First Time Admits China's Hypersonic Weapons Test, US General: It's Very Worrying

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Jenderal Mark A Milley. (Wikimedia Commons/Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)

JAKARTA - The top US military officer, General Mark Milley, has given the first official confirmation of China's test of a hypersonic weapon, which military experts believe is an ambition to have a system capable of evading US missile defenses.

Previously, the Department of Defense or the Pentagon had gone to great lengths to avoid direct confirmation of China's tests this summer, the Financial Times first reported, although President Joe Biden and other officials have expressed general concern about China's development of hypersonic weapons.

General Milley explicitly confirmed a test and said it was "very close" to the Sputnik moment, referring to Russia's first man-made satellite launch in 1957, which put Moscow ahead in the Cold War-era space race.

"What we're seeing is a very significant event of a hypersonic weapon system test. And that's very concerning," Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bloomberg television, in an interview broadcast on Wednesday, citing Reuters Oct. 28.

Nuclear weapons experts say China's weapons tests appear designed to evade US defenses in two ways. First, hypersonics travel at more than five times the speed of sound, or about 6,200 kph (3,853 mph), making them more difficult to detect and intercept.

Second, sources told Reuters, the United States believes China's test involved a weapon that first orbited Earth. It's something military experts call a Cold War concept known as "fractional orbital bombing."

Last month, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall raised concerns about such a system, telling reporters about the weapon going into orbit and then descending to the target.

"If you take that kind of approach, you don't have to use a traditional ICBM's trajectory, which is straight from the point of launch to the point of impact," he explained.

"This is a way to evade missile defenses and warning systems," Kendall continued.

Fractional Orbital Bombardment would also be a way for China to evade the United States' missile defenses in Alaska, which are designed to combat weapons from countries like North Korea.

Separately, Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies summed up fractional orbital bombing in this way, "The simplest way to think of China's orbital bombardment system is to imagine the space shuttle, loading nuclear weapons into cargo hold, and forgetting the landing gear." Lewis said the difference lies in China's re-entry system is the glider.

Previously, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied the weapons tests. It said it had carried out routine tests in July, but added, "It's not a missile, it's a space vehicle."

The United States' defense systems are incapable of combating large-scale attacks from China or Russia, which could overwhelm the system. But the open pursuit of increasingly advanced missile defenses has Moscow and Beijing looking for ways to defeat Washington, experts say, including hypersonics and, apparently, fractional orbital bombardment. It is known, the United States and Russia are both testing hypersonic weapons.