Flight-testing U.S. hypersonic missiles is about to take off-perhaps as often as once every six weeks over the next four years-but the Pentagon still has a long way to go to create the "ecosystem" of skilled people, test facilities, and industrial capacity needed to build such weapons at scale. The urgency is great, because China and Russia have already fielded their first hypersonic weapons, and it's expected it will take the U.S. several years to catch up. For that reason, the U.S. is on a crash program to field weaponized prototypes in the next two or three years, followed a few years later by more elaborate and mature systems built in larger numbers. However, that won't happen without building the infrastructure to produce the still-experimental vehicles.
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