegedly reach Mach 10, equivalent to more than 7,600mph. Last May, Ukraine claimed it had repelled the Kinzhal hyperbolic missiles above Kyiv, using air defence systems including the US-made Patriot systems.

China, meanwhile tested its hypersonic missiles back in 2021 , while North Korea was also developing hypersonic missiles as early as 2021 .

A spokesperson for the MoD refused to comment in detail on the project due to national security concerns, but said hypersonic technologies were being pursued.

“We continue to invest in our equipment to meet current and future threats,” they said.

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The Telegraph: UK to develop its hypersonic missile by 2030 to catch up with China, Russia, and US

Britain plans to equip its armed forces with homegrown hypersonic cruise missiles by the end of 2030, according to The Telegraph.

Military leaders plan to develop high-speed missiles surpassing Mach 5 speed as the UK races to catch up with China, Russia, and the US. The UK’s Defense Ministry is adamant that this new weapon must be constructed entirely in Britain within this decade.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has identified the hypersonic missiles project as one of the directions for the planned £75 billion boost in defense spending over the next six years.

One possibility involves developing a weapon that could be installed on fighter jets such as the Typhoon or F-35, offering a shorter range and smaller payload than larger ground-launched weapons. Alternatively, the missile could be launched from UK warships.

The project is overseen directly by the UK’s Defense Ministry headquarters in Whitehall rather than being delegated to one of the armed services. Since late last year, the ministry has been coordinating a consortium of approximately 80 companies to explore potential design options.

Sources reveal that constructing hypersonic missiles poses significant challenges to engineers due to the fact that some materials capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures associated with hypersonic speeds do not yet exist.

The engineers are also developing a British version of a “scramjet” engine, which relies on compressed air at supersonic speeds to aid fuel combustion.

While the Defense Ministry refrained from providing detailed plans about the project, citing security concerns, a spokesperson emphasized the pursuit of hypersonic technologies to bolster the UK’s advanced capabilities and address present and future threats.

Most missile projects work as international collaborations between the UK and at least one foreign ally, making the project unusual.

Additionally, a separate project may see the UK acquiring more advanced hypersonic weapons through the AUKUS partnership with the US and Australia.

Hypersonic missiles, capable of flying at over 4,000 miles per hour, have the ability to evade air defenses and maneuver in mid-flight – that’s what makes them especially desirable to possess within armed forces.

The US has already tested a hypersonic cruise missile with a successful outcome. The country also says the weapon is crucial to keep pace with missile technology in Russia and China, which both claim to have developed similar technology.

Russia has used five ZM22 Zircon missiles to attack Kyiv since the start of 2024, according to the Kyiv Military Administration. High-speed missile Zircon is one of the latest developments in Russian missile technology, which Moscow presents as “a serious threat to Western armies.”

Zircon missiles were designed for deployment on ships and submarines, with possible adaptation for ground-based launch systems. This expands the options for their use, including unexpected ones, because ground-based missile systems are less noticeable than MiG-31Ks).

US President Joe Biden has described Russian hypersonic missiles launched at Ukrainian cities as “almost impossible to stop.” A Patriot air defense system, which Ukraine has, is the only weapon in the country’s army that is capable of intercepting such missiles.

The US has faced setbacks in its hypersonic missile programs, enduring months of delays and failures. Despite these challenges, a recent successful test flight over the Pacific Ocean signals progress, with Washington aiming to deploy its first hypersonic weapons as early as next year.

Meanwhile, the UK is planning to invest up to £1 billion in its hypersonic project over the next seven years through the defense consortium.

This escalating competition over hypersonics, evocative of the Cold War arms race, has prompted debate over whether the missiles are worth their high price tag or better to invest in the existing weaponry.

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