The Secretary of the US Air Force has said that the United States and China are engaged in an arms race to develop highly lethal hypersonic weapons.
According to the British news agency Reuters, Beijing and Washington are developing and testing more and more high-speed and sophisticated weapons.
On Tuesday, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said: "There is an arms race, not necessarily an increase in numbers, but an improvement in quality."
"It's an arms race that has been going on for a long time. The Chinese are very aggressive in this matter."In October, the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Millie, confirmed tests of Chinese hypersonic weapons, which military experts say appear to be Beijing's orbiting system that the U.S. Designed to avoid missiles.
This year, the Pentagon has successfully conducted a number of successful tests of hypersonic weapons.
In October, the Navy successfully tested a booster rocket motor that would be used to power a launch vehicle carrying a hypersonic weapon.Hypersonic weapons travel in the air at five times the speed of sound or about 62 kilometers per hour.
According to Frank Kendall, since the US military has focused its funds on Iraq and Afghanistan, it has turned its back on hypersonic weapons.
"I'm not saying we did something new, but we haven't done enough," he said.
As the Pentagon enters its 2023 annual budget cycle, Frank Kendall hopes to raise funds for the new systems, including the hypersonic development program, with the retirement of the old and expensive systems.Major US arms manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin Corporation, have introduced their hypersonic weapons programs to investors as the world's attention shifts to a new arms race for an emerging class of weapons.
However, the head of research and development said the Pentagon wanted defense contractors to reduce the final cost of hypersonic weapons, as the next generation of superfast missiles currently being built cost hundreds of millions per unit.
