Trump Tips Brand-New ‘Super-Duper Missile’ That Puts China’s Best Missiles to Shame

The Department of Defense is working on developing a range of hypersonic missiles to counter our adversaries. https://t.co/ATb1XLHFtl

— Jonathan Rath Hoffman (@ChiefPentSpox) May 15, 2020

So, what is a hypersonic missile?

It’s defined as any missile which goes past Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. The United States conducted a test of a newly developed hypersonic missile glide body in March, Reuters reported.

The missile follows an unpredictable path, which makes it difficult to neutralize.

It’s fired on a rocket up to 25 miles in the atmosphere, at which point the hypersonic glide body detaches and flies toward the target. This unpredictability is actually why they’re considered so lethal; regular ballistic missiles have a predictable arc, whereas hypersonic glide vehicles can do extraordinary things to evade a country’s missile defenses.

A senior NATO official told Agence France-Presse that in a hypersonic missile strike, the target country wouldn’t know what happened “until there’s a boom on the ground.”

It’s unclear whether this was the missile Trump was referring to in his comments on Friday, but given the context, one would assume it was something else. Both China and Russia have tested hypersonic missiles, and Russia says it has an operable version.

It’s always a good day at the White House when both China and Russia can be put on notice like this. It’s even better when you consider that Russia has used the threat of aiming their putative hypersonic missile arsenal at the United States if we were to deploy intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe.

Russia, however, clearly isn’t the main target for the “super-duper missile,” when it arrives.

China has been fairly aggressive about pushing its hypersonic missile, the DF-17. When 16 of them appeared at last year’s National Day parade, the Beijing-friendly South China Morning Post said the “boost-glide missile may be powerful enough to penetrate US missile shields in the region, transforming Beijing’s previously defensive strategy of containing independence-leaning forces in the Taiwan Strait.”

That’s a dangerous statement to begin with, particularly when it comes from a paper that — if certainly not under the heel of the Chinese Communist Party the same way Xinhua news agency or similar propaganda mills are — clearly amplifies pro-Beijing voices.