The Never-Ending Arms Race
By Kira Webster
Among fighter jets in the seemingly endless nuclear arms race against developed powers, hypersonic missiles are creating issues within defense structures all across the world. China, Russia, and the U.S. are in the lead in the hypersonic arms race, but others including Britain, France, Germany, India, and Japan have joined. Undoubtedly, more will follow.
There are two variants of hypersonic weapons, both equipped with conventional or nuclear warheads, and they destroy their targets through speed and force of impact. HGV’s (boost-glide missiles) are lofted on ballistic missiles or aircraft, launched through the atmosphere, and pulled to their target by gravity. These stay low and don’t travel above 62 miles in the air. The lower altitude helps their speed, and makes their journey shorter, while also deterring radars and defenses designed to track and intercept ballistic missile warheads.
HCM’s (hypersonic cruise missiles) are like pilotless aircraft, propelled by an on-board engine. They’re lighter than standard cruise missiles since they don’t carry liquid oxygen tanks. They “breathe” in the air that passes through it at supersonic speed, combining the oxygen with its hydrogen fuel. The end combustion generates extreme heat and propels the missile towards its target. These fly even lower than HGV’s, which makes identifying and destroying them even more difficult. These weapons can close in on their targets at a minimum of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound, or 3,836.4 miles an hour).
Both of these weapons can also maneuver towards their targets, which makes them harder to track and intercept. The Trump Administration’s plan for a new Space Force plans to put sensors and interceptors into space to better pinpoint the threat of hypersonic missiles, but many critics have slammed this idea for being poorly funded.
In late 2017, China tested its DF-17, a new low-range missile, and specifically used an HGV to launch it. The following year, they tested the Xing-Kong-2 (Starry Sky 2), a “wave rider,” that gains momentum by surfacing shock waves. Russia successfully tested its Avangard HGV in 2018, and their Tsirkon (a hypersonic cruise missile) has been tested several times since 2015. The U.S. has been far from behind when it comes to HGV’s — Boeing, Pratt, and Whitney Rocketdyne received a contract from the U.S. Air Force to develop the hypersonic X-51A WaveRider scramjet on 2004. Its first flight test was in 2010 and failed — a pattern that was soon to form.
In more recent times, the Air Force has launched its ARRW from a B-52 bomber as part of its Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) this past June, while the Navy tested an HGV in 2017. These two military branches, along with the U.S Army, all had their own hypersonic weapons programs, but in 2018, the Pentagon decided to combine them into one big program: the Conventional Prompt Global Strike Program (CPGS), which seeks to build the capability to hit targets worldwide in under 60 minutes.
The Center for Public Integrity’s R. Jeffrey Sith also reports that Congress passed a bill last year requiring the US to have operational hypersonic weapons by late 2022. President’s Trump’s 2020 Pentagon budget request included $2.6 billion to support their development. Smith expects the annual investment to reach $5 billion by the mid-2020s. Within the military-industrial complex, companies, Washington-based think tanks, the Defense Department, and certain legislators will insist that building these hypersonic weapons is of utmost importance when it comes to protecting ourselves from countries that successfully finish their weapons first.
However, these prices do matter in terms of a nationwide budget, no matter how hard the defense companies will insist they do not. Consider the fact that worker productivity has increased since 1979, but the minimum wage has not increased to the same degree. Many workers struggle to find jobs that cover basic life expenses even though unemployment is low. The gap in wage inequality has steadily grown over the decades, with 90 percent of the population’s household wealth dropping from 33 percent to 23 percent between 1989 and 2016. Forty-four percent of families would be unable to cover emergency-related expenses surpassing 400 dollars without borrowing money or selling their belongings. Periods of unemployment or illness, even with unemployment benefits factored in, can’t be covered adequately by the majority of Americans because of the stark increase of out-of-pocket medical expenses, which have increased fourfold since 2007. The U.S. has had 400,000 opioid-related deaths since 1999 and 47,173 suicides in 2017 alone. Over 14,000 people have died from firearms in that same year, and the U.S. was ranked higher than 32 out of 36 developed countries for child poverty. These issues are never covered as terms of national security by politicians, and hardly at all by conservative politicians.
The logic behind an arms race is littered with holes. Rajan Menon, professor of International Relations at the Powell School of New York and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, compares an arms race to any other race in sports (i.e. a bike or a foot race). There’s always a beginning, a set distance, and a goal. Normally, the goal is to cross the finish line before all of your rivals. As history will point out, arms races are not always easy to pin when they started, and cause long disputes over who was the real initiator. Historians today are still researching (and arguing) about what started the arms race that culminated back in World War I. Apart from a constant perpetuation to keep the competition alive (where the money will stay flowing between legislation and weapons companies and suspicions are sustained) and reactionary decisions, arms races lack a steady purpose. Due to the constant need to keep up (or outdo) the others, the finish line is never clearly in sight.
While the whole purpose of keeping arms races alive is to foster security, it normally does the opposite. Without fluid communication and transparency about the others, each side will just continuously build weapons. President Trump’s decision to leave treaties that tried to maintain trust only deepens uncertainties shared on all sides. Pulling out of the INF has definitely influenced Russia’s decision to develop hypersonic weapons, and also continues to ensure that their nuclear forces will serve as a credible deterrent against a first strike on their country. Not only does this get expensive (the U.S. has consistently exceeded China and Russia’s spending combined since 1991), but threats are more plausible since uncertainties keep rising. Sprouting from this paranoia, money flows like a revolving door between the military, defense companies, and politicians. The “experts” in these fields, and big supporters of pouring money into defense are rarely challenged for fear of looking unpatriotic. Without any kind of pushback, this line of thinking only gets more powerful and takes less heed as to how much they spend. In turn, this leaves less funding for other crucial areas of well-being for American citizens. With no specific end in sight for this weaponized foot race, the end could ultimately be nuclear agitation, with the potential to doom us all. The revolving financial door between defense and legislation needs to see crucial readjustment, transparency, and diplomacy. It’s the only way for us to truly remain safe.
Kira Webster is a college intern at Peace Economy Project.
