EXPERIMENTS IN HYPERSPEED


What are hypersonic weapons, why does the Army want them, and are they as revolutionary as they sound?


by Ms. Mary Kate Aylward — 1998 —


U.S. intelligence locates Osama bin Laden at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan. Navy ships in the Arabian Sea launch cruise missiles, which take two hours to reach the target 1,100 miles away. Te camp is destroyed but bin Laden survives: He had left less than an hour earlier.


— 2003 —


DOD requests funding for the Conventional Prompt Global Strike program, citing the need to be able to hit “fleeting targets.”


— 2011 —


After several failures, DOD’s first successful test of a hyper- sonic weapon occurs: Te Army launches a missile from Hawaii that lands 30 minutes later in the Marshall Islands, approximately 2,000 nautical miles (or 2,300 standard miles) away.


— 2013 —


Te Chinese military’s “Science of Military Strategy” (an authoritative study of China’s strategic position) notes: “Te United States is in the process of implementing a conventional ‘Prompt Global Strike’ plan. Once it has functional capabilities, it will be used to implement conventional strikes against our nuclear missile forces and will force us into a disadvantaged, passive position.”


— 2014 —


China conducts the first of at least seven tests of a hyper- sonic weapon.


— March 2018 —


Russian President Vladimir Putin claims to have finished testing an “invincible” Mach 10 hypersonic cruise missile that “can also maneuver at all phases of its flight trajectory, which also allows it to overcome all existing and, I think, prospective anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense systems, delivering nuclear and conventional warheads,” accord- ing to translations provided by the Russian government.


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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY


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