'Washington Lost Advantage in Hypersonic Weapons' - Chiefs of Staff Official

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the United States does hot have technical advantage in the hypersonic weapon research, as Russia and China had strengthened their positions in this sphere.

"[The United States] lost our technical advantage in hypersonics… [but] we haven’t lost the hypersonics fight," Gen. Paul Selva said on Tuesday, as quoted by the Air Force Magazine, adding that Moscow and Beijing "moved out pretty smartly" in this sphere.

The US military official added that China was planning to spend up to "hundreds of billions" on development of own hypersonic technologies, such as hypersonic flight and hypersonic target destination.

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According to Selva, Washington has been actively engaged in development of own its hypersonic systems.

In 2017, the Russian deputy defense minister said that Russia will consider the development of hypersonic weapons and supplying the country's Armed Forces with them as one of the high-priority spheres in the country's 2018-2025 state armaments program.

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Hypersonic technology is aimed at creating weapons which can move at extreme speed and thus evade missile defense systems. In addition, they have manoeuvrability as one of their main traits which distinguishes hypersonicmissiles from traditional ballistic rockets.