This information was included in the Defense Department’s annual Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China report, more commonly known as the China Military Power Report (CMPR), which serves as an assessment of China’s current defense strategy and military capabilities. While the CMPR analyzes a wide array of Chinese military advancements, it was especially beneficial in clarifying what exactly occurred during the country’s highly intriguing hypersonic weapon test that took place on July 27, 2021, which can be read about in detail here.
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“On July 27, 2021, China conducted the first fractional orbital launch of an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] with an HGV [hypersonic glide vehicle],” the CMPR revealed. “The HGV flew around the world and impacted inside China. This demonstrated the greatest distance flown (~40,000 km) and longest flight time (~100+ minutes) of any land-attack PRC [People’s Republic of China] weapons system to date. According to senior U.S. military officials, the HGV did not strike its target, but came close.”
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As The War Zone discussed in this previous breakdown of the FOB concept, the depressed flight profile and capacity to strike really any target near its orbital path pose quite the challenge for an opponent’s tracking and missile defense networks. The FOB system could attack from vectors that its opponent’s radars are not looking toward, affecting its ability to anticipate where and when a strike may occur, let alone counter one.
An infographic depicting the flight path of a FOB system. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
China’s FOB-like system, though, instead carries a maneuverable hypersonic glide vehicle as opposed to a traditional nuclear-armed reentry vehicle, allowing it to change course dynamically and fly at lower altitudes, even porpoising as it goes, during its flight through the atmosphere. This allows it to hit targets much farther off its orbital flight path and makes interception nearly impossible. As noted earlier, reports that China’s hypersonic glide vehicle had also released its own projectile while on its very high-speed descent complicates things further, as The War Zone explained in detail in this past article.
The Financial Times, which was the first to report on the test, even emphasized how caught off-guard the Pentagon was by this development considering how technically complex it would be for anything moving at high hypersonic speeds to launch its own projectile.
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The Pentagon throughout the CMPR cited the U.S. military’s own advancements in the hypersonic realm as the predominant driving factor behind China’s innovations while admitting that most of China’s missile systems are “comparable in quality to systems of other international top-tier producers.” An underlying fear that the proliferation of hypersonic technology could soon “blur the line between nuclear and conventional escalation” was also highlighted as a potential motivator behind these advancements. These influences are being reflected in other Chinese strategic developments, as well.
Regardless, it is important to note that U.S. missile defenses, as they exist now, aren’t anywhere capable of deflecting a massive nuclear strike from a near-peer like China or Russia, which is something The War Zone has previously touched on. Defending against hypersonic weapons, especially ones that can attack from unpredictable vectors like this FOB-capable system would be able to, is an even more challenging proposition.
