Here’s a link for search results that will link you to a bunch of articles on this topic: usaf ends hypersonic program. My impression has been that we’ve been led to believe that this program was proceeding smoothly and successfully. But now we learn that isn’t the case.
Andrei Martyanov includes a short account of this announcement with his own comments, in a longer post:
Finally, about the failed test of the USAF very own hypersonic ARRW.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force’s March 13 test of a hypersonic weapon was “not a success,” the service secretary told lawmakers Tuesday. Frank Kendall indicated the Lockheed Martin-made AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon program may be in jeopardy. The service, he said, is “more committed to HACM [the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, the service’s other major hypersonic weapon program] at this point in time than we are to ARRW.” The ARRW effort “has struggled a little bit in its testing program,” Kendall told the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel during a hearing on the fiscal 2024 budget request. He said an ultimate decision on whether to continue with the program could come as part of the FY25 budget process next year following a study of the failed March test and possibly two more test launches. Hypersonic weapons travel at speeds topping Mach 5 and are highly maneuverable, making them difficult to track and shoot down. China and Russia have invested considerable resources in developing these weapons for their militaries, and several U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern that the country is not doing enough to field its own hypersonic capabilities.
Again, read my lips: the US eventually will be able to come up with some type of hypersonic weapon, most likely of a glider variety but neither China nor US will have anything even remotely equal to 3M22 Zircon. Moreover, it seems that US legislators and journos need a constant reminder of a huge difference between quasi ballistic systems and full power systems such as serially produced and deployed to Russian Navy's surface fleet Zircon. The only hypersonic thing which allegedly could get IOC is US Army's Dark Eagle but it is clear that there are "issues" with this system too. Well, doesn't look like Russia sweats too much about it. Plus S-300V4 and S-500 are specifically designed for dealing with such kind of threats and those are in serial production.
It appears the US will be playing catch up for years to come. It may also turn out that dollar hegemony will come to an end before catch ever happens.
One thing that's getting missed here is that this is part of a larger pattern. Technologically, we can no longer do stuff that we did almost a lifetime ago. NASA is claiming that the recent Artemis 1 unmanned Moon shot "aced" its test despite the loss of heat shield material. That the crew would have died had there been one isn't that big a deal, I guess. I think they're talking about a hypothetical landing in 2024 or 2025, but on the current flight schedule they won't be able to test out the hypothetical lander before then. (And the lander is still hypothetical). back in the days the Lunar module had teo manned test flights before the Big Show in July 1969.
We could not today build an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane or a B-70 Valkyrie bomber. Both were done up my smart guys with slide rules, and the advanced computers we have today can't duplicate what those guys did. Modern military aircraft can't fly as high or as fast as they did in the 60s. Or as reliably. Despite taking more time to develop the F-35 than it took to out a man on the Moon, the beast still isn't ready for prime time. It can't match the sortie rate of a 60s era F-4 Phantom.
The Russian hypersonic program was carried out with a sense of urgency since they took the possibility seriously that American missile defenses would render their ballistic missiles impotent and useless. (They need not have. Those defenses never existed in reality, but that is neither here nor there.) Our hypersonic program was the product of a bloated, over managed R&D bureaucracy hat cannot produce deployable weapons in a timely manner and at an affordable cost. It cannot even duplicate past weapons successfully. The Ford class carrier is a disaster for which people should hang.
The weapons with which we won the Cold War, the nuclear subs, ICBMs and manned bombers that provided our deterrent back in the days were built with the same urgency that the Russians brought to their hypersonic program, the same feeling that "we have to get his done or else". They were also produced by defense contractors that had to compete. The monopoly producers of today know they're getting the contract regardless with predictable results.
End of rant.
This time the "missile gap" is real (rather than the largely MIC fundraising ploy it was in the late '50s) and nobody gives a [bleep], because, now, the MIC gets all the money it wants entirely without regard to results.