USNI News:


U.S. aircraft carriers are already facing risks from hypersonic weapons that are now entering the inventory of American adversaries and the Navy has developed early defenses for the threat, the head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said last week before the Senate.

“It’s important that we have that capability now because the hypersonic threat is there now,” Vice Adm. John Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces last week.

Within the last few years, both China and Russia have fielded early versions of hypersonic weapons that can travel faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5 is about 3,806 mph) and potentially hold U.S. capital ships at risk. Unlike the explosive supersonic cruise missile threats the carrier’s Aegis escorts are designed to fight, the new weapons travel at higher speed and can make unexpected changes in flight on their way to their targets…



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