While our foes deploy hypersonic weapons, Washington debates about funding

August 11, 2020

The Hill

For years the Department of Defense did little to develop hypersonic systems — missiles that fly at five or more times the speed of sound, or nearly 4,000 miles per hour. In the meantime, however, both Russia and China pushed ahead with their own hypersonic programs, in order to obtain a faster non-ballistic, long-range capability against American and allied forces. Having awakened belatedly to the Russian and Chinese hypersonic threat, the Pentagon at last is planning to introduce both long-range hypersonic systems and new defenses against hypersonic missiles in the next two years.

It also has announced that it will field several other new missile defense systems in the next several years. These include the Army’s Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense, or MSHORAD, that employs guns and missiles, together with a 50-kilowatt (KW) equipped laser system dubbed DE-MSHORAD, all to be mounted on a Stryker vehicle and initially fielded in 2021, and a 200-KW, truck-mounted laser, the IFPC-HEL, to be initially deployed in 2024. The Missile Defense Agency plans to complete an Aegis Ashore missile interceptor site in Poland by 2022. For its part, the Navy plans to test Standard Missile 3 systems against medium range ballistic missiles in 2021.

The Pentagon’s request for fiscal year 2021 funds for these programs reflected the sense of urgency that underlay them. The request for research and development money to support them rose from just under $447 million in fiscal year 2020 to just over $831 million in FY 2021, of which $801 million was to support the Army’s hypersonic program. M-SHORAD procurement totaled $536 million, while research for the two SHORAD programs called for a total of about $284 million, of which $212 million was for the 50-KW laser. The request for Aegis Ashore procurement was just under $440 million; all other Aegis ballistic missile defense procurement and research and development programs totaled an additional $1.5 billion.

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