U.S. Army To Have Operational Hypersonic Missiles by 2023

The U.S. Army on Wednesday released new information and video on the progress it's making developing hypersonic missiles that can destroy targets thousands of miles distant while flying at superfast speeds ranging from Mach 5 (6,000 km/h) to Mach 20 (25,000 km/h). Russia and China are also developing hypersonic weapons.

Video released yesterday from a joint U.S. Army and U.S. Navy test back in March is the first public revelation of both service's "Common Hypersonic Glide Body" (C-HGB) in action from launch to impact on target.

The C-HGB was the payload of a missile launched March 19 from the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii. The video was narrated by Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood, director of Hypersonics, Directed Energy, Space, and Rapid Acquisition.

Hypersonic boost-glide vehicles such as C-HGB are unpowered. They typically use rocket boosters to propel them to hypersonic speed and altitude. Once attaining the targeted parameters, they hurtle toward their target at hypersonic speeds along a varying trajectory. They can maneuver laterally, making them more difficult to intercept by anti-missile missiles because of their unpredictable flight profiles.

This advantage plus their hypersonic speed makes it almost impossible for an adversary to defend against these weapons or to take cover before they hit.

The Army said it will soon begin accelerate the C-HGB testing schedule so it can field the first operational hypersonic missile battery by fiscal 2023, said Gen. Thurgood.

"The flight test program is very aggressive, and we need to be aggressive in order to keep on case and be competitive with our near-peer competitors, namely Russia and China," he said.

He said the successful test in March, "will actually accelerate our program. Our next flight test will be mid-year 2021, followed very quickly by two shots later in 2021."

Gen. Thurgood said the C-HGB in the video was "very accurate ... over the distance that we were asked to go."

"It gets off the pad pretty quick," he said of the missile launch during his narration. "It gets pretty high pretty fast."

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has made hypersonic technologies a priority. It's nearly doubled its long-term investment in this weapon. DoD has added $5 billion more in fiscal 2020 funding for the development of hypersonics alone over the next five years.

Over the next 12 to 14 months, the Army will transfer the high-priority glide-body work from government laboratories to Dynetics Technical Solutions. This firm will produce the first commercially manufactured set of prototype C-HGB systems.

"We have to transition the technology ... from the government labs to our commercial industrial partners who can build this kind of weapon system in quantity," said Gen. Thurgood.

The more aggressive funding follows advances made by Russia, which claims to have unveiled a hypersonic glide vehicle capable of more than Mach 20.