Unleashing the Speed
Building a Strong Hypersonics Industrial Base: Challenges and Commitments
Last week, the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute released a report on the impact of supply chains on the development and fielding of hypersonic weapons.
U.S. Representative Doug Lamborn (CO-5) serves as the chairman of Congress’ Strategic Forces Subcommittee, and spoke during the launch of ETI’s report. Rep. Lamborn echoed the concerns in the report stating “American development of hypersonic capabilities is nonnegotiable. This is a technology that was born in America but is being perfected by China and Russia.”
I’ve written about hypersonics before, but this is an important topic and worth a revisit.
Supply Chain and Research & Development Challenges
Anybody that has paid attention to the news since 2020 is likely aware of significant issues in our supply chains, in general. The COVID pandemic, lack of manning at the Port of Los Angeles, the blockage of the Suez Canal, and other issues each highlighted the vulnerability in our globally connected system.
More recently, support for Ukraine as it fights to restore its territorial sovereignty, has seen the U.S. military provide significant amounts of weaponry and the defense industrial base struggle to replace those stockpiles.
In other words, the defense industrial base and supply chain is struggling to keep up with current requirements, and would be woefully insufficient for a major war.
With that as context, the supply chains for hypersonics are even more vulnerable. According to the report, the availability of critical raw materials is the first point of vulnerability for our hypersonics programs. This includes our dependence on foreign sources for those raw materials. Some of these materials Tantalum, Rare Earth Minerals, Cobalt, Aluminum, Titanium, Nickel, Carbon Fiber, Ammonium Perchlorate, Carbon-Carbon, Neon, various plastics, and C4F6. Several of these are more vulnerable than others.
The workforce supporting the defense industrial base and hypersonics work has waned in the past years. We’ve seen a bit of a generalized rebound in manufacturing jobs and capabilities in the U.S., but it remains insufficient. Hypersonics requires specific talent pools that will take years to develop and build.
Other considerable threats to the supply chain include cybersecurity, counterintelligence, and intellectual property theft.
Finally, the testing of hypersonics is incredibly difficult and relies on a system of sensors spread across a large area (usually across the ocean) in what is colloquially called a “string of pearls” to track the system, debris, and other information about any given test. Understandably, this is an expensive, and labor intensive way of testing.
Lack of Clear Demand Signal
The defense industrial base is not solely responsible for the issues facing our development, testing, and fielding of hypersonic capabilities. The Defense Department has been inconsistent in requesting support from industry.
During the report’s launch, its lead, Rebecca Wostenberg, highlighted this fact stating “over time, the government demand signal has varied greatly, leading to a small hypersonics manufacturing base with limited suppliers suited only for manufacturing limited numbers of hypersonic systems with long lead times.”
Defense companies will not solve problems for the DoD without the DoD identifying that the problem, in fact, requires solving. In other words, companies need to know that the money their investing to build our defense will have a return. To do otherwise, is just bad business sense.
To reassure the companies working on this critical technology, the report suggests that the department “treat certain hypersonic programs as programs of record… by including funding in the Department of Defense annual budget request to move them to production and deployment,” as well as utilizing multi-year procurement contracts to ensure a clear demand signal that extends into the future. This might look similar to the recently approved multi-year buys for Patriot Missile systems and Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems.
Congressional Commitment and Funding
Rep. Lamborn has led the charge on Capital Hill to reinvigorate hypersonic programs in the United States; but, he isn’t alone.
Congress has demonstrated its support for hypersonic testing and fielding, voting with its money. Congress appropriated nearly $5 billion to hypersonics programs in the FY 2023 defense budget.
International Landscape and Competitors
Through all of this, it’s important to remember why work on hypersonics is so critical. Lamborn hints at it with his mention of Chinese and Russian programs. Of course, the importance extends beyond just competing with other weapons development.
Appearing before Congress, Paul Freisthler, the chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s analysis division, highlighted the agency’s concerns stating that China has “dramtically advanced its development of conventional and nuclear-armed hypersonic missile technologies and capabilities through intense, focused investment, development, testing and deployments.”
And Russia isn’t far behind, Freisthler continues that “While both China and Russia have conducted numerous successful tests of hypersonic weapons and have likely fielded operational systems, China is leading Russia in both supporting infrastructure and numbers of systems.”
China has several hypersonic missiles including the DF-17 a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) with a range of 1,600 km, an HGV mounted on a DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, the DF-ZF HGV with a 2,000 km range, and the Starry Sky-2, a nuclear capable hypersonic prototype.
Russia has the Kinzhal missiles with ranges of 2,000 km and speeds 10 times that of sound. Russia also claims its Avangard HGV can travel at Mach 20 with a range of more than 10,000 kilometers, and a ship-launched Zircon hypersonic missile with a range of 1,000 kilometers
Hypersonic weapons are an important tool in large scale warfare, and seek to mitigate one of the greatest vulnerabilities of ballistic missiles—namely, the ballistic missile trajectory allows for detection far earlier in the flight than the trajectory of a hypersonic weapon.
Naturally, not everyone is convinced that hypersonics are the correct tool. The Congressional Budget Office released a report earlier this year that argued in favor of ballistic missiles over hypersonics.
Conclusion
We’re locked in great power competition with China and Russia, whether or not we like it. We’re not at a point of an arms race, but maintaining technological advantage is important to reassure our allies and ensure our ability to defend our nation and our way of life.
We are continuing to develop hypersonic capabilities, as are our greatest antagonists, but our development, testing, and fielding of these systems is reliant on a precarious supply chain that faces significant issues.
The Department of Defense needs to incentivize private industry’s efforts to build capacity able to support our hypersonics work through clear, consistent signals that will extend beyond a single program.
Let’s fix our ability to design, develop, test, and field critical systems.
Keep building!
Andrew