Top US General Laments Failures Of Hypersonic Program, Calls For Extra Speed

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th January, 2020) The United States needs to expedite the creation of hypersonic weapons to reclaim global leadership in the field after the failure of major development programs, US Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten said on Friday.

"In hypersonics we are now in a significant competition with a number of competitors around the world," the general said, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We were ahead in hypersonics a decade ago. We had two programs, two flights... They didn't quite work. What did we do after they failed? We instituted multi-year studies into the failure process and then canceled the programs.

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Hyten admitted that the development stopped "for years to recover" and called for "inserting speed in the processes inside the Pentagon."

"If you don't have human life involved, you have to figure out how to go fast, how to adjust, how to learn, how to launch quickly, how to move fast. We have to do it across our entire enterprise and we are not doing that," he said.

Russia and China both boast hypersonic capabilities. President Donald Trump has recently claimed that the United States had "many hypersonic missiles" under construction.