It is extremely likely that Iran and North Korea will acquire hypersonic missiles, according to a senior U.S. general.
Back in April, Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, testified to the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. During the hearing, Sen. Susan Collins asked Greaves about the risk that China and Russia’s hypersonic missile technology will be proliferated to countries like North Korea and Iran. “I assess that risk as extremely high,” Greaves responded. “I don’t see what will prevent it from happening.” He added that this is the reason why “the hypersonic threat is something that we need to address expediently.”
Hypersonic missiles travel at speeds greater than Mach 5, or between 3,106 and 15,534 miles per hour. There are two basic types of hypersonics. The first are called hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), which are launched into the atmosphere from a rocket and glide to their targets at altitudes of between forty and one hundred kilometers—or even higher. These HGVs typically fly at faster speeds than the second type of hypersonics, hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs). As their name suggests, HCMs are cruise missiles that fly at hypersonic speeds. During their entire flight, they are powered by rockets or high-speed jet engines like scramjets.
Hypersonic missiles are uniquely destabilizing in a number of ways. For one, their extreme speed greatly compresses reaction times and reduces the effectiveness of defensive systems. Their altitude and maneuverability also pose tremendous issues. With regard to the former, HGVs travel at altitudes lower than ballistic missiles while HCMs fly higher than traditional cruise missiles. In both cases, this limits the ability of traditional missile defense systems to shoot them down. Especially with HGVs, the high maneuverability poses a biggest issue. HGVs combine the best characteristics of traditional ballistic and cruise missiles. They travel at incredible speeds like traditional ballistic missiles, but don’t fly along a predictable trajectory like ballistic missiles. Instead, they are highly maneuverable, similar to cruise missiles.
Currently, the only three countries with mature hypersonic research programs are the United States, China and Russia. As Ankit Panda first reported , China conducted two tests of a new hypersonic missile, the DF-17, in November 2017. An unnamed U.S. government source told him at the time that “the missile is explicitly designed for operational HGV implementation and not as a test bed.” The source also noted that this was “the first HGV test in the world using a system intended to be fielded operationally.”
Source » nationalinterests