While big breakthroughs like last July's hypersonic test garner big headlines, Bussey noted that China has for years experimented with different technology combinations to get at that altitude layer. “You can look at their papers,” she said. “They have lighting scramjet vehicles; they have glide vehicles with scramjets….vehicles with liquid rocket, solid rocket propulsion. There's a whole host of propulsion systems that they are working on.”
It’s easy to lump hypersonic missiles in with nuclear weapons. The key nuclear-armed hypersonic missiles that both countries are developing certainly fall into that category. But Mark Lewis, the executive director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute, has concerns about the smaller weapons as well.
“It's really the tactical systems that I worry about the most,” Lewis said during Monday’s event Imagine a hypersonic missile swarm that can sink an aircraft carrier; that's really quite a capability. And that leads to us asking the question: are we willing to risk an aircraft carrier say in a potential scenario?”
