Australian combat jets will fire US hypersonics

In a bold move to restore its long-range strike capabilities, Australia is set to test-launch a US hypersonic missile from one of its combat jets.

This month, The War Zone reported that the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) is set to conduct test launches of the US Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) over Australian ranges.

The War Zone notes that the HACM program, a collaborative effort between the US and Australia, aims to enhance both nations’ air-launched hypersonic cruise missile capabilities. According to a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman have been contracted since 2022 to develop the missile, which features a two-stage design with a rocket booster and a scramjet cruiser.

While The War Zone mentions that the missile’s peak speed is undisclosed, it is expected to surpass Mach 5, the threshold for hypersonic speed. The GAO report indicates that flight testing could commence as early as October and continue through March 2027.

The War Zone states that the decision to utilize RAAF F/A-18F Super Hornets for testing is attributed to limitations in US testing infrastructure. Australia’s Woomera Test Range offers a secure and remote environment ideal for sensitive trials.

It also says that the USAF plans to integrate HACM initially into the F-15E Strike Eagle and potentially expand to other aircraft. The source notes that the program’s progress is closely watched, as hypersonic weapons are considered crucial for future high-end conflicts, offering rapid, difficult-to-intercept strike capabilities.

The War Zone mentions that this collaboration reflects the deepening defense partnership between the US and Australia, further solidified by the AUKUS agreement, which includes cooperative efforts in various domains such as uncrewed aircraft and artficial intelligence.

Australia’s Defense Strategic Review 2023 (DSR 2023) notes that Australia’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy is often synonymous with long-range strike capability alongside undersea warfare and surface-to-air missiles (SAM). The DSR 2023 adds that long-range strike capability is fundamental to its ability to hold an adversary at risk in its northern approaches.

It notes that an A2/AD strategy is essential for denying an adversary freedom of action to militarily coerce Australia and operate against Australia without being held at risk.

Further, in a May 2024 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Strategic Studies, Fabian Hoffman argues that long-range strike weapons can become strategic deterrents by fulfilling counter-population, strategic interdiction, counter-leadership and counterforce roles.

Hoffman mentions that counter-population long-range strikes are carried out against civilian targets to break an adversary’s morale. For strategic interdiction, he says that long-range strikes aim to destroy an adversary’s war-making capability, such as industrial infrastructure, supply chains, and transportation nodes.

He adds that counter-leadership long-range strikes aim to target and neutralize an adversary’s leadership. Such strikes, Hoffman says, can destroy hardened command and control nodes, and improvements in hypersonics and sensors increase their effectiveness against time-sensitive targets.

Hoffman notes that conventional counterforce long-range strikes can aim to eliminate the reciprocal nature of war by overwhelming application of force at the operation and tactical levels or to paralyze an adversary by knocking out critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) nodes, effectively “locking out” an adversary from the battlefield.

Australia has lacked long-range strike capabilities since retiring its F-111s in 2010. It has also canceled its plans to arm its Collins-class submarines with Tomahawk cruise missiles, leaving it without such capability.

However, Andrew Davies says in a March 2021 paper for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) that intermedia-range hypersonic cruise weapons could be a viable way to restore Australia’s long-range strike capabilities previously provided by the F-111, although the threat calculus during the Cold War was much different from today.

Davies mentions that Australia’s 1960s decision to acquire the F-111 was driven by an assessed risk of aggression from Indonesia, which was countered by the capability to strike anywhere in the archipelago.

However, he says that if Australia pursues long-range strike capabilities as part of its deterrence posture against China, there’s a risk that China may respond in kind with its long-range strikes against Australian targets from forward-deployed systems.  

According to Thomas Shugart in a 2021 Lowy Institute analysis, China can already strike Australia with long-range systems such as the DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM), H6-K bombers armed with land-attack cruise missiles (LACM) from Mischief Reef and aerial-refueled H-6N bombers armed with air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM) from the Chinese mainland.

However, reviving Australia’s air-based long-range strike capabilities faces many challenges including cost, limited firepower, difficulty of achieving economy of scale and dependence on the US for crucial ISR capabilities.

In a December 2022 ASPI paper, Marcus Hellyer and Andrew Nicholls say that hypersonic weapons may be deceptively expensive, that the price tag of each missile increases with range and that all of its exquisite components are non-reusable.  

Hellyer and Nicholls mention that while hypersonics are more complicated to defeat than traditional ballistic or cruise missiles, they carry little in the way of explosives. While they note that economies of scale may eventually reduce the price of hypersonic missiles, the weapons will always be costly. Australia may not be able to field these missiles in sufficient quantity to have a decisive effect.

Further, in a January 2024 article for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Veerle Nouwens and other writers note that while Australia is investing in ISR capabilities and ISR data fusion, its long-range strike capabilities will most likely remain dependent on US support.

Nouwens and others say that while the Australian government had plans to launch four observation satellites, those plans have been targeted for budget cuts, leaving Australia’s prospects for independent space-based ISR capabilities unclear.