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The Star
a day ago
- Politics
- The Star
US debuts hypersonic missile in Australia. Is it a deterrent against China?
The US appears to be strengthening its allied deterrence against China by deploying its Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, a move that could 'further intensify' regional rivalry, Chinese experts have warned. The United States Army Pacific, a service component for America's Indo-Pacific Command, confirmed on the weekend that it had deployed a Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) system – commonly referred to as Dark Eagle – to Australia's Northern Territory as part of the three-week Talisman Sabre 2025 military exercise that wrapped up on Monday. It was the first time that the weapon had been used overseas and beyond the continental US. 'The deployment of the LRHW system to Australia is a major milestone for the army and demonstrates our ability to rapidly deploy and operate advanced capabilities in support of our allies and partners,' Wade Germann, commander of the Hawaii-based 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force which transported the weapon to Australia, said on Sunday. As a land-based, manoeuvrable missile system, Dark Eagle can travel at over 6,100km/h (3,800mph) and strike targets more than 2,700km (1,700 miles) away. The US deployment of the weapon showed a 'flexing of military muscle', according to Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. He said the move indicated the importance that Washington attached to the US-Australia alliance, including its readiness to strengthen defence coordination and security cooperation with Canberra. Xin expected that the deployment was unlikely to have a direct impact on China. He said many US actions had targeted China in recent years, including the Aukus trilateral security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom. 'I'm afraid that is also the main intention of the US [this time] – to exert a certain deterrence against China, to demonstrate the unity and interoperability of its alliances, as well as the credibility of its stated security commitment to the region – to project this posture and attitude,' he said. Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Centre at East China Normal University in Shanghai, said the US had been steadily cultivating and shaping Australia into a key military hub for American forces since the US began advancing its Indo-Pacific strategy. With the LRHW deployment, the US was seeking to comprehensively and gradually improve Australia's long-range strike ability, he said. He said he expected that Washington aimed to turn the South Pacific nation into a potential launch pad for future military action against China. 'Australia has not only already been a tool of the US Indo-Pacific strategy, but is increasingly becoming both a strategic and tactical weapon for Washington across multiple aspects,' Chen said. The overseas deployment of the hypersonic missile system is another example of Washington ratcheting up its force projection in the Asia-Pacific region. The US deployed a Typhon missile system – also known as the Mid-Range Capability (MRC) system – in the Philippines last year, with the weapon apparently remaining in the Southeast Asian country, drawing repeated criticism from Beijing. Xin, from Fudan, expected that China would be vigilant about the US deployment of Dark Eagle, although he also said China's own development of hypersonic weapons had been rapid in recent years. He said US military deployments in the Philippines and Japan, as well as Washington's policy statements on the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, targeted Beijing. 'I think China will certainly maintain a high level of alertness and attention to this,' Xin said. 'The military and security rivalry or competition between China and the US in the Indo-Pacific is likely to further intensify.' Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People's Liberation Army, said the inclusion of Dark Eagle in the Talisman Sabre 2025 exercise carried symbolic weight, as the weapon could reach China's periphery. If the missile, with a range of around 2,720km, were placed at Steep Point, mainland Australia's westernmost location, it could strike as far as the James Shoal in the South China Sea, said Zhou, who is also a senior fellow in the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University. Still, he said, the weapon was unlikely to be the 'game changer' the US military had described, given that China's DF-17 hypersonic missile had a comparable range and the DF-27 could reach up to 8,000km – far surpassing that of the LRHW. 'In terms of weapons comparison, it's not a case of them having something we don't. What we have may even be better than theirs,' he said. He also noted that the weapon's use in the Talisman Sabre 2025 exercise would not guarantee its future stationing in Australia, and that it was difficult to conclude whether Canberra would approve its use on Australian territory during wartime. Fu Qianshao, a Chinese military aviation analyst and former member of the air force, also expected that deploying Dark Eagle in Australia was of little threat to China. 'Even if it were to pose a threat, we have corresponding countermeasures,' he said. The latest Talisman Sabre drill, a biennial event involving more than 40,000 troops from the US, Australia and 17 other nations this year, started on July 13 while the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was in China. In recent years, Australia has increased its military presence in the South China Sea, while China's surprise live-fire naval drills in international waters of the Tasman Sea earlier this year drew protests from Canberra. Meanwhile, Canberra is also facing growing pressure from Washington on defence matters. The Pentagon has reportedly urged both Australia and Japan to clarify their positions in the event of a conflict with Beijing over Taiwan. 'What makes us alert and concerned is that there seems to be an increasingly evident rift or divergence between Canberra's diplomatic and military spheres,' Chen said. He said the Albanese government's efforts to improve relations with China through diplomacy continued to be undermined – or sabotaged – by its defence and security sectors. 'If the Albanese government succumbs to pressure and political inducements from the US military and Australia's domestic China hawks, the hard-won progress in China-Australia bilateral relations could be damaged, or even lost entirely,' he said. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
AllAfrica
5 days ago
- Politics
- AllAfrica
Dark Eagle: US hypersonic deployment has China squawking
US deployment of its Dark Eagle hypersonic missile system to Australia's Northern Territory for the 2025 Talisman Sabre joint military drills has reshaped deterrence dynamics vis-à-vis China in the Indo-Pacific. Capable of striking targets up to 2,700 kilometers away, Dark Eagle is operated via a battery of four launchers and command vehicles, allowing precision strikes at hypersonic speeds. The deployment, conducted by the Hawaii-based 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) represented the weapon's first operational use west of the International Date Line, USNI reported. Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), stated that the military exercise, held from July 13 to August 4 with over 30,000 personnel from 19 nations, validated the US Army's ability to deploy and operate the system in forward environments. Prior to this, the weapon had only been tested in Florida and integrated into Navy-led command drills. During Talisman Sabre, the MDTF also launched an SM-6 missile from its Mid-Range Capability (MRC) platform against a maritime target—a shot that provoked strong protests from Beijing, which warned that such moves risk destabilizing the region and triggering a new arms race. The US Navy plans to field a variant of the hypersonic missile aboard Virginia-class submarines and Zumwalt-class destroyers by fiscal year 2028, reinforcing the Pentagon's long-range strike architecture aimed at penetrating Chinese and Russian anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) networks. As noted by Ankit Panda in an October 2023 report for the Carnegie Endowment, the US strategy increasingly favors mobile, land-based missile systems whose ability to reposition rapidly complicates adversary targeting and enhances survivability in contested environments. These wheeled launchers, employed in shoot-and-scoot tactics, are seen as effective tools for bolstering deterrence without incurring the diplomatic costs of permanent basing. Panda notes that such systems enable a sustained forward presence while adapting to the demands of a more fragmented and escalation-prone Indo-Pacific theater. This evolving doctrine is embedded within the MDTF concept, which integrates capabilities across land, air, sea, space and cyber to counter enemy A2/AD strategies. According to Wilson Beaver and Anna Gustafson in an April 2025 article for the Heritage Foundation, MDTFs are uniquely designed to deliver tailored, theater-specific strikes that degrade adversary capabilities while restoring US freedom of maneuver. Their agility and domain integration make them ideal for operating long-range precision fires in environments where fixed installations are highly vulnerable. At the operational level, forward-deployed missile forces also serve broader strategic goals. In testimony before the US Senate in April 2025, Admiral Paparo stressed that defending Taiwan and preserving Indo-Pacific stability demands forward-deployed missile, sensor and command systems across allied territories, including Japan, the Philippines, Guam and Palau. He described this posture as essential to denying adversaries their strategic objectives, emphasizing that geographic dispersion, allied interoperability and resilient early warning and precision-strike capabilities form the backbone of a combat-credible deterrent embedded across the region's front-line archipelagos. These capabilities have triggered deeper strategic concerns. Aaron Shiffler, writing for the Joint Air Power Competence Center in an October 2023 article, notes that hypersonic weapons compress decision timelines and complicate traditional defense postures. Their extreme speed and maneuverability reduce early-warning windows, increasing the risk of miscalculation. Shiffler argues that these systems could undermine mutual vulnerability—the bedrock of nuclear deterrence—by enabling rapid, precise strikes against high-value targets. In his view, this shift raises the prospect of crisis instability if adversaries perceive a first-strike advantage. While advocates tout the deterrent value of hypersonic weapons, Shiffler warns that without arms control frameworks, proliferation of these weapons may erode both nuclear and conventional strategic balances. But the growing momentum behind hypersonics has met stiff resistance from skeptics, such as David Wright and Cameron Tracy, who argue in a March 2024 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the systems offer little advantage over legacy missiles. They cite intense heating and aerodynamic drag during low-altitude flight as limiting factors that degrade speed, range and survivability. Unlike ballistic missiles, which briefly heat during reentry, boost-glide vehicles face sustained thermal stress during their glide phase—up to 30 minutes—making faster, longer-range designs difficult. They need large rocket boosters and emit bright infrared signatures, making them visible to early-warning satellites despite claims of stealth. Wright and Tracy contend that the technology suffers from fundamental design compromises and may be more about optics than operational advantage. Shawn Rostker echoes this skepticism in a February 2025 RealClear Defense article, where he critiques the growing political pressure in the US to match Chinese and Russian hypersonic deployments. Rostker argues that recent calls for expanded hypersonic funding rest on inflated threat assessments and that many technical hurdles remain unresolved. He states that both glide vehicles and cruise-type hypersonics lack a compelling strategic rationale beyond symbolic parity. Despite the limited operational success of China's DF-ZF or Russia's Tsirkon, Avangard and Kinzhal, their existence fuels anxiety in Washington, creating a momentum that may not be justified by battlefield utility. Rostker warns that absent clear strategic value, hypersonics risk becoming expensive distractions rather than game-changing deterrents. Yet China's response indicates that it takes these developments seriously. Veerle Nouwens and others, in a January 2024 report for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), state that Chinese analysts view US plans to deploy land-based missiles across the First and Second Island Chains as a direct threat to China's strategic mobility and posture. According to Nouwens and others, Beijing sees these forward deployments as a deliberate effort to undermine its A2/AD systems and target inland facilities. In response, Chinese strategists anticipate a surge in their land-based missile deployments—including conventional and nuclear systems—to break out of perceived encirclement. Nouwens and others caution that such dynamics risk spiraling into a full-blown arms competition and destabilizing the region's already fragile security architecture. That concern has deepened with a June 2025 report by Kyle Balzer and Dan Blumenthal for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank showing that Chinese strategists now view these long-range precision missile deployments as existential threats to China's regional deterrence and national survival. They say Chinese analysts believe these systems could enable decapitation strikes on the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) in a crisis, prompting accelerated efforts to modernize the force. This line of effort includes expanding mobile and silo-based platforms to ensure mission survivability and retaliatory capability. Balzer and Blumenthal argue that this shift reflects a broader consensus in China that survivable, land-based nuclear forces are vital to counter US denial strategies and preserve credible deterrence. The US bet on forward-deployed hypersonics aims to fracture China's A2/AD bubbles before they harden—but the payoff hinges on credibility, not just capability. As China accelerates countermeasures, the strategic equation is shifting toward a high-stakes contest of precision, survivability and political will.
Yahoo
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The US Army fired its new missile system that rattles China in a Western Pacific first. It found its target and sank it.
The US Army fired a Standard Missile-6 from its Mid-Range Capability, or Typhon, system in Australia. The successful live-fire test sank a maritime target. The MRC's deployment in the region has previously and repeatedly irritated China. The US Army fired its new MRC missile system in the Western Pacific for the first time, striking and sinking a maritime target. The Mid-Range Capability, or Typhon, missile system drew China's ire during a previous deployment, with Beijing repeatedly warning that its presence risks escalating tensions. The Army sees the weapon as an essential strike asset that closes a critical capability gap in the region. The Army said on Tuesday that the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force successfully fired a Standard Missile-6 using the versatile MRC launcher and sank an unspecified sea target. The test occurred earlier this month during the joint Talisman Sabre exercise in northern Australia. The service said it was the first time the land-based MRC had been fired west of the international date line, which splits the Pacific Ocean. "The deployment of the MRC and successful execution of a [Standard Missile-6] live fire against a maritime target is another significant step forward in our ability to deploy, integrate, and command and control advanced land-based maritime strike capabilities," Col. Wade Germann, commander of the 3rd MDTF, said. While this was the first live test of the MRC in the region, it has been deployed there before, notably during a joint exercise with the Philippines last year. The MRC is a high-value system for the Army, filling both a capability and range gap by providing a flexible way to fire both the SM-6s and the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile. The MRC's development followed the 2019 US withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty over concerns about Russian violations. The treaty banned nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,000 kilometers. The withdrawal, overseen by the first Trump administration and driven by Moscow's SSC-8/9M729 missile, opened the door to the development of previously banned weapons. When the MRC was first deployed to the Philippines, China was quick to express its frustration. In September of last year, Lin Jian, a spokesperson for China's foreign military, called the deployment "a move to turn back the wheel of history," adding that "it gravely threatens regional countries' security, incites geopolitical confrontation, and has aroused high vigilance and concerns of countries in the region." Earlier last year, he said that Beijing "strongly opposes the US strengthening forward deployment at China's doorstep." China notably maintains a large arsenal of ballistic missiles, including many intermediate-range systems able to threaten US and allied forces in the region. China also expressed its irritation to the Philippines last year. In August 2024, Philippine Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo said that his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, had expressed concerns the weapon could destabilize the security and relations of the region and that when they discussed it, China "made it very dramatic." China has warned Manila against igniting an arms race. Beijing has said the Philippines, a key US ally, is serving American interests to the detriment of its own. Manila has expressed interest in the MRC's capabilities as a useful combat capability. China's US embassy didn't immediately respond to BI's request for comment on the test. The MRC is a work in progress for the Army, which is still exploring how best to employ it. During the MRC's deployment to the Philippines, US personnel also tinkered with and reworked the system in the field, according to a Government Accountability Office report earlier this year, providing user input that led to "multiple design changes." The test of the MRC in Australia, the Army said, validated the ability to forward deploy long-range precision fires. It also, Germann added, provided valuable insights and lessons for future land-based maritime strike capabilities. Mobile launchers with the ability to strike targets on land and at sea have tremendous potential in Pacific combat. Read the original article on Business Insider
