US lagging China, Russia on hypersonic weapons: Lamborn

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) on Tuesday raised concerns that the United States is falling behind adversaries China and Russia in manufacturing and testing hypersonic missiles. 

“As a country, we are behind China, and even Russia for that matter, and this is not a good situation,” Lamborn said, adding hypersonics are “a whole new type of offensive capability, and we are behind, no doubt about it.” 

Lamborn’s concerns were echoed by academics and weapons experts who joined The Hill’s Tuesday event, “National Security at the Speed of Sound: Hypersonics in American Defense,” sponsored by Raytheon Industries.

Hypersonic missiles are weapons that have the capability to travel at five times the speed of sound, roughly 4,000 miles per hour. They are designed to be so fast that other defense technology cannot react in time to prevent strikes.

Lamborn, the ranking member on the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, said the U.S. must expedite its testing capabilities in order to catch up to other nations. He pointed specifically to HBTSS satellites, which could track hypersonic weapons from China and elsewhere. 

“Right now, we don’t have the ability to adequately cover the tracking and even the fire control when it comes to hypersonic vehicles,” Lamborn told Hill editor-in-chief Bob Cusack. “We need to have the sensor layers in space.”

Lamborn was joined by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), chair of the Tactical Air & Land Forces Subcommittee, who was more optimistic about congressional suppot for the Department of Defense’s hypersonics strategy. 

“There’s concern about hypersonics, no question about it,” Norcross said. “But I believe given where we are right now and the progress we made, we’re going to be able to meet the timelines that the department has set.”

Norcross also noted that while hypersonics are crucial, there are a number of ways to address China and Russia’s defense advancements. 

Lamborn’s concerns were echoed by defense experts Mark Lewis, director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute, as well as Kelly Stephani, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

“The country that actually worries me the most is China,” Lewis said. “Their systems factor much more closely into what we would anticipate as far as warfighting capabilities in that part of the world. We have seen what appear to be very capable systems in the hands of the Chinese.” 

Cusack asked Stephani whether she sees China ahead of the U.S. in these technological advancements, to which she bluntly answered, “Yes.” 

“We challenge our congresspersons, and the nation in general, to recognize this threat, and act on it,” Stephani said. “We have a limited time, and it is something that we have to rally on.”

Lewis closed the conversation by providing insight into what he sees as the impact of not having this technology in wartime. 

“Every time we did war games in certain scenarios across the world, we found out that when the United States was facing an opponent who had developed hypersonic capabilities, if we didn’t have that capability, we lost,” Lewis said. 

“This has to be a priority if we’re going to be successful in the future fight.”