Of course we have hypersonic missiles. Every ICBM is hypersonic. IRBMs, too. Plus, we were flying hypersonic, manned atmospheric craft in the 1950s. Remember the X-15?
We were doing boost-glide stuff like Russia and China back in the 1980s. True, there have been no high profile fielded projects by the US. Which isn't a huge surprise, we really don't have a pressing need to kill carriers. And if we do, we have a very different approach using low observable weapon systems.
Now our public use case for hypersonics is the kind of stuff that Noodles is all lathered about. Which is to precisely target something hardened anywhere on the face of the globe in under half an hour that isn't an ICBM. In other words, air-breathing hypersonics. We can't do that, but neither can anyone else. Now we have been doing some promising work with the Australians, which I suppose has already been shut down because Aussies, and every once in a while China has an excited press release, but progress is slow. This is the realm of scramjets, rotating detonation engines and such. Everything else is just a rocket, and those have been quantified risks for going on a century and not something new, scary and we need to panic and conquer large swaths of the globe...
Which, come to think of it, is a very Russian outlook. |
