Top Pentagon Future Technologies Official Pushes Offensive Hypersonic Weapons Capability

The Defense Department is developing a space-based sensor
system and an associated communication network to defend the nation against
hypersonic weapons. But the military’s top future technologies official also
wants to field an offensive capability.

Although the United States led the world in developing
significant parts of hypersonic technology, “we choose not to weaponize it,”
Michael Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering,
said Aug. 13.

But “our adversaries are developing hypersonic weapons.” In
response, “I came into office wanting DoD to make a big deal of that. I want to
be the offense. I want to hold others hostage. … Hypersonic technology is the
key to that.”

In addition to the research being conducted by defense
agencies, the U.S. Navy, Army and Air Force all have programs to produce
hypersonic missiles, with some test flights expected within a year.

Griffin said the danger from hypersonic weapons is that they
“overfly our air defense and underfly missile defense. They’re a new class of
threat we have to deal with,” he told a Hudson Institute forum. And that
requires sensors in space that can detect and track hypersonic missiles, which
can fly more than five times the speed of sound and, unlike ballistic missiles,
can maneuver.

Because they fly so low and so fast, “by the time we see them,
it’s too late in the kill chain” to intercept them. “We have to see them
farther out. Radar detection ranges are “about as good as they’re going to get,”
he said. “If this were exclusively a land conflict, the solution would be to
forward-deploy radars.” But intelligence suggests a future war would be “a
maritime conflict,” Griffin said.

Because there are “not a lot of islands out there” to put
radars on, “we have to move to space. You can see a lot from space.” Hypersonic
weapons also present a dimmer target than ballistic missiles so the space-based
sensors need to be in a lower orbit than those looking for ballistic missiles,
he explained.

“The sensor layer is critical. But if it can’t talk among
itself, it won’t be efficient. The network underlays everything we need to do,
in space, land and maritime. That’s what we don’t have today,” Griffin said.

Developing that network is one of the main jobs of the Space
Development Agency (SDA), which then-acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan created
in March, Griffin said. SDA was placed under Griffin, but if Congress agrees to
create a Space Force, as President Donald Trump proposed, and Griffin supports,
SDA would move into the Space Force, he said.

Asked about the ground-based midcourse missile defense
system, which includes the 44 interceptors in California and Alaska, Griffin
said he has “a great deal of confidence” in that system, even though the
Missile Defense Agency stopped its program to develop a new kill vehicle for
the interceptors because preliminary tests indicated it would not be
successful. Now the MDA and his office are looking for alternatives, Griffin
said.

Under official U.S. policy, the current missile defense
system is not designed to counter an attack from Russia or China, which have
more ballistic missiles than it could handle. Building a system to defend
against Russia and China would be a budgetary issue, not a technology
challenge, Griffin said.

“We know how to do it,” he said.