As the first hypersonic weapon to be fielded by the US Army is scheduled to soon complete its final testing, the programmes developing the army’s and other services’ hypersonic technology could benefit from industry best practices, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
A new GAO report praised the army’s use of feedback for development of its Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) but cautioned that the service could use more digital engineering to speed along fielding and cut costs. Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo told reporters that LRHW – which is a collaboration with the US Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) hypersonic programme – is on track for fielding.
“It is a critical part of us fielding our multidomain task forces in the future, and we look forward to its eventual fielding,” Camarillo said on 8 August during the National Defense Industrial Association’s (NDIA’s) Emerging Technologies Institute conference. A previous GAO report published in June 2024 found that full fielding of the LRHW would be delayed to fiscal year (FY) 2025 due to test delays throughout FY 2024.
Digital engineering is underused by the services overall, which could impact cost and schedule, according to the report released in late July. The army, for example, told the GAO that it had no plans to use digital twin technologies.
While the LRHW programme is not utilising digital engineering, the CPS effort has a digital engineering plan. It will transition to a computing environment in the future, but officials have been challenged by having to bring various models “together to create a full digital representation”, according to the report.
However, digital engineering may not be a silver bullet to improving success metrics for hypersonic programmes, Mark Lewis, CEO for Purdue University’s Applied Research Institute, told Janes on 6 August.
“It’s the obvious direction that we’re all moving in, and it holds tremendous promise,” said Lewis, who was previously the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) director of defence research and engineering. “But here’s the catch, it hasn’t fully proven itself yet.”
It would be “difficult” to draw a direct line from lack of digital engineering to being over budget and schedule, he said. Beyond that, the physics of a hypersonic system is so complex that using digital engineering for modelling and simulations is complex.
“The physics of hypersonic flight is extremely challenging, so much so that it challenges the state of the art or ability to do physics modelling by all the processes that are going on in a hypersonic system, especially in an airbreathing system, for example, trying to model everything that’s going on inside the engine,” Lewis said.
As hypersonic technology becomes more advanced and more tested, “you improve your modelling with tests, but they all kind of go hand-in-hand”, Lewis said.
User feedback
The GAO report also praised the army and navy’s joint development of CPS for its implementation of user feedback. For example, the army has fielded hypersonic ground equipment with a unit that will deploying the weapons in the future for training purposes.
Officials from the other hypersonic efforts reported not soliciting feedback from individuals who would physically interact with or operate the systems.
The report recommended inclusion of feedback to support the acquisition best practice of reaching minimum viable product and updating it from there.
Lewis noted that the other hypersonic programmes not included in that section may have their own reasons for not relying on user feedback. “I’ve had that experience where you talk to current practitioners, current users … and they’re sort of used to their current capability,” he said.
One area where the army has been able to save schedule by adopting the minimum viable product approach is in its logistics, according to the report. For example, the army initially had a requirement for the LRHW to be rail-transportable. However, because of challenges reaching that requirement, officials made the decision that air transportability was the main priority and have deferred rail plans.
For more information on hypersonic development, please see US weapons report confirms delays to ground-based development programme: https://customer.janes.com/Janes/Display/BSP_76378-JDW.
Author: Meredith Roaten, Washington, DC
Publication: Jane’s Defence Weekly