The Air Force announced a successful test flight of one just the other day. Since the Chinese had announced they had a hypersonic missile a week or so ago, it sounds like the Air Force has had a hypersonic program going for quite some time. It takes more time than a few weeks to get something like a hypersonic missile to fly. Sounds groovy but... It takes a lot of fuel to get up to mach 5. Wanna bet the range of this missile isn't so great? Existing cruise missiles like Tomahawk fly somewhat below mach 1 and have transcontinental range. You can launch from say England and hit most of Russia, all of the middle east, the northern half of Africa. Tomahawk flies so low that ground radar cannot see it. If the radar cannot see you the fighters cannot find you.
One fine day while I was in the Air Force Air Defense Command we were practicing. We sent a target aircraft (a helpless T-33) up north and then turned him around to come south. The radar guys got to practice tracking, the SAGE center got to practice vectoring fighters and the fighter crews got some flight time. Only this day, the radar guys could not see the target. "Can you come up another thousand feet?" the controller asked the target. No joy, we still could not see it. We had to get the target up to 10,000 feet before he showed up on radar. I am sure that a Tomahawk cruise missile down at 1000 feet will never show on radar. And Tomahawk has the range to go about anywhere.
So, groovy as hypersonic sounds, I am betting on conventional cruise missiles to do the work.
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