Despite Vastly Outspending China and Russia, US Lags Both in Missile Tech

A Russian Yars intercontinental ballistic missile launcher parades through Red Square during the Victory Day military parade in central Moscow on May 9, 2022. Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

China just announced it has developed a space-launched hypersonic glide vehicle weapon capable of reaching a target anywhere on the planet within 30 minutes of launch. The reentry glide vehicle (RGV) travels at about Mach 20 while in space and is designed to survive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, whereupon it glides to its target at speeds greater than Mach 5.

Of course, for decades all major nuclear powers have had intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that travel through space at speeds in the Mach 20 range before reentering Earth’s atmosphere and striking their targets at hypersonic speeds. China’s RGV differs from ICBMs in that it is not limited to a ballistic trajectory, is capable of changing targets multiple times after launch, and can maneuver to avoid interception. This is certainly an advantage, but given that no one can really effectively intercept decades-old ICBMs, the question becomes: Just how important is this additional maneuverability?

Many in the Pentagon do believe that developing hypersonic weapons is very important, yet despite decades of research and development and many billions of dollars, the United States is years behind China and Russia in deployable hypersonic weapons. Hopefully, the successful testing of the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missile puts the United States on the path to closing the gap, but it’s not like China and Russia are just waiting for the United States to catch up.

With the United States spending nearly seven times as much on its military as Russia and about three times as much as China, an obvious question comes to mind. Why is the United States years behind both Russia and China when it comes to deployable hypersonic weapons? The answer to that question has many parts. The biggest part is that when it comes to developing and fielding affordable weapon systems that can be reliably deployed, a strong argument can be made that with respect to bang for the buck, the United States is dead last. U.S. taxpayers pay exorbitant prices for missiles, and there is little doubt that hypersonic missiles will be even more expensive. Indeed, paying way too much pretty much applies to all the weapons systems developed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But beyond general inefficiency and profligacy with taxpayer dollars, much of U.S. weapons development suffers from an acute case of what could be characterized as paralysis by analysis—analysis paralysis. Rather than building many prototypes and testing them to get the real-world data necessary to rapidly develop a working system, defense contractors spend billions on developing complex models that will theoretically predict how hypersonics perform. The problem is that no matter how complex the models, the data collected by building a prototype and actually flying it gives you better data. This is not to say that modeling is not critical to modern weapon systems development, but that if you can feed your models lots and lots of data from real-world tests, they will improve much faster than trying to extrapolate and interpolate data from limited test flights. It turns out that conducting extensive real-world testing, including destructive testing, is actually less expensive than endless modeling.

Such testing—and the mindset supporting such testing—is perhaps the number one reason SpaceX was so successful in meeting its requirements for NASA’s commercial space program, while Boeing, with its much larger budget, continues to flounder. And SpaceX continues to be willing to suffer losses of its test spacecraft on the theory that doing so accelerates development, and ultimately costs less than trying to model its way to success.

Unsurprisingly, China has leveraged real-world testing to leap ahead of the United States. In a December 2021 Defense Post article, retired U.S. Air Force Gen. John Hyten noted that the United States has only conducted nine hypersonic missile tests (as of December 2021), whereas China has already carried out “hundreds” of missile trials. “Single digits vs hundreds is not a good place,” he said.

Further, when you test real-world systems, you are also able to see how the actual hardware and components perform under stress and make corrections when those components fail. Conducting many real-world tests reduces the cost of fixing things after a system is declared operational.

Once again, this is not to say that modeling is not useful; however, models populated with lots and lots of real-world data will outperform models that don’t have that advantage.

Both Russia and China having already fielded hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles that can deliver both conventional and nuclear warheads. These missiles, including anti-ship ballistic missiles like the DF-21D, can be used to execute hard-to-counter precision tactical strikes that could be used to take out our air bases, ships, surveillance and tracking assets, and other targets. And as of today, we have no effective defense against such strikes.

That the United States has fallen behind both China and Russia in missile technology, including hypersonics, despite spending many times more on national defense, is just another piece of evidence that spending more is not the answer. Rather, we need to spend our defense dollars far more efficiently to develop weapon systems that meet current needs and can be cost-effectively upgraded to meet future needs. This will require major disruptive defense reform far beyond what the Department of Government Efficiency will be able to deliver in a year or two.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.