Deccan Herald

Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” This motivation kept the US-Russia rivalry neck-to-neck during the Cold War, drives China’s emerging motivations to be a world leader in current times and continues to fuel the US defence industry, which continues to remain technologically ahead of most other countries. And fulfilling Sun Tzu’s criteria is one of the emerging technologies of war – hypersonic missiles. Only a few countries are working on hypersonic missiles, and mastering them remains a challenge job even for them.

On December 27, Russia’s first missile regiment armed with the Avangard Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV), with a top speed of 27 Mach, officially entered combat duty. Russia’s deployment of Avangard follows 30 years of research into hypersonic vehicles that started during the mid-1980s Soviet era. In December 2018, the Avangard was launched from the Dombarovsky air base in the southern Urals and successfully hit a practice target on the Kura shooting range on Kamchatka, 6,000 km away.

Click here to read more