By: Jake Smith, Daily Caller News Foundation
Despite spending billions of dollars and nearly a decade’s worth of work, the Pentagon has yet to deploy a single hypersonic weapons system, according to a watchdog report released Monday.
It has been a long-time goal for the Pentagon to develop hypersonic missile systems — capable of firing missiles moving at 7,000 miles an hour with pin-point maneuverability — among its several military branches. But a review by the Pentagon’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) released on Monday found that no hypersonic missile systems currently in development are ready to be fielded, even as costs and delays continue to balloon eight years after the programs were started.
“Years of effort and billions of dollars spent on hypersonic weapon development have yielded considerable progress, but DOD has yet to field its first operational hypersonic weapon system,” the GAO report reads. “Yet even fielding these first prototypes will not ensure an effective or affordable capability.”
The Army’s long-range hypersonic system throughout its lifecycle is expected to cost roughly $10.3 billion, according to current cost estimates cited in the GAO report. The Air Force is expected to spend over $3 billion on different hypersonic prototyping and development programs over current lifecycle estimates.
The Navy is expected to spend the most on its various hypersonic programs at nearly $31 billion over current lifecycle estimates, according to the GAO report.
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Part of the reason the Pentagon’s hypersonic weapons programs have been delayed is because it is not using the best “digital engineering tools” available for testing and development, according to the GAO report. Development efforts are also not “soliciting user feedback to determine what capabilities to include in their minimum viable product, a leading practice for product development.”
Moreover, the Pentagon is not “comprehensively reporting to Congress about progress against [Pentagon]-wide risks to fielding hypersonic systems,” according to the GAO report.
Taking these measures could have “the potential to speed up the design process, reduce costs, and develop a more usable product,” the GAO report states.
The U.S. has struggled to keep pace with its adversaries on hypersonic development. China currently maintains “the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal” after spending decades and intense investments to advance the technology and test it on a routine basis, Jeffery McCormick, senior intelligence analyst for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, told a Congressional committee in March, according to Bloomberg.
Russia has used hypersonic weapons in Ukraine but has not kept pace with China’s technology and supportive infrastructure, according to Bloomberg.
“While both China and Russia have conducted numerous successful tests of hypersonic weapons and have likely fielded operational systems, China is leading Russia in both supporting infrastructure and numbers of systems,” Paul Freisthler, chief scientist for science and technology at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers during a congressional hearing in March 2023.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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