“This is absolutely serious,” Austin said, referring to the threat posed by Chinese and Russian hypersonic programs, according to a CEO who participated in the virtual meeting. “We are distracted now by Russia, but China is the real threat.”
“We’ve decided that failure is bad,” Hyten said at the time. “Nope, failure is part of the learning process. And if you want to get back to speed, you better figure out how to put speed back into [sic] and that means taking risk and that means learning from failures and that means failing fast and moving fast.”
Top executives from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Leidos, Aerojet Rocketdyne, BAE Systems, L3Harris, and about a half dozen other defense companies were represented at Thursday’s meeting, which was chaired by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. It was not classified, but participants agreed to meet in a classified session soon.
“We all need to get in a SCIF and do it face-to-face,” the CEO said.
Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said in a meeting readout Thursday evening that “participants identified a need to expand access to modeling capabilities and testing facilities in order to adopt a ‘test often, fail fast, and learn’ approach which will accelerate the fielding of hypersonic and counter-hypersonic systems.”
“These meetings with executives in key areas of innovation and modernization also help to strengthen relationships and employ a collaborative disruption approach to accelerate the development of cutting-edge capabilities and new operational concepts,” Pahon said.
China and Russia’s advances and recent failed tests have led the Pentagon to inject more urgency into the US program and increase the resources they are devoting to hypersonic weapons development. The FY22 budget committed $3.8 billion to hypersonic research, an increase from the previous year’s $3.2 billion.
This story has been updated with additional information Thursday.
