Hypersonic weapons are coming, and the Pentagon needs to spend more on defending against them
Share to twitterIn the year since Russian President Vladimir Putin declared to the world that his nation had successfully tested a hypersonic weapon, funding for similar weapons in the U.S. has greatly increased. The Pentagon now plans to spend an average of over $2 billion per year through 2024 on developing hypersonic systems for the Air Force, Army and Navy.
Which is why the Pentagon needs to prepare for defending against them now, before Russian systems and their likely Chinese counterparts become operational. However, while the Defense Department is making rapid progress in applying hypersonic technology to an array of munitions, it isn’t spending much on defending against them. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2020 budget request seeks $2.6 billion for hypersonic weapons work, but only $157 million of that is for defending against hypersonic threats.
Birth-to-death tracking, as it is called, is even more important when hypersonic weapons are approaching than when threats are purely ballistic, because it is so hard to predict the path maneuvering hypersonic vehicles might follow. If North Korea launches a ballistic missile towards America, defenders can make an educated guess early-on what the intended target is; that is not the case with gliding hypersonic weapons.
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