Weapons

US Seeks Hypersonic Weapons as China Zooms Ahead

The US is facing an emerging threat in the form of hypersonic weapons, leading to calls for the US to develop its own defensive and offensive hypersonic capabilities.

"China's hypersonic weapons development outpaces ours," Admiral Harry Harris, head of US Pacific Command, told Congress on Wednesday.

"We're falling behind," Harris said, echoing US Air Force General Paul Selva's recent comments that the US has "lost our technical advantage in hypersonics" to Beijing and Moscow, whose programs have accelerated forward at mach speed.

The military needs to address the growing disparity "in a most aggressive way," according to Harris, "in order to ensure that we have the capabilities to both defend against China's hypersonic weapons and develop our own offensive hypersonic weapons."

Hypersonic weapons can travel at extremely high speeds — upwards of five times the speed of sound, or nearly twice the speed of any existent military aircraft — and thus evade missile defense systems. Either conventional weapons or nuclear weapons could theoretically be attached to a hypersonic missile, both horrifying prospects, but the raw kinetic energy of the projectile moving so fast is sufficient to wreak great destruction all on its own simply by hitting the target.