Hypersonic missile concept, Lockheed Martin image

WASHINGTON: DoD must sort out roles and responsibilities for developing and buying hypersonic weapons as it has 70 related efforts scattered amongst the services, DARPA and the Office of Secretary of Defense —  to avoid costly duplication and technological missteps, the Government Accountability Office says.

While hypersonic weapons are one of the US military’s top priorities, the new GAO report frets that the department has not formally laid out who decides what programs are viable and how they are prioritized. The GAO report follows a Congressional Research Service review last month, which suggested DoD needs to take a harder look at “the rationale for hypersonic weapons, their expected costs, and their implications for strategic stability and arms control.

“DOD itself has not documented the roles, responsibilities, and authorities of the multitude of
its organizations, including the military services, that are working on hypersonic weapon development,” GAO said. “Without clear leadership roles, responsibilities, and authorities, DOD is at risk of impeding its progress toward delivering hypersonic weapon capabilities and opening up the potential for conflict and wasted resources as decisions over larger investments are made in the future.”

In response, DoD notes that it already has appointed a senior official — as directed by Section 217 of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — under the undersecretary for research and engineering, OUSD(R&E), to serve as  “principal director for hypersonics.” That’s Michael White. His position “provides unity-of-effort guidance to the services and Fourth Estate agencies developing hypersonic systems,” DoD spokesperson Cmdr. Josh Frey said in an email. “We are working on developing and documenting a more formal set of relationships with concomitant roles and responsibilities under the senior officials,” he added.

White further has already developed a roadmap to set priorities, and, as mandated the 2021 NDAA “enable the transition of such technologies to future operational capabilities for the warfighter.”

“I think that if you go back to where we were a couple of years ago … the department had all these disparate programs and they weren’t necessarily properly prioritized. Now, if you look at the roadmap that Mike White’s got, it’s a pretty good roadmap,” Mark Lewis, former acting OUSD(R&E), told me today. “In terms of actually focusing on deliverable capabilities, it hangs together pretty well.”

That said, OUSD(R&E) oversees only research and development; there isn’t an equivalent senior official at the acquisition and sustainment shop, OUSD(A&S), to oversee hypersonic efforts once they become programs of record. For the moment, none of DoD’s efforts have yet made that transition, but several are expected to come to fruition within the next couple of years.

The myriad projects account for about $15 billion in investment between 2015 and 2024, GAO found. The Pentagon asked Congress for $2.865 billion for hypersonic weapons in 2021 alone, up not quite 14 percent from a 2020 total of $2.508 billion.

The bulk of that investment, 56 percent, is aimed at four offensive missile development programs being designed for long-range strike (not counting the Air Force’s canceled Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon), the watchdog agency said. All four programs are aimed at boost-glide type missiles, which use a conventional rocket booster to accelerate the weapon to hypersonic speed, after which the glide body containing the warhead detaches from the booster and coasts, skipping along the upper limits of the atmosphere like a stone across a pond:

  • Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), the Air Force program to develop, working with DARPA, a hypersonic glide vehicle to equip a B-52 bomber. Lockheed Martin Space is the prime contractor.
  • Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), the Army’s program, developed with the Navy, to build a hypersonic glide vehicle for land launch using the Common Hypersonic Glide Body. The missile system is built jointly with the Navy, with the Army producing the glide body. Lockheed Martin Space is the prime contractor.
  • Conventional Prompt Strike, the Navy’s effort to put the Common Hypersonic Glide Body onto a submarine-launched missile. Lockheed Martin Space is the prime contractor.
  • Standard Missile-6 IB (SM-6 IB), the Navy’s program to modify the existing Standard Missile-6 IA, built by Raytheon Technologies, by integrating a new rocket booster that will allow it to fly at hypersonic speeds (above Mach 5).

Another three, slightly less mature efforts are aimed at developing air-breathing hypersonic cruise missiles, building from the Air Force-DARPA Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) project, for the same missions. Whereas boost-glide systems can reach longer ranges, cruise missiles would be smaller and could be carried by the Air Force’s fighter fleet. They are also potentially less costly, according to Lewis. Indeed, White has called hypersonic cruise missiles “a game changer.” Those programs are:

  • Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment, funded by OUSD(R&E) and the Air Force to flight demo a an operational hypersonic cruise missile “to act as a bridge” between HAWC and a future Air Force hypersonic cruise missile acquisition program, says GAO.
  • HyFly2, funded by OUSD(R&E) in collaboration with the Navy “to mature a hypersonic air-launched cruise missile concept compatible with aircraft carrier operations.”
  • Carrier-compliant Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapons Concept, an Office of Naval Research (ONR) project to launch of a hypersonic air-breathing missile integrated with a staged booster off an aircraft carrier in order to “validate models developed to assess a proposed future hypersonic long range strike weapon.”

Frey explained that aim of the plethora of hypersonic missile projects underway at DoD, “is to transition from development to operational systems at scale to provide the warfighter with the highest-quality weapons in sufficient quantities to perform critical missions in support of the National Defense Strategy.”

Emphasizing a point Congress has also been making, GAO notes that DoD efforts to defend against hypersonic missiles military leaders say are being rapidly built by Russia and China are much less mature than offensive efforts, with much less funding being put toward them. Only 12 of the 70 projects tracked by GAO related to defenses; DoD requested $207 million in 2021 for hypersonic defense, up from $157 million in 2020

“Defensive systems for detecting, tracking, and defeating adversary hypersonic missiles are in the early stages of planning and development,” the GAO report said, “with none rising to the level of maturity seen in the offensive prototype efforts.” The report adds that Congress has passed legislation directing the Pentagon “to accelerate the development of defensive systems and provided additional funding,” for example adding $100 million to the 2020 budget request for research and development.

Lewis, who now is the director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute, agreed that defense against enemy hypersonic missiles is critical, if not an easy problem to solve. “Defense is extremely important, and the first part defense being able to see it, detect it, and then track it, follow it — that is difficult — and then stop it somehow.”

“The good news is,” he added, is that “other people are mostly copying us. So, as we develop ours, we learn how to defeat theirs, because their’s looks like ours.”

DoD is working on the entire spectrum of operations for hypersonic weapons, Frey explained. “We are developing systems for hypersonic strike; defense against adversary capabilities; and hypersonic reusable technology for missions such as ISR and space access,” he said. This includes both systems for striking adversary launch facilities (in Pentagon-ese, ‘left of launch’) and hitting an incoming missile early in its flight, he added.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) leads those defensive efforts, Frey pointed out. MDA and the Space Development Agency (SDA) “are working on the necessary space systems to support hypersonic offensive and defensive kill chains” in support of Congress’s orders for DoD to “deploy a persistent, timely global space sensor layer that is disaggregated and less-concentrated in order to be more survivable.”

(Indeed, Congress has been casting a beady eyeball on the MDA-SDA relationship, concerned about MDA’s independence.)

GAO also noted that in its conversations with White, he pointed out that “there are other efforts outside the scope of this report that are critical for the integration of hypersonic weapons into DOD’s existing systems and capabilities” — specifically those underway at SDA and MDA “aimed at reducing the time it takes from identifying targets to striking them.”