Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest military contractor, is investing heavily in hypersonic weapons technology as CEO James Taiclet seeks to align the company’s portfolio of capabilities with future warfighting requirements.
Taiclet’s signature initiative since taking the helm at Lockheed has been to orient company priorities towards the demands of 21st century warfare, and coincident with that emphasis the defense department has increased its own emphasis on hypersonic weapons.
In recent years, Lockheed Martin, a contributor to my think tank, has won a series of development contracts that effectively make it the dominant domestic player in hypersonic weapons.
It is the prime contractor on a “Conventional Prompt Strike” system that the Navy is developing and will share with the Army, and it is prime contractor on an air-launched hypersonic system that the Air Force is pursuing.
In both cases, the weapons employ glide vehicles that maneuver in the atmosphere after being boosted to five times or more the speed of sound.
Lockheed Martin has been working on related technologies for many years, mainly in connection with its ballistic missile programs.
But ballistic missiles typically follow a parabolic trajectory that carries warheads outside the atmosphere, so previous work on hypersonics was focused mainly on the behavior of reentry vehicles during the terminal stage of the trajectory as they approached their targets.
At that point, the reentry vehicles may be moving at 20 times the speed of sound, and interaction with the atmosphere creates extreme heating.
Today’s hypersonic weapons present a different challenge, because the weapons spend almost all of their flight time within the atmosphere, and thus must function during much longer periods of elevated heating.
Moreover, the hypersonic weapons are maneuverable rather than following a predictable ballistic trajectory; that maneuverability, when combined with high speed and relatively low altitudes (less than 50 miles above the Earth) can defeat any defenses currently fielded by other nations.
As if all this were not a sufficient challenge, the hypersonic weapons the joint force is pursuing today will be armed with conventional warheads, which means that to be effective they must hit within tens of meters of their intended targets after traveling many hundreds of miles and maneuvering to avoid interception.
Russia and China are developing similar weapons, but their designs are all dual-use, meaning capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads, so their need for accuracy is not necessarily as great as in the U.S. designs.
The U.S. approach in effect avoids issues of strategic stability by not creating fast-arriving weapons of mass destruction, but it achieves this result by imposing much greater performance demands on the weapons in terms of their accuracy.
Because they have been modeling and testing hypersonic effects for many years—in fact, back to before Lockheed and Martin combined in a single company—program managers are confident they understand all the factors they must master.
But the programs are on a tight timeline, with the Army planning to field its first hypersonic weapons in 2023 and the Navy two years later, so Lockheed has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into development and testing facilities aimed at getting the desired results quickly.
All four of the company’s major business units are engaged in the effort, and a new missile assembly factory was opened near Huntsville, Alabama only months ago.
The new facility is the latest in a series of digital factories the company has been constructing that apply advanced technology to the task of fabricating and integrating next-generation weapons (other such sites are up and running in Palmdale, California and Titusville, Florida).
At the Alabama site, Lockheed will combine boosters and other inputs such as a glide vehicle being produced by Huntsville-based Dynetics (a division of Leidos Holdings) to create an integrated system capable of penetrating air defenses at the heart of Russian and Chinese anti-access strategies.
The weapons will be uniquely capable of destroying distant, time-sensitive targets that other U.S. military systems may not be able to address.
The Navy says that it wants to produce two dozen of its prompt strike missiles annually to meet the needs of both the sea services and the Army.
When Air Force demand for its own glide system, called the Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon, is added, the Alabama facility will likely provide an economic boost to the state, further consolidating Huntsville’s reputation as a center of military innovation.
Of course, this all requires Congress to come through with funding for the current fiscal year; Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday warned during a recent visit to the factory that if Congress fails to replace the current continuing resolution with a real budget for fiscal 2022, progress on hypersonic weapons will slow.
But Gilday expressed optimism about the technology itself, stating that the joint hypersonics effort his service is leading is on track and progressing smoothly.
The Conventional Prompt Strike program that will soon deploy on both surface warships and submarines fits neatly into Gilday’s stress on long-range fires in his modernization plan.
It is also a close fit for the Army, which has made long-range fires its top modernization priority as the service seeks to grow its role in the Western Pacific.
The challenge of meeting military expectations for future hypersonic weapons will fall largely to Lockheed Martin, and the company has invested accordingly.
If it succeeds, it will have established an important new military franchise for the enterprise, and in the process helped keep the U.S. ahead of great-power rivals.
