3rd December 2024 at 8:35am
The US Navy is adding its first-ever shipborne hypersonic missile system to one of its stealthy guided missile destroyers.
The potent weapon is being retrofitted to USS Zumwalt, with the missile tubes replacing gun turrets that were never activated because they proved too expensive.
The work is underway at a shipyard in Mississippi, and once complete the warship will be capable of conducting fast, precision strikes from greater distances.
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The latest development comes as the US continues its arms race with Russia and China to develop and implement new hypersonic weapon technologies.
Travelling beyond Mach 5, at five times the speed of sound, hypersonic weapons have added agility to their speed, making them far harder to shoot down.
This could see hypersonic missiles transforming the future battlefield.
All three of the Zumwalt-class destroyers are to be equipped with four missile tubes, with each one taking three missiles, giving a total of 12 hypersonic weapons per ship.
Bryan Clark, a defence analyst at the Hudson Institute, told the AP new agency that the initial inactivated gun turrets had been a “costly blunder”.
He said this was an opportunity for the US Navy to “take victory from the jaws of defeat here, and get some utility out of them by making them into a hypersonic platform”.
For the last two decades, the US has been developing several types of hypersonic weapons, but recent tests by both China and Russia have added pressure to begin rolling them out.
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