Although the Pentagon says it intends to deploy its first hypersonic weapon by September 30, more than three years later than planned, its testing office says the weapon managed by the army has yet to prove it would be effective in combat.
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The army also must show it can produce enough of the highly manoeuvrable missiles before fielding them after the Pentagon invested more than US$12 billion since 2018 attempting to develop, test and deploy hypersonics.
Delivering the new missiles will be a major test of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s vow to improve the lethality of US forces, including catching up with a next-generation weapon that Russia already has used in its war on Ukraine and China also has deployed.
“We have to develop hypersonics,” Steve Feinberg, President Donald Trump’s nominee for deputy defence secretary, said at his confirmation hearing last week. “We can’t allow the Chinese to be faster than us, both in their weaponry and aircraft.”
Lockheed Martin Corp. is the systems integrator for the army’s hypersonic weapon. Dubbed the “Dark Eagle,” it has a reported range of 2,780km (1,725 miles) and consists of a ground-launched missile equipped with a hypersonic glide body and related equipment. A variant will be used by the navy. The Defence Department has said little about how much each missile will cost.
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There’s now reason for optimism because the army “successfully executed a joint test” with the navy in December “that demonstrated end-to-end performance of the system,” according to a Pentagon statement.