The Hill:
In the movie “The Graduate,” the older and wiser Mr. McGuire puts his arm around young Ben Braddock’s shoulders and offers one word of advice about the future: “Plastics.” If the same scene took place today, he would solemnly intone: “Hypersonics. They’re the future.”
Or are they? Hypersonic weapons are an emerging threat, but what kind of threat remains unclear. In recent testimony to Congress, Stratcom commander Gen. John Hyten described a hypersonic weapon as “like a ballistic missile, but then it depresses the trajectory and then flies more like a cruise missile or an airplane. So it goes up into the low reaches of space, and then turns immediately back down and then levels out and flies at a very high level of speed.”
The missiles can carry both nuclear and conventional payloads. Such weapons can have many uses, and lumping them all together under one catch-all phrase isn’t very helpful in figuring out what kind of threat they pose to U.S. national security. They can be used for reconnaissance, for destroying a range of enemy assets far from home (and far from a battlefield), and they could even be used to deliver a nuclear sucker-punch…
