Citing China's major investments in anti-ship missiles,
stealth fighter jets, hypersonic vehicles and other hi-tech weaponry,
Kendall said the United States could lose its dominant position if it
failed to respond to the altered strategic landscape.
The
Pentagon is investing some resources in two forms of hypersonic arms: a
ballistic missile boost glide vehicle and a jet powered, atmospheric
cruise missile, he said.
Kendall said the threat of such
hypersonic vehicles to the United States is that they are difficult for
missile defenses to counter. The vehicles travel and maneuver while
flying at speeds of up to Mach 10 or 7,680 miles an hour.
“The high speed of these systems makes it much more difficult for air defenses to engage,” he said.
"Their
budget is far smaller than ours, but their personnel costs are also far
smaller than ours," said Kendall, undersecretary of defence for
acquisition, technology and logistics.
"Our budgets are going in the opposite direction. So just by that metric alone, it's not positive."
“A
boost glide missile theoretically would be intended to counter existing
mid-course missile defenses,” Mark Stokes, a former US Air Force
officer said.
“The beauty of the HGV is that it can
perform hypersonic precision strikes while maintaining a relatively low
altitude and flat trajectory, making it far less vulnerable to missile
defenses,” Rick Fisher, an analyst at the International Assessment and
Strategy Center, told the Washington Free Beacon.
The
Chinese are “actively seeking global military power to challenge the
United States, and it is not yet in any mood to talk, or engage in arms
control, about it,” Fisher said.
US officials said
that, while the glide vehicle test was not an intelligence surprise, it
showed China is moving much more rapidly than in the past in efforts to
research, develop, and test advanced weaponry.
Adm.
Samuel Locklear, commander of the US Pacific Command, noted that the
hypersonic test demonstrated China’s ability to move quicker than the
United States in developing some advanced arms.
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