Seth Cropsey
The U.S. Should Leverage its Allies to Accelerate Hypersonic Deployment
The United States must accelerate hypersonic development and deployment. To do so it should turn to its allies, particularly Australia, and leverage the connections under the AUKUS Pact to intensify testing, expand production capacity and ensure American-allied interoperability. Indeed, the U.S. has a unique chance, through its alliance relationships, to ensure that hypersonic weapons and defense reach the future battlespace rapidly and at scale.
Hypersonic Strike (HS) weapons, generally speaking weapons that fly faster than Mach 5, will play an important role in modern high-end combat. They will not wholly replace traditional subsonic and supersonic cruise and ballistic missiles, nor will they fulfill every mission. Rather, the speed of hypersonic weapons provides unique benefits. First, hypersonics can penetrate air defenses that non-hypersonics would struggle to breach simply because of their speed and maneuverability. Second, and equally critical, hypersonic strikes can be staged along a quite different timeline from non-hypersonic strikes simply because they move so quickly, and therefore can hold at risk high-value, time-critical targets.
Russia’s air campaign in Ukraine has demonstrated the value that only a handful of more sophisticated assets have against air defense networks. Russia has paired slower loitering munitions with a handful of faster systems, including hypersonic strike, to prosecute its anti-infrastructure campaign in Ukraine. An unusually warm winter, combined with innovative Ukrainian adaptation, blunted the effectiveness of this campaign – Russia neither knocked out Ukraine’s electrified rail network nor triggered another refugee wave. But Russia did force Ukraine to redeploy air defenses from the front-line to deal with its threat and did cause some damage. Meanwhile, if Ukraine cannot repair its grid this summer, it will face another onslaught in the coming winter, jeopardizing its combat capacity once again.
The Russian experience provides a useful analogue to the Indo-Pacific theater, insofar as hypersonic strike will be part of a much broader strike complex. To borrow an analogy from land combat, hypersonic strike enables an aerial breakthrough operation, punching a hole through a robust air defense system that allows other cheaper slower munitions to penetrate it and erode broader combat capacity.
China has a layered defensive system that employs a major aerial component. This transcends a general strategy of anti-access. Rather, the PLA recognizes that the U.S. and its allies, considering the distances involved in the Indo-Pacific, will defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan only if they can hold at risk targets on the Chinese mainland. China’s layered defense system extends well into its geographic depth to blanket all major industrial sites, repair depots, supply hubs, and airfields.
The PLA’s assumption about mainland strikes is correct. The Indo-Pacific is simply too vast, and China too near its targets in the First Island Chain, for the U.S. and its allies to fight without having the capability to threaten the sources of Chinese power, its logistical system on the mainland. To hit these targets, the U.S. needs hypersonics weapons to cause an aerial breakthrough. Even a limited number of hypersonics, alongside a greater number of traditional missiles, can punch through China’s defense network and hit the critical targets in its rear areas.
America’s adversaries are developing hypersonics weapons and have begun deploying them. Russia has a handful of hypersonic cruise missiles and a hypersonic strategic nuclear delivery system, while China fields the DF-ZF glide vehicle, mounted on a medium-range ballistic missile, to counter U.S. carrier strike groups. The U.S. has a variety of systems that near maturity, including the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike missile, and the Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile and the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), which remains under evaluation. Assuming they are resourced appropriately, these weapons will reach the military in phases over the next two to five years.
The issue, however, is development and production speed.
Hypersonics are complex weapons to produce and the U.S. industrial base to do so is being established. Any system that moves so quickly must be designed to withstand extremely high temperatures and physically hold together in flight, never mind maneuver to targets and evade enemy countermeasures. Developing and deploying these at scale takes a significant amount of effort and resources.
Even though this is a difficult problem, the U.S. must accelerate the pace of hypersonic strike development. America’s adversaries have programs that are mature enough to be fielded. More critically, America’s adversaries have extremely dense air defenses that will be difficult to break without hypersonics. The Ukraine War’s aerial phase demonstrates this. Ukrainian fighter pilots, while skilled and practiced in operating alongside ground-based air defenses, must avoid high-level fight even in the middle of the country or risk a long-range Russian missile strike, and must conduct only shallow low-level penetration operations against a dense air defense network.
Accelerating the deployment of hypersonic capabilities is critical to American defense and deterrence. U.S. allied relationships provide an ideal vehicle. Australia in particular has participated in the SCIFiRE program with the U.S. over the past 15 years and has expressed deep interest in hypersonics – both glide body and air-breathing systems.
Moreover, a major hypersonic force would meet Australian strategic requirements. AUKUS is meant to provide Australia with these capabilities, particularly with nuclear-powered submarines for wartime patrols. But Australia may agree to more rotational deployments of U.S. strike aircraft in Australia and procure long-range strike aircraft of its own. Expanding hypersonic co-development and co-production with Australia is therefore politically and strategically practicable.
Critically, Australia also has the space to test hypersonics. The Royal Australian Air Force’s Woomera Range Complex, roughly the same size as Pennsylvania, has the potential to be an exceptionally effective test area. A variety of hypersonic vehicles have been tested at the range for the past 20 years. The U.S. should consider partnering openly with the Australian military to develop and test advanced hypersonics at the Woomera Range.
Hypersonic strike weapons are quickly becoming central to modern deterrence credibility and combat capability. The U.S. could accelerate their development by working with an ally whose interests exactly align with Washington’s. Upon the announcement of the AUKUS submarines plan, the U.S. should immediately press forward with a major set of initiatives on Australian hypersonic co-development and co-deployment. Under the AUKUS framework, this partnership could include the United Kingdom; and other allies like Japan have expressed an interest in acquiring hypersonic strike capabilities. Such a broad allied effort would send a clear and strong deterrent signal to our adversaries.
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