The Air Force’s hypersonics efforts are focused on an air-breathing cruise missile in the near term, a reuseable platform further out, and the possible end of its boost-glide ARRW program, Lt. Gen. Dale White told the House Armed Services Committee.
Congress is mandating biennial updates on the Pentagon’s strategy for developing, buying, and fielding offensive and defensive hypersonic systems, according to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which is poised to pass both chambers this week. They also want a plan identifying overland test ranges ...
Sluggish testing is holding back U.S. efforts to develop and field new hypersonic weapon systems, and Congress must help the effort by funding new test capabilities and capacity, according to Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) and the NDIA’s Emerging Technologies Institute.
The defense industrial base is “incapable” of building hypersonic systems at scale, due mainly to the government giving ambiguous signals to industry about whether it will invest in such technologies, according to a new paper from the National Defense Industrial Association's Emerging Technology Institute. The ...
The second all-up flight of the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon on March 13 fell short of a fully successful test, but the Air Force isn’t saying what went wrong with the Lockheed Martin-built hypersonic missile. The defense giant's Missiles and Fire Control division recently ...
The Air Force's ARRW hypersonic missile would cost about $15 million per shot across a production run of 300 missiles, but that’s a third of the cost of the Army's ground-launched hypersonic missile, the Congressional Budget Office said. The CBO relied on open sources to ...
The Air Force's AGM-183A ARRW hypersonic missile is outrunning its test plan and evaluation tools, and the Air Force needs to get a test plan approved by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation to assure the weapon delivers what's needed, the DOT&E said.
The Air Force has handed out a $334 million contract to contractor Leidos for “Mayhem,” the secretive program aimed at developing a larger class of hypersonic system, the Pentagon announced Dec. 16. The contract comes more than two years after the Air Force first began asking ...
A test flight of the first all-up AGM-183 ARRW hypersonic missile was a deemed a success, the Air Force said. The test marks three successful flights in a row for the missile, which suffered a series of failures in 2021.
The U.S. still lags China and Russia in development and deployment of hypersonic weapon systems, and it will take a huge investment in education, test capacity and manufacturing capabilities to catch up, experts and members of Congress said in a streaming seminar broadcast by The ...
The Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces heard testimony from the Defense Department’s top missile defense leaders and demanded to know why the Missile Defense Agency's proposed $9.6 billion fiscal 2023 budget will not yield more reliable defense against hypersonic weapons already being fielded ...
A hearing of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee drew attention to perceived funding shortfalls in the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, but Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley said plans to counter China have not ...