Why Do US Hypersonic Missile Tests Keep Failing? They’re Going Too Fast
If it’s so important to deploy these new missile types, development schedules should be revised to promote success.
By Joshua Pollack
Editor, Nonproliferation Review
January 3, 2022
A new arms technology is coming into its own, and the U.S. Defense Department is determined to achieve quick results in the field. Rather than select one or two concepts and usher them through the deliberate, highly structured process of research, development, testing, and evaluation, the Pentagon’s program managers opt for multiple, competing efforts, and place them on a streamlined course: rapid prototyping and testing, to be followed by rapid production and deployment. The major defense contractors set forth as confidently as prospectors during the gold rush.
The trouble is, the new weapons keep failing in tests, sometimes in fairly rudimentary ways that don’t lend themselves to evaluating and improving the design. The truncated development strategy seems to require a faith that American aerospace engineering can overwhelm all the usual difficulties by force of sheer élan. The results turn out differently.
Now, if you think I’ve just described the last few years of U.S. efforts to build and fly hypersonic gliders and cruise missiles, you’re right. In December, for example, the Air Force’s Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) failed in testing for the third time running in 2021, not even leaving the wing of the B-52 bomber carrying it. ARRW, remarkably, is supposed to become an operational weapon by 2023. Nor is it the only developmental hypersonic missile with a troubled test record.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/01/why-do-us-hypersonic-missile-tests-keep-failing-theyre-going-too-fast/360276/
