Following a lengthy delay as the U.S. Army and Navy struggled to test the round, the Army will field its\u00a0long-range hypersonic weapon\u00a0to the first unit by the end of fiscal 2025, a defense official confirmed Wednesday in a statement to Defense News.<\/p>\n
The Army had planned to field the live, ground-launched hypersonic rounds to\u00a0the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit\u00a0at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state by the fall of 2023.<\/p>\n
But the milestone continued to be\u00a0pushed back after several aborted tests in 2023\u00a0due to challenges at the range, related not to the round, but the process of firing up the missile for launch.<\/p>\n
Testing the all-up round was considered critical to ensure the system was safe, effective, and ready for fielding, said then-Army acquisition chief Doug Bush.<\/p>\n
The U.S. is in a race to field the capability and develop systems to defend against hypersonic missiles. China and Russia are actively developing and testing hypersonic weapons.<\/p>\n
The Army conducted an\u00a0end-to-end successful flight test\u00a0of its hypersonic missile at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in May 2024, which put the initial fielding to the first unit closer on the horizon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following a lengthy delay as the U.S. Army and Navy struggled to test the round, the Army will field its\u00a0long-range hypersonic weapon\u00a0to the first unit by the end of fiscal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,28],"tags":[404,77],"class_list":["post-1956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-army","category-military-tech","tag-long-range-hypersonic-weapon","tag-us-army"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/US-ARMY-long-range-hypersonic-weapon.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1956"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1990,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956\/revisions\/1990"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}