What do China, Russia, North Korea and Iran have in common? Each member of this axis of aggressors has developed (or at least has claimed to have developed) operational hypersonic weapons. These adversaries’ hypersonic capabilities significantly enhance their ability to threaten American interests at home and abroad, including the ability for the United States to quickly come to the aid of its allies in crisis or wartime.
Adversary hypersonic capabilities seriously challenge the effectiveness of U.S. deterrence by threatening the U.S. homeland and forward bases with survivable, long-range conventional and nuclear lethal effects. To address this growing challenge, the U.S. Congress, Department of Defense (DoD), and industry all need to ensure that U.S. programs to develop both offensive hypersonic weapons and counter-hypersonic defenses are a national priority, are effectively and affordably executed, and rapidly deliver to the warfighter these essential capabilities in meaningful numbers.
Strategic context
Today, U.S. adversaries have fielded, or are developing, a range of hypersonic missiles — from Russia’s Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, Zircon ship-launched hypersonic strike missile and Avangard ground-launched nuclear-armed intercontinental hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, to China’s growing family of ballistic and hypersonic glide vehicles — that pose complicated challenges to U.S. deployed forces and the U.S. homeland. The October 2023 Congressional Strategic Posture Commission warned that these nations may be developing plans to employ these weapons against the U.S. homeland in the event of a conflict and called for U.S. policy to prioritize missile defenses to address such strikes.
U.S. policymakers are hardly ignorant of this threat or the importance of fielding this capability. The DoD is investing significantly in offensive hypersonic weapons, counter-hypersonic defenses and upgraded sensor networks for hypersonic kill chains. However, despite increased attention, serious questions remain as to the timeliness, adequacy, and prioritization of hypersonic capabilities in U.S. research, development, procurement and fielding decisions.
Hypersonic weapons provide key advantages
The advent of hypersonic weapons on the battlefield complicates military decision-making enormously. Commanders have little time to react, the missiles themselves are highly survivable, and they have a long range to ensure survivability of their launch platform. Hypersonic weapons can defeat heavily defended, high-value targets from long range within minutes. For example, to deliver effects on a target at 500 miles, a traditional subsonic cruise missile, such as the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile or Tomahawk, would take approximately one hour of flight time. Hypersonic missiles can make that trip in less than 10 minutes.
Additionally, hypersonic weapons enable precision deep-strike capabilities while maintaining unmatched survivability due to their extreme speed, altitude and unpredictable flight path, making them highly effective against anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategies likely to be encountered by U.S. and allied forces during a future conflict.
A robust inventory of land-, sea- and air-launched hypersonic strike weapons is essential to maintaining U.S. strategic deterrence. Hypersonic weapons enable the military to hold heavily defended, high-value targets at risk anywhere in the world with conventional warheads, thereby providing an additional level of effectiveness prior to the use of nuclear weapons. This optionality would complicate an adversary’s strategic calculus, particularly in scenarios involving strategic simultaneity or opportunistic aggression, forcing the aggressor to reconsider the risks of escalation.
Unfortunately, potential U.S. adversaries have seized the initiative to develop, field and use this new class of weapons to help create an asymmetry that challenges U.S. and allied battlefield dominance. The U.S. must not let that asymmetry persist.
The United States must close the gap
While the U.S. has made progress developing a first generation of air-, land- and sea-launched hypersonic strike weapons over the past five years, Washington has not yet fielded its first weapon. Most notably, the U.S. Air Force decided not to field the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) boost-glide hypersonic weapon when it was ready at the end of 2023, and the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile will not field in significant numbers until the end of the decade. Additionally, technical challenges have delayed the fielding of the Army Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) and Navy Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) weapon, originally scheduled to field in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
As a result, America’s ability to dominate the current and near-future battlespace has been significantly challenged. Without comparable hypersonic capabilities, U.S. forces will struggle to overcome the A2/AD challenges they face from adversary systems and will be severely challenged to deliver timely lethal effects against heavily defended, high-value targets at range on a high-tempo battlefield enabled by adversary hypersonic and ballistic missile capabilities. Such an asymmetry weakens U.S. deterrence, including extended deterrence guarantees to allies, due to a reduced ability to mount a timely and effective response to an adversary’s regional aggression.
Congress and the DoD must prioritize fielding capability in meaningful numbers
The U.S. must prioritize fielding hypersonic capabilities now as part of a comprehensive warfighting strategy. Doing so will maintain the U.S. ability to dominate the battlefield against an increasingly capable set of adversaries. These adversaries have created a highly contested environment to defeat U.S. and allied forces across all domains: air, land, sea and space. This multi-domain threat must be addressed with a comprehensive layered defeat strategy that leverages new offensive and defensive capabilities to attack and disable the adversary’s high-end systems before and after launch.
Hypersonic strike weapons, launched from stand-off ranges sufficient to protect launch platforms, will be essential to allowing U.S. forces to defeat these systems with lethal, survivable effects in a timescale of relevance on a modern battlefield. This offensive capability must be coupled with effective, layered, kinetic and non-kinetic defenses against adversary hypersonic and ballistic missile capabilities. The services must work with the combatant commands to respond to their critical demand signal. They must then respond with an acquisition strategy that fields hypersonic systems in the numbers necessary to complement, and in many cases enable, traditional weapons to achieve dominance on the highly-contested battlefield of the future.
Recommendations
To strengthen U.S. hypersonic capabilities, the DoD must pursue a comprehensive modernization strategy. In the near term, the services need to work aggressively with their industry partners to define an immediate fielding plan for ARRW, LRHW and CPS in meaningful numbers by implementing the most-cost efficient production rate possible.
Additionally, they should identify accelerated block upgrade programs to continuously enhance the respective capabilities while working with industry to aggressively implement cost-reduction initiatives that will be critical to fielding hypersonic weapons at scale. DoD should develop next-generation systems including reusable hypersonic aircraft and accelerate defensive capabilities against adversary hypersonic threats.
Success requires expanding the nation’s ground and flight test infrastructure to enable accelerated learning, advancing modeling and simulation tools, strengthening the science and technology base and developing the necessary workforce. The strategy must also energize the broad industrial base to drive innovation and affordability, while leveraging international partnerships to accelerate fielding of these vital capabilities. We call on leaders and stakeholders across government, industry and academia to join us in developing and implementing solutions to accelerate the development and fielding of essential hypersonic capabilities.
Deborah Lee James served as the 23rd Secretary of the Air Force, serves as an Atlantic Council Board Member, and is co-Chair of the Atlantic Council Hypersonic Capabilities Task Force.
Ryan McCarthy served as the 24th Secretary of the Army and is co-Chair of the Hypersonic Capabilities Task Force.
Michael E. White is the former principal director for hypersonics in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (modernization) and is the author of Atlantic Council Hypersonic Capabilities Task Force papers on the hypersonics imperative.
This article first appeared in the March 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
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