US-China-Russia Hypersonic Weapons Race Accelerates

American defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s recent announcement that it had been awarded a $694 million contract by the US Air Force to produce a new air-launched hypersonic missile is the latest sign of an accelerating tripartite arms race involving the US, China, and Russia.

A hypersonic missile is a weapon able to move at speeds exceeding Mach 5 -- more than five times the speed of sound or roughly 6,100 kilometers per hour -- while maintaining the ability to perform sharp, sustained maneuvers within the Earth's atmosphere.

“What makes certain newer hypersonic weapons particularly challenging is the combination of speed, maneuverability, and flight trajectory, which can complicate detection, continuous tracking and the prediction of where the weapon will be at the point of interception,” Eva Sula, a senior fellow for defense and security at the London-headquartered Baltic International Security Center (BISC), said in an interview.

Lockheed said the missile’s -- known as the ARRW -- “production readiness makes it an essential asset for the military, providing a critical capability to counter emerging threats.”

China and Russia, which have had a “no limits partnership” since early 2022, are foremost among those threats. Beijing has the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal, driven by a high-volume manufacturing strategy. Russia leads the US in operational fielding of hypersonic weapons, having used them in combat during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Analysts say that if current production trends hold, by 2035 China and Russia will field a joint hypersonic weapons arsenal of 5,000 -- with Beijing accounting for 4,000.

“It's one piece of the puzzle as the US scrambles -- with some success -- to rapidly build up its hypersonic capabilities, both defensive and offensive,” Grant Newsham, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington and retired Marines colonel, told RFE/RL. Washington “is making surprisingly rapid progress, particularly on the offensive end -- and that includes the Air Force, Navy, and Army,” he added.

The Pentagon plans to spend $37.9 billion on hypersonic weapons programs from the 2027 to 2031 fiscal years in a push to catch up with China and Russia. That includes $10.1 billion for the Army to field 4,500 intermediate-range hypersonic weapons, $2.1 billion for the Navy to procure 59 missiles, and broad funding for the Air Force to acquire the ARRW and the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM).

China’s Advantages

In the hypersonic weapons race, China leads for several reasons. First, it has an early mover’s advantage. In 2020, it deployed the world’s first operational hypersonic weapon system, which is composed of the DF-17 medium-range ballistic missile and DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV).

“China’s development of its conventional missiles, not bound by INF [the arms control agreement signed by the US and Soviet Union in 1987], gave them a leg up in the medium-range ballistic missiles that can be used as hypersonic boosters,” John Van Oudenaren, a research analyst for the technology consultancy BluePath Labs in Washington, told RFE/RL.

Beijing further benefits from a testing infrastructure for hypersonic weapons that is more varied and expansive than the US’s, he adds.

China is the only country to have successfully integrated an HGV with a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), a warhead delivery system that places a weapon into low-Earth orbit (LEO) before de-orbiting it toward a target. Beijing carried out two tests in 2021 that demonstrated this integration.

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Though the HGV in the first test missed its target by 39 kilometers, it successfully fired a separate projectile mid-flight. The Pentagon was stunned. No country had ever released a payload from a vehicle moving at hypersonic speeds without destroying the craft or destabilizing its flight path. General Mark Milley, then-chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a "Sputnik moment.”

At the same time, China’s hypersonic tests highlighted US vulnerability to an attack from the south. That’s because US missile defense is designed with the assumption that a Russian nuclear attack on the American homeland would travel across the shortest distance -- the North Pole and Arctic. But in China’s hypersonic tests, the weapons moved in low-Earth orbit over Antarctica, where US radar coverage is limited. A FOBS can approach from unexpected trajectories because it does not fly on high, predictable parabolic arcs like a traditional intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Beijing denied that it tested hypersonic weapons. Its Foreign Ministry said that the tests involved verifying reusable space vehicle technologies to help lower the cost of spacecraft operations.

“They are lying. It's part and parcel of Chinese strategy,” the Center for Security Policy’s Newsham says, adding that Beijing vastly understates its military spending. The Pentagon estimates that China spends 40-90 percent more on defense than in its stated budget.

Another advantage China has in the hypersonic competition is its manufacturing prowess, compounded by its de facto alliance with Russia. “Russia is in a wartime economy and China is a manufacturing powerhouse. They are able to build these missiles very quickly compared to the US,” Ali Javaheri, a senior emerging technology analyst at private markets data firm PitchBook in New York, told RFE/RL.

Russia and China respectively produce an estimated 80 and 370 hypersonic weapons annually, while the US manufactures them in the single digits.

“The US is great at making exquisite defense systems -- like the F-35 fighter jet -- but not so good at making the mid-tier stuff” like hypersonics, says Javaheri.

He notes that after the Cold War ended, the American defense industrial base atrophied, with dramatic consolidation and decoupling from the commercial economy. Defense contractors focused on producing advanced, low-volume, and expensive platforms for the Pentagon. The US military ultimately acquired some world-leading defense systems, but at the expense of mass production and surge capacity.

Increased Threat To Taiwan

American military planners worry that China’s burgeoning hypersonic arsenal could complicate US efforts to intervene in a Taiwan crisis, the most likely scenario that could thrust the two superpowers into armed conflict. While China already boasts the world’s largest conventional missile force, hypersonic weapons present unique challenges because of their speed, low-altitude atmospheric flight and real-time maneuverability.

The Pentagon’s Overmatch brief, a classified assessment of US military preparedness that was first brought to light by The New York Times in December 2025, found in war-game simulations of a Taiwan conflict that Beijing used hypersonic weapons as part of a devastating campaign that disabled or destroyed the US Navy’s advanced Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers.

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Without the ability to neutralize China’s missile threat, US commanders would likely be forced to operate the carrier groups outside the weapons’ range -- which is 4,000 kilometers for an intermediate range missile. Since most carrier-based aircraft have a combat radius of 800 to 1,300 kilometers, US fighter jets would be far out of effective strike or air superiority range over the Taiwan Strait.

“It potentially makes a US (and Taiwanese and Japanese) defense of Taiwan more costly given the currently inadequate US defenses against hypersonic missiles,” says Newsham of the Center for Security Policy. “However, it doesn't give China an insurmountable advantage that will give it an easy victory -- or necessarily a victory at all. The US and its allies still have plenty of capabilities for giving China a very hard time.”

Notably, the US has deployed mobile missile launchers in Japan and the Philippines that can target China’s eastern coastal economic hubs, naval bases, airfields, and command nodes.

Looking ahead, the hypersonic arms race with the US on one side and China and Russia on the other is likely to intensify as all three countries aim to ramp up their respective arsenals.

Yet analysts say that the transformative capabilities of hypersonic weapons should not be overhyped. “Hypersonic weapons are becoming an increasingly important element of strategic competition,” says the Baltic International Security Center’s Sula.

“However, I would be cautious about presenting them as a technological development that will independently transform warfare. The experience of Ukraine has demonstrated quite clearly that military effectiveness increasingly depends on how different capabilities are combined and employed, rather than the sophistication of any single weapon.”