The U.S. remains behind China and Russia in the development of hypersonic systems, and catching up will require the Pentagon to accelerate the recruiting and education of experts in the field, invest heavily in test capabilities and work with industry to create a hypersonics industrial base.
So said technical experts, members of Congress, and a senior Defense Department official during an Oct. 18 streaming event hosted by The Hill.
Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said the Pentagon is sponsoring scholarships for both undergraduate and graduate work in hypersonics-related fields.
“Last year, we had 482 scholars” enter the program, which pays for bachelors, masters, and Ph.D. programs in exchange for a post-graduate commitment to work in government a matching number of years. She said the Pentagon is looking for a “significant increase” in that number next year.
“We also need to figure out how to keep the talent…in this country,” Shyu said, noting that many countries and foreign firms are anxious to hire hypersonics experts.
Shyu insisted that there is a great deal of urgency in the Pentagon’s efforts to develop hypersonic weapons and match other countries in this regard, but cautioned that it is not the sole area of competition, and hypersonics should not be emphasized at the expense of other worthwhile technology pursuits.
Hypersonics match Russia and China’s strategic goals, but the U.S. has many different priorities, Shyu said, calling hypersonic weapons simply part of a “vast portfolio” of new technologies the U.S. is pursuing for future weapons. It is one of 21 priority areas of scientific research being pursued by her office. Asked if hypersonic weapons will replace any weapons now in the inventory, she repeated that they will be “part of the portfolio.”
Shyu said there is a “significant amount” of funding in the fiscal 2023 budget for the hypersonic test enterprise and predicted a larger amount in the 2024 budget now being built.
Asked about Russia’s use of hypersonic missiles in Ukraine, Shyu said “not everything” demands a hypersonic solution, and Russia’s targeting of a dam with such a weapon was “not the best use” of the technology.
“The dam is still there,” she noted.
Shyu said she will also seek ways to simplify hypersonic systems toward increasing their produceability and therefore lowering their cost.
“If they’re too expensive, you can’t afford very many,” she said.
Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ), chair of the House Armed Services tactical air & land forces subcommittee, said he believes there is bipartisan support for hypersonics development and an understanding on both sides of the political aisle that the technology is essential, and that the U.S. is in a catch-up mode.
While he is concerned about the pace of progress, “I think we’re going to be able to meet the timelines” the various services have set for achieving initial operational capability with their various hypersonic weapon systems.
Norcross said he’s concerned, too, not only about a shortage of scientific and engineering talent, but a shortage of workers in aerospace trades, and said Congress should work harder to attract people to work in these trades, which he said can be very lucrative, without the need for “a lot of college debt.”
In visits with allies, Norcross said they have the same workforce concerns.
Asked how he makes the case for strong defense outlays with members of his party who advocate spending less on national security, Norcross said that aggression from China and Russia is “absolutely the case” for why defense should not be shorted in the budget.
“We can absolutely spend it better,” he said, insisting that “the oversight we perform is critically important” but “now, more than ever” defense is a high priority. “We need to spend it, but spend it wisely,” he said.
The industrial base has “not been given the right signals to be ready for this,” he added, and “we have to ramp up.”
Donations of weapons to Ukraine is “increasing … the challenges” of keeping the U.S. military stocked and ready, Norcross added. He also called House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s recent comments—that getting Ukraine military aid through Congress will be harder if Republicans win back the House—“surprising, given what we are hearing, both in open and classified sessions with our colleagues.” There are plenty of checks and balances and “accountability” for the aid, he said.
He also said he doesn’t see any “gaps in support … for our allies in this case.”
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), in a recorded interview included in the broadcast, said hypersonics is “maybe the most important issue facing the future of our strategic forces.” He claimed there is a “strong consensus” between the two chambers of Congress and between the political parties to provide the needed funds for it.
In the coming National Defense Authorization Act, there is a “hypersonics initiative” to provide more research and development money, to the tune of an additional $2 billion, he said.
Lamborn cited test capacity for hypersonics as a key concern, and said the U.S. is well behind China in that regard. He said he’s still trying to “get to the bottom” of why hypersonics was neglected for so long after the U.S. did pioneering work in the field and allowed China to capitalize on that research and get ahead.
“We kind of dropped it … thinking other things were higher priorities,” Lamborn said, adding that it is his “A-1” priority. He insisted that hypersonics “parity” with China and Russia will be a “stabilizing, not destabilizing” development. He also said he’s pushing for development of space tracking systems that will help in building a hypersonic missile defense capability.
Mark Lewis, director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute, said China and Russia are ahead of the U.S. in hypersonics “by any measure I can construct,” those countries having “stolen our homework.”
They built on our success, built on our research, and they’ve gone to deployed systems while we’re still in the research and development phase,” Lewis said, before noting that Russia’s failure to use hypersonic weapons in Ukraine “very effectively” says more about Russia’s capabilities “than about the capabilities of hypersonics.”
There is reason for optimism in the bipartisan support for hypersonics and its high priority with the Pentagon, Lewis said, and “all the services have hypersonics programs, and they all make sense within the context of those services.”
Echoing Lamborn, Lewis said the key roadblock to hypersonics success is test infrastructure. Investments are being made “but we’re still not there,” with a “backlog” in tunnel work as well as flight test. There’s a waiting list of “months, if not years” for access to certain kinds of tunnels and airspace.
“That’s not a recipe for success,” he said.
Meanwhile, explaining the importance of hypersonics is still a recurring issue.
“You would think the case has already been made … it’s been studied to death,” Lewis said. He noted that in various wargames, if the U.S. faces an adversary with hypersonic weapons, “We lose. It’s as simple as that.”
Another roadblock is coordination, and hypersonic advance needs to be viewed as a “whole of nation, whole of government problem if we’re going to turn this capability over to our warfighters.”
Kelly Stephani, a professor of hypersonics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagn, said “the window is closing” on getting hypersonics technology moving at the right speed because it takes up to eight years to develop a Ph.D. in appropriate disciplines. Given where other countries currently stand, the U.S. is significantly behind, she said.
“We need to ramp up … yesterday,” she said, echoing the remark that tradespeople are needed to translate theory into hardware.
“We have to increase tenfold our investment” in recruiting and educating hypersonic engineers and scientists, Stephani said.
“If you think about the number of masters and PhDs we’re producing now, it’s not sufficient to replace the retiring workforce. So if we’re going to get serious about this … we need to invest more in these university partnerships, they need to be integrated directly with government and industry partners, so our students are ready to transition upon graduation,” Stephani added.
On top of that, industry is challenged to manufacture hypersonics-specialized materials and components “at scale,” Stephani said. This will require “reinventing our strategy and approach” to some items, too many of which are sourced from overseas.
Lewis said China “worries me the most” because they are the closest to fielding true operational capabilities in significant numbers—the intelligence community has kept track of the Chinese progress in that area, and the Chinese themselves have showcased it at time.
“It’s not a secret. They showed it off at a military parade in 2019,” Lewis noted.
Hypersonics “exactly match their needs in their part of the world,” Lewis said, giving China the ability to hold naval vessels and Air Force bases in the region at risk. “It makes sense in the context of what the Chinese hope to gain,” he said.