Kinesernes hypersoniske test vil endre USAs forsvarsdoktrine - DefenseNews

 

Chinese hypersonic missile test unlikely to trigger arms race, experts say

By Jen Judson

 Oct 20, 06:00 PM

L3Harris Technologies is working on the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, one capability that could better track complicated space-based hypersonic weapons like the one China tested in August. (L3Harris Technologies)

WASHINGTON — The August test of a Chinese space-based hypersonic missile is unlikely to trigger an arms race, but could influence the White House and Defense Department’s effort to shape new missile defense and nuclear posture strategies, experts say.

Top military officials gave clues in the late summer and early fall that they knew this event, which was first reported by the Financial Times, was happening.

Gen. Glen VanHerck, the U.S. Northern Command chief, in a speech at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, in August, briefly mentioned China had “just demonstrated” a “very fast” hypersonic vehicle. At the time, he said he couldn’t provide more detail, but noted the demonstration would challenge current threat warning systems.

And new Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters last month at the U.S. Air Force Association’s annual conference that China has the ability to conduct global strikes from space.

Based on news reports, the Chinese appear to have combined a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS, with a hypersonic weapon.

“The combination of those two technologies creates two problems for our detection and tracking capabilities,” Patty-Jane Geller, a policy analyst for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at the Heritage Foundation, told Defense News.

The first is that the U.S. can detect most large rocket and missile launches, but might not be able to track a glide vehicle throughout its entire orbit or even see the Chinese orbital system is armed with something like a nuclear hypersonic weapon, she said.

The second problem is that once the weapon is “deorbited” or deployed from the system, then the U.S. has to deal with tracking a hypersonic weapon, “which is a problem that we’ve already been facing because hypersonic weapons fly at low altitudes at obviously very fast speeds and can maneuver to its target, making tracking very difficult,” Geller added.

Though she noted it was only a test, Geller said the implications could be significant. Even though China isn’t necessarily explicitly developing a doctrine on preemptive strike, the test suggests it’s thinking about the possibility given that it’s experimenting with a capability that can evade early warning radars.

Still, “this doesn’t fundamentally upend strategic stability or deterrence,” Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Defense News. “Americans don’t like it, but the way that the deterrence is most stable is if each side is vulnerable to the other.”

It’s natural to want to avoid vulnerability to attack, Panda said, and so the U.S., Russia and China all invest in offensive and defensive missile capability.

“Our existing missile defenses are, I think, poor enough that China should really have no concern about their ability to penetrate using ballistic missiles,” he said. “They don’t need this capability.”

But, if the U.S. successfully delivers a more robust homeland missile defense and early warning detection capability through programs like the Next-Generation Interceptor and other layered homeland defense technologies, “deterrence is a lot shakier if you are sitting in Moscow or Beijing,” Panda said.