Raytheon

Hypersonic weapon (Raytheon concept)

WASHINGTON: The Missile Defense Agency held a closed-door meeting today at its Alabama headquarters with defense industry reps to talk through ideas for knocking hard-to-kill hypersonic missiles out of the sky.

The classified meeting will begin laying out the basics for what’s being called the Hypersonic Defense Regional Glide Phase Weapon System. While details of the program were scarce, its name may provide some clues. 

It’s clear “they’re going after the regional as opposed to the homeland mission,” Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. The lack of a space-based sensor layer likely makes this the more achievable play in the short-term, he said, since these weapons can be forward deployed on ships or overseas bases to target shorter-range weapons. 

The new effort adds to the panoply of hypersonic defense programs the Pentagon is scrambling to get off the ground as quickly as possible in the face of real advances by China and Russia to field such weapons. 

Short or long-range, hypersonic weapons, which travel at Mach 5 or above pose a tough challenge for the Pentagon as it tries to come up with ways to defeat them. 

“If war breaks out tomorrow, we’re probably not going to kill hypersonic boost glide missiles,” the Pentagon’s research and development chief, Mike Griffin, said earlier this year

“We don’t have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us,” Gen. John Hyten, then commander of the Pentagon’s Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, 2018. Hyten has since been sworn in as the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, putting him in a position to begin to push for just such programs.

As with the newest program, the Pentagon’s efforts have been clouded in secrecy as the military figures out a way to talk about the problem, and what they’re doing about it. That makes it hard to figure out just how far away the US is from fielding either offensive or defensive weapons.

One bit of sunlight emerged in September, when the Missile Defense Agency narrowed down the list of potential bidders for its Hypersonic Defense Weapon System program, naming four interceptors: Lockheed Martin’s Valkyrie and Dart concepts, Boeing’s Hypervelocity Interceptor and Raytheon’s SM-3 Hawk, along with a Raytheon idea for a non-kinetic weapon as technologies it wants the companies to continue to develop. All of the programs are still very early in their development however, so are likely years away from testing and fielding.

Capitol Hill is watching. On Tuesday, the Senate approved $230.9 million to accelerate hypersonic defense programs in the defense bill it sent to the White House, while the Senate and House appropriators also added $108 million to MDA’s request to pursue a “Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (formerly Space Sensor Layer).”

None of these programs are programs of record — which means they don’t yet own their own dedicated budget line — but Pentagon leaders have said they need to accelerate hypersonic defense efforts.

Outside of the MDA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been developing its Glide Breaker project, focusing heavily on a hard-kill interceptor to knock the speedy weapons out of the sky.

Griffin has long said the Space Development Agency’s top priority is to build a low earth orbit-based missile tracking constellation aimed at low-flying hypersonic cruise missiles. He has also said the Pentagon is looking at things like directed energy weapons  and potentially putting electronic emitters on missile defense interceptors to fry the hypersonic weapon’s electronics might be the way to go. That way, the interceptor won’t have to actually hit the hypersonic weapon, but just come close enough to catch it in its electronic net.