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WASHINGTON — A group of former senior U.S. defense officials is urging the Pentagon to dramatically expand investment in advanced hypersonic weapons and manufacturing capacity, warning that China and Russia are outpacing the United States in developing high-speed, maneuverable missiles that threaten to erode U.S. military deterrence.
The recommendation comes in a new report released Oct. 9 by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. The study urges the Department of War to rapidly field both offensive hypersonic strike weapons and counter-hypersonic interceptors at a scale sufficient to achieve meaningful deterrence and, if necessary, defeat attacks from adversaries.
The report was written by the Atlantic Council’s Hypersonic Capabilities Task Force, formed in early 2025 and co-chaired by former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. The task force includes former senior Pentagon officials and industry executives.
“As Russia and China advance their hypersonic capabilities, the United States faces critical decisions on investment, prioritization, and deployment of these technologies,” the task force said.
Cost versus capacity
Hypersonic weapons — capable of flying at speeds above Mach 5 while maneuvering to evade detection — are a top strategic concern for Washington. China has conducted multiple tests of hypersonic glide vehicles and cruise missiles, while Russia has deployed operational systems targeting Ukraine.
Lead author Michael White, former principal director for hypersonics in the Pentagon’s research and engineering office, said the United States has built sophisticated hypersonic missiles but at unsustainable cost levels. Some current U.S. systems, according to published reports, cost between $15 million and $30 million per missile, limiting production to small quantities.
“If you look at the portfolio of systems that we have developed and that are ready to field, they are very capable,” White said during a panel at the Atlantic Council. But they’re too expensive to produce in the numbers needed to deter adversaries that are likely to launch large salvos.
White urged the Pentagon and defense industry to “find that sweet spot in the affordability-capability spectrum” to produce hypersonic systems at scale. “We need to do that aggressively,” he said.
Call for industrial transformation
The report argues that the U.S. defense industrial base is not structured or incentivized to design and manufacture hypersonic weapons affordably. It calls for a “dramatic shift” toward a production model similar to commercial aerospace and automotive industries — emphasizing high-volume, lower-cost manufacturing rather than bespoke, high-end systems.
“There must be a dramatic shift in perspective,” the report said, adding that investments should focus on “innovative ways of achieving affordable capacity” rather than expanding traditional defense contractor capabilities.
White said the Pentagon must “get rid of the traditional culture” and adopt a commercial manufacturing mindset. “We’ve got to start with cost,” he said, comparing the needed shift to how commercial space firms have reduced launch costs through iterative design and mass production.
Testing bottlenecks and infrastructure gaps
Whitney McNamara, senior vice president at Beacon Global Strategies and a member of the task force, said modernizing the nation’s hypersonic testing infrastructure is a key priority.
Current facilities and processes, she said, are siloed and slow down development cycles. She recommends building an AI-enabled test network that can integrate and analyze data across multiple programs, significantly reducing cost and time.
The report noted that the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center has begun modernizing facilities and exploring the use of commercial space assets for more frequent hypersonic flight testing. But McNamara said progress has been too slow: “We need to leverage commercial innovation more aggressively to break the testing bottleneck.”
Integration with missile defense
White linked the push for large-scale hypersonic manufacturing to the broader U.S. missile defense effort, including the Golden Dome initiative launched by the Trump administration to defend against hypersonic threats.
“No matter how sophisticated your defenses are, if you’re relying solely on kinetic interceptors, you get overwhelmed by numbers in a big hurry,” he said. “Your best defense is a good offense — you have to be able to deny launch and go after those numbers before they launch.”
He argued that the Pentagon’s success in deterring adversaries like China and Russia will depend on its ability to field hypersonic weapons — both offensive and defensive — in large quantities, not just as limited prototypes. He insisted that capability without capacity is not effective deterrence.
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