After a bombshell Financial Times report that China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August which circled the planet before zoning in on its target, Republican Representative Mike Gallagher — a member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee — said that this news should serve as a “call to action.”
“This test should serve as a call to action. If we stick to our current complacent course — or place our hopes in bankrupt buzzwords like ‘integrated deterrence’ — we will lose the New Cold War with Communist China within the decade,” Rep. Gallagher said in a statement. “The People’s Liberation Army now has an increasingly credible capability to undermine our missile defenses and threaten the American homeland with both conventional and nuclear strikes. Even more disturbing is the fact that American technology has contributed to the PLA’s hypersonic missile program.”
“We know from a recent Washington Post report that Phytium uses US-derived technology to power a military supercomputer that models hypersonic flight. While the Biden administration rightly placed Phytium on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, it has not applied the Foreign Direct Product Rule that was successfully used to counter Huawei. As a result, US-derived technology produced by TSMC still enables Phytium’s malign work. This needs to change,” Rep. Gallagher continued. “Phytium is just the beginning. The US government has long failed to apply maximum pressure against the Chinese Communist Party’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy. With our homeland now exposed, in part, by advanced technology derived from Military-Civil Fusion, we need to aggressively decouple from anything associated with Military-Civil Fusion. We must end joint ventures, investments, and research collaborations that involve areas associated with Military-Civil Fusion. We also need to stop the flow of Wall Street capital into Chinese tech.”
“American entities have a clear choice: they can side with our country, or they can side with the genocidal communist regime that now threatens our cities. They can’t do both. It is time to choose,” Rep. Gallagher concluded.
“Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target,” the Financial Times first reported. “The missile missed its target by about two-dozen miles, according to three people briefed on the intelligence. But two said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realized.”
According to the Financial Times, U.S. intelligence has “no idea how they did this.”
“The US, Russia and China are all developing hypersonic weapons, including glide vehicles that are launched into space on a rocket but orbit the earth under their own momentum,” the report added. “They fly at five times the speed of sound, slower than a ballistic missile. But they do not follow the fixed parabolic trajectory of a ballistic missile and are maneuverable, making them harder to track.”