The creation of their own supersonic weapons has become a problem for the United States. All attempts to force development have failed despite the fact that the Pentagon understands the serious lag behind Russia in this direction.
Such a statement was made by John Heiten, deputy head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces, during a speech at the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to him, the American military-industrial complex is faced with new and new failures. In this regard, the general urged to learn from their own mistakes and not repeat them from now on, since the United States, once a leader in the field of armaments, is now forced to catch up with opponents.
“I look back at supersonic weapons, now we are in fierce competition, but ten years ago we were ahead of everyone in the creation of supersonic weapons”, – said Heiten.
He recalled that under the auspices of the Pentagon Advanced Research Programs Agency, the Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle project existed. Within its framework, they tried to create two supersonic aircraft HTV-1 and HTV-2.
“They failed”, – the general complained. – What did we do after such a defeat? We studied these failures for years, and then programs turned off. Thus we will not accelerate”.
The US problem is precisely that every test failure entails the freezing of all activities, explains John Hayten. So, as an example, he cited the catastrophes with the shuttles “Challenger” and “Columbia”.
“But, if we are not talking about saving human lives, then we must move fast, adapt and make launches quickly”, – he stated.
As News Front previously reported, at the end of last year, the first regiment of the Avangard missile system, equipped with a hypersonic glider winged warhead unit, took up combat duty. Against this background, the executive director of the American Arms Control Association, Daryl Kimball, began urging Washington to urgently begin negotiations with Moscow “on the regulation of new types of weapons”.