US Congress funds hypersonic missile after China's WU-14 hypersonic strike vehicle test

The US Congress approved funding last week for the Pentagon’s advanced hypersonic missile program and expressed concerns over China’s recent test of an ultra high-speed strike vehicle designed to deliver nuclear warheads through U.S. missile defenses.

The House fiscal year 2015 defense authorization bill approved $70.7 million for the Army’s hypersonic missile as part of the Pentagon’s conventional prompt strike program.

The Senate, in its version of the fiscal year 2015 defense bill, also authorized $70.7 million for hypersonic weapons.

The Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle is a ballistic missile-launched system that glides and maneuvers to its target at speeds up to Mach 10, around 7,611 mph.

The current House bill funding is focused on an Army program called the Advanced Hypersonic Missile that was first tested in 2011. The Army said the missile is capable of traveling at Mach 5, or 3,600 miles per hour or greater. In the 2011 test, the missile flew 2,500 miles from Hawaii to the Kwajalein Atoll of the Marshall Islands in 30 minutes.

If the second Army missile test goes well, the Pentagon will begin studying whether the weapon can be deployed on a submarine, the House report said, recommending a third test for the missile.

Another U.S. system is the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle, a glider that failed two tests and is facing opposition from some congressional defense authorizers.

The Carnegie Endowment says it is unclear whether the WU-14, the Pentagon’s designation for China’s hypersonic glider, is simply an improved version of China’s notorious “carrier killer” — the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile, which has a range of about 900 miles — or a much more ambitious design rivaling Washington’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon.

Since the WU-14 test, American pundits have pushed the possibility that the high speed of Chinese boost-glide weapons could defeat U.S. missile defenses in East Asia, which protect both land-based military installations and aircraft carriers at sea. This fear has probably been overstated, however. Although hypersonic gliders re-enter the atmosphere at breakneck speeds, they are slowed by air resistance and are generally not as fast as ballistic missiles by the time they reach their targets. They would, therefore, probably be less effective at breaking through U.S. missile defenses around the Western Pacific than the conventional ballistic missiles that Beijing already has in droves.

While Chinese boost-glide missiles might struggle to defeat the missile defenses around compact targets, such as U.S. military bases in Asia, they could easily bypass the wide-area defenses based in Alaska and California that are designed to protect the U.S. homeland. Thus, if over the next decade or so China were to develop accurate boost-glide missiles capable of reaching the United States, key military assets — such as satellite uplinks, communication hubs, and ships in port — could become vulnerable to conventional attack for the first time. Protecting them through point defenses, burial, or redundancy might be possible, but it would also be extremely expensive.

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