China recently launched a hypersonic missile that could strike any American ship in the world. Beijing is flexing its muscles. They see the US as weak. They see our president as aloof, detached, and slow. Why wouldn’t you do some tests like this, which totally caught our intelligence community by surprise? Yes, when you waste hours manufacturing fake evidence of Russian collusion because you don’t like the 2016 election results—stuff like this slips through the cracks. When you’re more focused on making the military a 'woke' social engine and doling out white supremacy lectures, stuff like this gets missed.
The fact that someone in the IC said they don’t know how China did this should be a cause for concern. What the hell is our now-insanely politicized intelligence community doing? But the overarching story here is that we’re now in an arms race with China, which we didn’t start. Still, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, compared China’s test to the Soviet Union’s “Sputnik” moment (via Axios):
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Wednesday that China's test of a hypersonic missile is "very concerning" and "very close" to the kind of "Sputnik moment" that triggered the Space Race during the Cold War.
Why it matters: The comments by America's top uniformed general underscore the depths of U.S. concerns about China's rapid military expansion and development of advanced weaponry.
The big picture: In 1957, the Soviet Union's stunning launch of the Sputnik satellite raised alarms that the U.S. was falling behind in a technology race.
The Financial Times reported last week that China's test of a hypersonic missile, which could deliver a nuclear weapon that evades U.S. missile defenses, caught intelligence officials by surprise.
"I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. It has all of our attention," Milley told Bloomberg Television's "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations."
Maybe this gets our people to respond in kind. We already have hypersonic weapons in development. The Sputnik crisis spurred the US to get serious about space and beating the Russians. We did that. Can we do it again with China?