I don't know if you saw it or not, but over the summer China conducted a pair of hypersonic weapons tests that reportedly left Department of Defense officials "stunned."
General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a "Sputnik moment."
Of course, none of this came as a surprise to me, or my readers, because I've been talking about hypersonic weapons for years.
I even wrote an entire report on the subject, and I'll share the relevant details of that report in a moment.
But first, let's just get caught up on hypersonic missiles...
For instance, what exactly are they?
Hypersonic missiles are weapons that travel at speeds of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) or higher.
Such weapons can include unmanned jets or more traditional cruise missiles. But the real threat comes from "glide vehicles."
A glide vehicle is launched into space (low-earth orbit) by rockets almost identical to ones that carry satellites and astronauts, except it carries a glide vehicle/maneuverable warhead instead. That glide vehicle deploys from the rocket, re-enters the earth's atmosphere, leaves again, coasts for a while, and then re-enters once more, screaming down at its intended target.
This is called "boost-glide" or "skip-glide."
It looks something like this...
This is much different than a traditional ICBM which launches up and comes down in a pretty standard arc. And this unpredictable nature, along with uncanny speed, makes it almost impossible to intercept.
Still, this technology has been around for a while.
Russia's is called Avangard. First introduced in 2018, it launches from an ICBM and is capable of hitting Mach 20.
Meanwhile, China's hypersonic glide vehicle is known as DF-ZF, and it officially became operational in 2019. It can also reach speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 10 and can be outfitted with various ICBMs.
However, the two hypersonic tests China conducted over the summer seem to have taken things a step further.
This was something new.