In September 2020, Forward Defense Assistant Director Christian Trotti and Nonresident Senior Fellow Tate Nurkin were interviewed on hypersonic weapons by Defense & Aerospace Report‘s Vago Muradian. During the interview, Trotti and Nurkin discussed the key insights from Forward Defense’s recent Primer on Hypersonic Weapons in the Indo-Pacific Region, while further exploring essential issues such as:
- the military utility of hypersonic weapons in alternative applications;
- the significance of hypersonic weapons across the conventional and nuclear rungs of the escalation ladder;
- the quantity and mass necessary to achieve strategic and operational effects in wartime; and
- the imperative to build a defense-industrial base that can produce these weapons at scale.
What intrigues me most about them… is not necessarily a nuclear strike… but more their utility in fast-moving contingencies and conventional operations…
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