Pentagon urges CEOs of largest defense companies to accelerate hypersonic weapons development as US lags behind China
By Kristin Fisher
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin encouraged CEOs from more than two dozen of America’s largest defense companies to accelerate hypersonic weapons development during a high-level meeting Thursday.
“This is absolutely serious,” Austin said, referring to the threat posed by Chinese and Russian hypersonic programs, according to a CEO who participated in the virtual meeting. “We are distracted now by Russia, but China is the real threat.”
During the meeting, multiple CEOs described the need for more wind tunnels to test hypersonic vehicles as a “choke point in testing.” The US only has a handful of hypersonic wind tunnels, according to one CEO, while China has about 12 and “they’re building about one every six months.”
The CEO pointed to an industry-wide “fear of failure” in testing hypersonic weapons, echoing remarks by now-retired Air Force Gen. John Hyten in October. While the US had conducted approximately nine hypersonic tests in roughly the last five years, the Chinese had conducted “hundreds,” according to Hyten.
“We’ve decided that failure is bad,” Hyten said at the time. “Nope, failure is part of the learning process. And if you want to get back to speed, you better figure out how to put speed back into [sic] and that means taking risk and that means learning from failures and that means failing fast and moving fast.”
Top executives from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Leidos, Aerojet Rocketdyne, BAE Systems, L3Harris, and about a half dozen other defense companies were represented at Thursday’s meeting, which was chaired by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. It was not classified, but participants agreed to meet in a classified session soon.
“We all need to get in a SCIF and do it face-to-face,” the CEO said.
Traveling at Mach 5 or faster, hypersonic weapons are difficult to detect, posing a challenge to missile defense systems. Hypersonic missiles can travel at a far lower trajectory than high-arcing ballistic missiles, which can be easily detectable. They can also maneuver and evade missile defense systems.
China and Russia’s advances and recent failed tests have led the Pentagon to inject more urgency into the US program and increase the resources they are devoting to hypersonic weapons development. The FY22 budget committed $3.8 billion to hypersonic research, an increase from the previous year’s $3.2 billion.
The US hypersonic industry has suffered problems and setbacks in recent months. In October, the Pentagon said a test of a hypersonic glide body failed due to a problem with the rocket propelling it to hypersonic speeds, and in April, a hypersonic missile failed to separate from a B-52H Stratofortress bomber during a test at Edwards Air Force Base.
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