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Indiana will play a key role in developing hypersonic weapons systems in an effort to surpass an increasingly sophisticated and worrisome threat from Russia and China.
The Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane recently unveiled a program to address the priority—along with several other pressing military concerns. It uses an innovative approach that rapidly develops technologies and systems into prototypes for testing and fielding. The program will draw from a network of leading-edge companies and universities from which the U.S. government can mine the best ideas.
Hypersonic weapons can travel at least one mile per second and maneuver through blind spots of missile defense systems. Their development by Russia and China is a major concern for military planners.
“Hypersonic weapons use advances in electronic capacity, sensor quality and miniaturization to create a new threat,” said Trey Obering, former head of the Missile Defense Agency. “They’re fast and maneuverable. That combination creates a threat that is imperative for the U.S. to address.”
Michael Griffin, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said development of hypersonic capabilities is the “highest technical priority.”
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency puts a very fine point on the value of hypersonic capabilities, for both the United States and its potential adversaries.
“Developments in hypersonic propulsion will revolutionize warfare by providing the ability to strike targets more quickly, at greater distances, and with greater firepower,” the agency said in congressional testimony.
Russian leaders recently claimed they are building a hypersonic missile that can travel at nearly nine times the speed of sound and that it can be used to combat ships at sea or land targets.
The United States is playing catch-up, adding even greater urgency to the Crane program.
“We have lost our technical advantage in hypersonics,” Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year, “but we haven’t lost the hypersonics fight.”
The hypersonics focus is part of a larger effort at Crane aimed at prototyping systems to address a range of critical Department of Defense priorities, from machine learning and hypersonics to radiation-hardened microelectronics. Managed out of Crane’s office of Strategic & Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems, the prototyping program will be active for up to 10 years.
Central to the success of the program will be the need to cast a wide net for the best available technologies. As a result, Crane will seek out both traditional and nontraditional defense companies—because many of the developments are taking place in the private sector.
Academia also will play a key role. For example, the University of Notre Dame and Purdue University partnered to launch the largest wind tunnel for testing technologies at hypersonic speeds, the first of several the partnership will build.
Delivering cutting-edge solutions also requires innovation in contracting. The Department of Defense’s “Other Transaction Authority” agreements, like the Crane program, jump-start the slow technology-buying process, allowing for the rapid development of prototypes for assessment by the military services.
Using OTA, a research and prototyping project can be shepherded through the acquisition process and funded in about two months. It would take over a year if managed through the usual wickets.
Indiana is at the heart of innovation in the U.S. military—and, given advancing military threats, it is an increasingly vital outpost for national security.•
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Greeff is founder and CEO of the Raleigh, North Carolina-based National Security Technology Accelerator. It has an office in Bloomington that manages the prototyping program at Crane.
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