Russia, China, and Iran have moved hypersonic weapons from the test range to the battlefield, fielding maneuvering glide vehicles that current air and missile defenses cannot reliably stop. The United States, after more than $12 billion invested in its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon since 2018, is only now fielding a first operational battery, years late and still without a combat-validated round. Europe remains largely absent from offensive hypersonics.
The shift crystallized between November 2024 and early 2026. Russia struck Ukraine with its new Oreshnik intermediate-range missile in November 2024 and again in January 2026, employed the sea-launched Zircon in theater, and Iran fired its Fattah-2 glide vehicle at Israeli targets during the two sides’ 2026 exchange. In December 2025 the Pentagon assessed that China now fields the world’s leading hypersonic missile arsenal. Adversary systems are being used or paraded as operational weapons while Washington’s programs remain in testing and Golden Dome, its planned homeland shield, is priced but unbuilt.
The Hypersonic Weapons Gap: Combat-Proven Offense, Absent Defense
The hypersonic weapons gap is less about who has flown a glide vehicle than about who has fielded and used one. Russia’s Avangard, a boost-glide vehicle carried on an intercontinental booster, has equipped operational units since 2019 and reaches speeds above Mach 20 by open-source estimates. The Oreshnik, which U.S. officials describe as derived from the RS-26 Rubezh, carries multiple maneuvering warheads; in its two demonstrated strikes it delivered inert submunitions to make a political point rather than destroy a hardened target. Moscow announced the system’s deployment to Belarus in December 2025, though analysts have questioned whether launchers, rather than support elements, have arrived. The ship-launched Zircon, a scramjet credited with speeds near Mach 8 and a range around 1,000 kilometers, was used against Ukraine in 2024.
China’s arsenal is broader. The DF-17 mates a medium-range booster to a hypersonic glide vehicle and is deployed against targets across the First Island Chain. The DF-27, which the Pentagon’s December 2025 report confirmed is fielded with a range of 5,000 to 8,000 kilometers, reaches Guam, Hawaii, and in its longest profiles the U.S. West Coast, and includes an anti-ship variant. The DF-26 ‘Guam killer’ now appears with a maneuvering hypersonic terminal stage, and the air- and ship-launched YJ-21 completes a family built to hold carrier strike groups at risk.
Why Hypersonic Glide Vehicles Defeat Current Missile Defenses
The interception problem is specific to the glide phase. Unlike a ballistic warhead on a predictable arc, a boost-glide vehicle separates from its booster in the upper atmosphere and then maneuvers along a shallow, shifting trajectory at speeds above Mach 5, flying below the reach of exo-atmospheric interceptors and inside the reaction window of most terminal systems. That combination compresses warning time and denies defenders a stable firing solution.
Iran’s Fattah-2 became the test case in early 2026. Tehran claims the missile, which it describes as a glide vehicle able to alter course on reentry, penetrated Israeli and U.S.-supplied defenses, including Arrow and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense batteries, during strikes that began in late February. Independent battle-damage assessment is limited, and Iranian performance figures, like Russian and Chinese ones, are best read as claims. What the episode confirmed is that a dense, layered network could not guarantee interception of a maneuvering glide threat.
The caveat matters. Not every weapon marketed as hypersonic evades defenses. Russia’s air-launched Kinzhal, an aeroballistic missile rather than a true glide vehicle, has been downed by Patriot PAC-3 over Ukraine. Non-interceptability as currently observed applies to maneuvering boost-glide vehicles in the glide phase, not to the whole hypersonic label, and it describes today’s fielded defenses, not a permanent law.
America’s $12 Billion Bet and the Interceptor That Does Not Yet Exist
The U.S. answer runs on two tracks, neither operational. On offense, the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, designated Dark Eagle, uses the Common Hypersonic Glide Body shared with the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike program and is credited by the Army with a peak speed of at least Mach 17 and a range beyond 1,725 miles. The first battery, four transporter-erector launchers carrying eight ready rounds, was activated at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in December 2025, and Army officials said in March 2026 that fielding was weeks away. That milestone arrives more than two years late; the Government Accountability Office traced slips through fiscal 2023 and 2025 to flight-test failures, contractor production problems, and funding delays. The Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation has reported that there is still not enough data to judge the weapon’s effectiveness, lethality, suitability, or survivability, with the first operational assessment due to begin in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026.
On defense, the picture is earlier still. The Glide Phase Interceptor, a Northrop Grumman missile developed with Japan to engage glide vehicles from Aegis ships, was accelerated in April 2026 but is not expected before roughly 2031. It anchors Golden Dome, the homeland shield the Congressional Budget Office estimated in May 2026 could cost about $1.2 trillion over twenty years. Europe fields no operational offensive hypersonic weapon; France’s VMaX glider is experimental, and the continent’s HYDEF interceptor is early-stage.
Analysis: The hypersonic contest has inverted the usual balance between offense and defense. Combat-employed offensive systems now lead a defense that does not operationally exist, and the West is behind on both ends at once. The harder conclusion for Washington concerns cause: the United States is not short of money, and $12 billion spent on Dark Eagle without a fielded, validated round points to an execution and production failure, not a budget gap. Golden Dome compounds the risk by staking homeland defense on stopping a threat no fielded system has demonstrably stopped. Committing hundreds of billions to the Glide Phase Interceptor bets that a capability still years away will work against adversaries already firing the weapons it is meant to counter.
The near-term markers are concrete. Dark Eagle’s first operational assessment is due in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, and a second battery is scheduled to follow, though the Government Accountability Office expects it no sooner than fiscal 2027. The Glide Phase Interceptor faces a preliminary design review in 2028, and the Pentagon intends to test the first Golden Dome space-based interceptors before the end of 2026. Russia, China, and Iran are unlikely to pause; further deployments, and in Ukraine and the Middle East further combat use, are the base case. The open question is whether Western defenses mature before the offensive gap becomes a coercive one.