If we’re fortunate, that will yield academic treatises with titles like “The Empire Tested: America and the World, 2021-2030.” If we’re unlucky — meaning, basically, if the United States and China eventually fall into a ruinous war — then the struggles in Ukraine and the Middle East will be retroactively assigned to histories of World War III.

We are not, as yet, inside that kind of conflagration. But it’s useful for Americans to think about our situation in global terms, with Russia and Iran and China as a revisionist alliance putting our imperial power to the test. And it’s also important to recognize that this kind of conflict is an endurance test, a long and winding road, in which it’s easy to fall prey to mood swings and judge the outcome prematurely.

We’ve had a lot of these swings in the last few years. In 2021 and early 2022, the rout in Afghanistan and our overpromising to a vulnerable Ukraine made America look ineffectual … right up until Vladimir Putin actually invaded his neighbor, at which point his military setbacks and our success in rallying support for the Ukrainians yielded a lot of chest-thumping about the superiority of liberal democracy and the permanence of American hegemony.

That optimistic mood lasted through the failure of Ukraine’s last major counteroffensive and the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, against Israel, at which point there was a swing back toward pessimism. American power was stretched too thin; our Israeli allies were taken unawares by their enemies, the Russians were regaining ground, our arsenal was almost certainly inadequate to protect Ukraine and Israel and defend Taiwan, and all of this under a president debilitated by advancing age, a grim symbol of a crumbling imperium.

This sense of multi-theater crisis helped to restore Donald Trump to power. Then the initial months of his administration inspired fears that he would end the global conflict by effectively surrendering — abandoning allies and making deals with dictators while retreating to a Fortress North America.

Yet right now that’s not how the landscape looks. Trump’s decision to bomb the Iranian nuclear program and the muted Iranian response has capped off a period in which Tehran’s regional power has crumbled under sustained Israeli assault. Meanwhile, our NATO allies are boosting their military spending and Trump is suddenly praising the alliance, while Russia’s gains in Ukraine remain a punishing grind and there’s a possibility that Putin threw away the best deal he was likely to get. Add in the strength of the American economy, even amid the Trumpian trade war, and it seems that maybe we’re winning the world conflict again. “Rah-rah! Pax Americana forever!”

OK, not quite. The damage to Iran’s nuclear program doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated the threat, and Israel’s Gaza war remains a humanitarian crisis without a clear political endgame. Trump’s walk-back of his Department of Defense’s attempt to triage resources by withholding weapons from Ukraine doesn’t change the reality that our weaponry is limited and does require triaging. Putin’s failure to make the most of Trump’s diplomatic outreach doesn’t change the fact that Russia is still slowly gaining ground.

But both the Ukrainian stalemate and the Iranian retreat are clarifying reminders that the ultimate outcome of this conflict depends on the revisionist power, the People’s Republic of China, that hasn’t directly joined the fights. China is at once a much more serious rival to America than either Russia or Iran and also an extremely cautious player, content to watch its tacit allies make their plays without, say, handing Iran a nuclear deterrent or sending the People’s Liberation Army to help Russia take Kyiv.

This cautious distance could reflect a fundamental weakness of the revisionist bloc — that it’s purely an alliance of interest between regimes that don’t trust one another, don’t have as much in common as we still have with our European and East Asian allies and struggle to work effectively in concert.

But it could also reflect a confidence on China’s part that time is on its side, that its investments in technology and energy are going to lap ours soon enough and that all our efforts now reflect a fateful squandering of resources given what Beijing has planned for the later 2020s.

Without certain knowledge of those plans, American foreign policy needs both a better long-term strategy to stay ahead of China and a lot of short-term Trumpian flexibility. Not restraint or hawkishness alone, but both an openness to peace and a capacity for warmaking, matched to the ebb and flow of a global conflict that won’t have any simple end.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — As the war rages on in Ukraine, the United States is doing more than supporting an ally. It’s learning lessons — with an eye toward a possible future clash with China.

No one knows what the next U.S. major military conflict will be or whether the U.S. will send troops — as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq — or provide vast amounts of aid and expertise, as it has done with Ukraine.

But China remains America’s biggest concern. U.S. military officials say Beijing wants to be ready to invade the self-governing island of Taiwan by 2027, and the U.S. is the island democracy’s chief ally and supplier of defense weapons.

While there are key differences in geography and in the U.S. commitment to come to Taiwan’s defense, “there are clear parallels between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan,” a Center for Strategic and International Studies report found last month.

A look at some of the lessons from the Ukraine war and how they could apply to a Taiwan conflict:

Soon after Russian troops crossed into Ukraine last February, the U.S. and allies began sending massive amounts of weapons across the border from partner nations.

But Taiwan would need to be fully armed in advance, CSIS found in dozens of war scenarios it ran for its report.

“The ‘Ukraine model’ cannot be replicated in Taiwan because China can isolate the island for weeks or even months,” the bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization and think tank found. “Taiwan must start the war with everything it needs.”

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Ukraine “was more of a cold-start approach than the planned approach we have been working on for Taiwan, and we will apply those lessons.”

For China, Hicks told The Associated Press that an amphibious landing is the hardest military operation to undertake. But that same challenge would also make resupply difficult, particularly if China chokes off ocean access.

STOCKPILE WOES

The Pentagon cannot pre-position equipment it doesn’t have. Ukraine is putting intense pressure on the U.S. and European defense stockpiles and exposing that neither was ready for a major conventional conflict.

For some items “we have weaknesses in both our inventory and our production capacity,” said CSIS International Security Program senior adviser Mark Cancian, an author of the Taiwan report. “In a couple of places, particularly artillery ammunition, it could become a crisis.”

Ukraine is shooting as many as 7,000 rounds a day to defend itself and has depended on announcements about every two weeks of new ammunition shipments from the U.S.

Since Russia invaded, the U.S. has sent Ukraine millions of rounds of munitions, including small arms and artillery rounds, 8,500 Javelin anti-armor systems, 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems and 100,000 rounds of 125 mm tank ammunition.

One of the biggest stockpile pressure points has been 155 mm howitzer ammunition. The U.S. has sent Ukraine 160 howitzers and more than 1 million howitzer rounds, which have been put to heavy use with as many as 3,000 rounds fired a day, according to the Pentagon.

Ukraine is waging a different type of war than the U.S. would likely face with China, said Doug Bush, assistant Army secretary for acquisition. A future U.S. campaign would likely involve much more air power and sea power, taking some of the pressure off land-based systems and ammunition.

But allies would still need to be supported with land-based systems and ammunition.

___

REBUILDING TAKES TIME

The Pentagon’s defense strategy says the U.S. must be able to conduct one war while deterring another, but the supply chain has not reflected that.

Hicks said the surge of weapons to Ukraine “has not slowed down U.S. support to Taiwan,” but many of the military sales promised to Taiwan are facing the same pressures the Ukraine munitions face, such as limited parts or workforce issues.

In response, the U.S. has set up a presidential drawdown authority for Taiwan, Hicks said, that will allow the U.S. to send weapons from its own stockpiles instead of arranging new contracts.

The Army is working with Congress to get the authority to do multiyear contracts, so that companies will invest to meet longer-term needs, especially for the systems Bush called “the big four” — Javelin missiles, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System ( HIMARS ) launchers, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) munitions and 155 mm rounds.

“Without that urgency, we risk being behind at the wrong time later,” Bush said.

The Army is adding production lines for 155 mm artillery — including major components such as the outer metal shell, chargers, the fuse and the explosive material — while right now all production is at one facility in Iowa.

All of that will take time. CSIS reported it could take five years or more to replenish 155 mm, Javelin and Stinger stockpiles.

“The good news is that I think the Ukraine conflict has alerted people to these weaknesses. The bad news is that they’re going to take a long, long time to solve even if there is a lot of political will,” said Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

For European stockpiles, there’s not much excess left to send, and many of the partner nations are rushing to sign new contracts with industry to replenish inventories. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned this week in Brussels that particularly for larger caliber munitions, such as for ground artillery, it could be as long as 2 1/2 years before some new orders are delivered.

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SPACE AS A FRONT LINE

With its use of tanks and artillery, the Ukraine war often seems like a throwback to 20th century ground wars, but it has provided lessons in how valuable space technology has become for intelligence, communications and propaganda.

Before the war, satellite imagery showed Russian forces massing along the border, countering Russia’s claims that it was just staging a military exercise. As troops crossed the border, Ukrainian civilians fed real-time images and video from their smart phones to expose Russian military positions, record confessions from captured Russian forces and publicize Russian troop defeats and deaths.

When Ukraine’s cell towers and power were struck, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk provided a backup by sending hundreds of his Starlink terminals to Kyiv to keep Ukraine connected.

“Russia just got its clock cleaned in the information war from Day One, and they were never able to control the narrative coming out of Ukraine” of democracy under attack, Brands said. “We should assume that China won’t make the same mistake, that it will try very aggressively to control the information space.”

U.S. space experts are also looking at expanding satellite communications, building on Starlink’s successes. While Starlink is now the main orbiting commercial communications ring, others are coming online.

Starlink has thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth at the same low altitude in a ring. In a potential conflict, if one satellite was attacked, it would be quickly backfilled by another orbiting into place behind it.

That type of proliferated satellite communications is “the way of the future,” John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told the AP. “This is the thing we need to adapt to.”

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BE READY FOR CYBERWAR

While the satellites and their transmissions must be protected, the ground stations to process and disseminate information are also vulnerable. As Russia invaded, a software attack against Ukraine’s Viasat satellite communications network disabled tens of thousand of modems. While Viasat has not said who was to blame, Ukraine blamed Russian hackers.

China would likely use cyberwarfare to prevent Taiwan from sending out similar messages showing that it was effectively resisting any assault, Brands said.

That issue has the attention of the U.S. Space Force.

“If we’re not thinking about cyber protection of our ground networks,” the networks will be left vulnerable, and the satellites won’t be able to distribute their information, said the chief of space operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the specter of nuclear weapon use, Earth crept its closest to Armageddon, a science-oriented advocacy group said, moving its famous “Doomsday Clock” up to just 90 seconds before midnight.

“We are really closer to that doomsday,” former Mongolian president Elbegdorj Tsakhia said Tuesday at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists annual announcement rating how close humanity is from doing itself in. He and former Ireland President Mary Robinson joined scientists to underscore what they consider a gathering of several existential threats, with Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s actions and words chief among them.

“People and scientists are warning us and we have to wake up now,” he said.

The advocacy group started in 1947 to use a clock to symbolize the potential and likelihood of people doing something to end humanity. It moved the clock 10 seconds closer than last year, making it the closest it has ever been to striking 12. It’s been as much as 17 minutes from midnight after the end of the Cold War but in the past few years, the group has changed from counting down the minutes to midnight to counting down the seconds.

Doomsday has not happened yet.

“We are sending a message that the situation is becoming more urgent,” Bulletin President Rachel Bronson said at the online announcement. “Crises are more likely to happen and have broader consequences and longer standing effects.”

And to emphasize the effect that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had on moving closer to theoretical doomsday, the group said it was also announcing the clock movement in the Russian and Ukrainian languages for the first time.

“Putin has repeatedly raised the specter of nuclear use,” said Steve Fetter, dean of the graduate school and a public policy professor at the University of Maryland.

“Putin has given no indication that he’s willing to accept defeat,” Fetter said. “He might make desperate moves if no other options are available that he regards as acceptable.”

Scientists and activists at the Bulletin announcement also mentioned nuclear weapon proliferation in China, Iran increasing its uranium enrichment, missile tests in North Korea, future pandemics from animal diseases, pathogens from lab mistakes, “disruptive technologies” and worsening climate change as other existential threats to humanity.

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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin, facing military production delays and mounting losses, urged his government Tuesday to cut through bureaucracy to crank out enough weapons and supplies to feed the war in Ukraine, where a Western-armed Ukrainian counteroffensive has set back Russia’s forces.

In other developments, Ukrainian authorities asked citizens not to return home and further tax the country’s battered energy infrastructure, and Western countries mulled how to rebuild Ukraine when the war ends.

The Russian military’s shortfalls in the eight-month war have been so pronounced that Putin had to create a structure to try to address them. On Tuesday, he chaired a new committee designed to accelerate the production and delivery of weapons and supplies for Russian troops, stressing the need to “gain higher tempo in all areas.”

Russian news reports have acknowledged that many of those called up under a mobilization of 300,000 reservists Putin ordered haven’t been provided with basic equipment such as medical kits and flak jackets, and had to find their own. Other reports have suggested that Russian troops are increasingly forced to use old and sometimes unreliable equipment and that some of the newly mobilized troops are rushed to the war front with little training. Last week, Putin tried to show all is well by visiting a training site in Russia where he was shown well equipped soldiers.

To substitute for increasingly scarce Russian-made long-range precision weapons, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said Russia was likely to use a large number of drones to try to penetrate Ukrainian air defenses. Russia’s “artillery ammunition is running low,” the British report said Tuesday.

The Institute for the Study of War, in Washington, added that “the slower tempo of Russian air, missile, and drone strikes possibly reflects decreasing missile and drone stockpiles and the strikes’ limited effectiveness of accomplishing Russian strategic military goals.”

The Russian military has still managed to inflict heavy damage and casualties, ruining homes, public buildings and Ukraine’s power grid. The World Bank estimates the damage to Ukraine so far at 350 billion euros ($345 billion).

Recent Russian attacks have focused largely on Ukraine’s energy facilities, especially electricity generation and transmission. Electricity shortfalls are so severe that Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk on Tuesday asked citizens living abroad not to return this winter to avoid placing further strain on the power supply.

“We need to survive the winter but, unfortunately, the (electricity) networks will not survive,” Vereshchuk said on Ukrainian television. “We understand that the situation will only get worse, and this winter we need to survive.”

In Berlin, European Union leaders brought together experts to work on a “new Marshall Plan” for rebuilding Ukraine — a reference to the U.S.-sponsored plan that helped revive Western European economies after World War II.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the meeting is addressing “how to ensure and how to sustain the financing of the recovery, reconstruction and modernization of Ukraine for years and decades to come.”

Scholz, who co-hosted the meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, said he’s looking for “nothing less than creating a new Marshall Plan for the 21st century — a generational task that must begin now.”

On the diplomatic front, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters in Kyiv after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday that his country will continue to stand by Ukraine’s side in this war and support its people as long as it takes — by helping to rebuild the destroyed country and sending more weapons.

“Reconstruction is not waiting for the war to end. It must begin now,” the German president said, adding that “not only is Germany helping with the reconstruction, but we’re also helping Ukraine to prevent the brutal destruction, to make sure that the population is protected in the best possible way.”

He promised that Germany would help rebuild destroyed towns immediately and send two more MARS Medium Artillery Missile Systems and four type 2000 self-propelled howitzers.

On the battlefront, Russian missiles set a gas station on fire late Tuesday in the south-central city of Dnipro, killing a pregnant woman in her car and the operator of a car wash at the facility, while wounding at least three, Ukrainian news agencies reported.

In the southern city of Mykolaiv, residents lined up for water and essential supplies Tuesday as Ukrainian forces advanced on the nearby Russian-occupied city of Kherson.

One of Moscow’s allies on Tuesday urged Russia to step up the pace and scale of Ukraine’s destruction.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the regional leader of Chechnya who has sent troops to fight in Ukraine, urged Moscow to wipe off the map entire cities in retaliation for Ukrainian shelling of Russia’s territory. Authorities in Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions that border Ukraine have repeatedly reported Ukrainian shelling that has damaged infrastructure and residential buildings.

“Our response has been too weak,” Kadyrov said on his messaging app channel. “If a shell flies into our region, entire cities must be wiped off the face of the Earth so that they don’t ever think that they can fire in our direction.”

Kyiv wants to step up the fight, but says it needs more war materiel.

“We need more weaponry, we need more ammunition to win this war,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told reporters in Berlin. He added: “We need tanks from our partners, from all of our partners; we need heavy armored vehicles, we need additional artillery units, howitzers.”

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The world seems to have suddenly awakened to the fact that we are in a proxy war with Russia. President Zelensky of Ukraine, in trying to save his own country, has been the front runner to alert us that we might be next. Because of his courage and leadership, he is, without doubt the most popular man in the free world. His refusal to bow down to a ruthless Dictator has garnered him more laurels than any man in the modern world. While he is the buffer in a proxy war between Russia and the United States, we do our best to help.

That brings me to a local contribution that might have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for nosy reporters like yours truly.

I discovered that Golden Era Productions (as always, has pitched in to help out with the situation. They have donated a total of 122 boxes of some very nice clothing articles for Ukrainian Refugees in California and Europe.

Thirty-one boxes were donated to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Los Angeles for the thousands of Ukrainian refugees that are crowding across the border at Tijuana.

Father Vasilos Basille Saucuir tells us that there are so many refugees that are attempting to cross into the United States from Tijuana, that the city has donated a building to temporarily house them while the wait to be processed to enter, which can often take several days.

The good Father Vasilos is also working with other Orthodox churches in the Los Angeles area to arrange temporary housing and to have their basic needs taken care of.

Muriel Dufresne, Community Affairs Director for Golden Era Productions, tells me that it is an ongoing work on their part. Recently another 91 boxes of clothing was stored in a Culver City warehouse for shipment next week to Ukraine.

It never ceases to amaze me when something needs to be done, it is usually the same volunteers who step up to do the work.

The San Jacinto Valley is teaming with volunteers for various causes. However, Golden Era can be counted on in every instance.

We reporters also read the papers and watch the news. I was more than a little bit amazed when I heard on the radio that Israel is hesitating to put forth much effort to help Ukrainians because they “don’t want to upset Russia.” I would have thought that the Israelis more than anyone else would have empathy for them. Hard to tell about governments. They do not always reflect the will of the people.

We do our part and that counts for a lot. Just sayin.

rustystrait@gmail.com

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First came the warnings, in messages among friends and families and on social media, to stock up on vital drugs in Russia before supplies were affected by crippling Western sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.

Then, some drugs indeed became harder to find at pharmacies in Moscow and other cities.

“Not a single pharmacy in the city has it now,” a resident of Kazan told The Associated Press in late March about a blood thinner her father needs.

Experts and health authorities in Russia say the drug shortages are temporary — due to panic- buying and logistical difficulties for suppliers from the sanctions — but some remain worried that high-quality medicines will keep disappearing in the Russian market.

“Most likely there will be shortages. How catastrophic it will be, I don’t know,” said Dr. Alexey Erlikh, head of the cardiac intensive care unit in Moscow Hospital No. 29, and a professor at the Moscow-based Pirogov Medical University.

Reports that Russians could not find certain medications in pharmacies started surfacing in early March, shortly after Moscow unleashed a war on Ukraine, and sweeping sanctions left Russia increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

Patient’s Monitor, a patients’ rights group in the Russian region of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea, began getting complaints in the second week of March.

Ziyautdin Uvaysov, head of the group, told AP he personally checked with several state-run pharmacies in the region on the availability of 10 most-wanted medications and “they didn’t have a large number of these.”

Uvaysov added that when he asked about when supplies would be restocked, the pharmacies replied that “there aren’t any and it’s unclear when there will be.”

Despite assurances from authorities that hoarding of supplies was to blame for the quickly emptying shelves, reports about shortages persisted throughout March.

Vrachi.Rf, one of Russia’s biggest online communities for medical workers, surveyed more than 3,000 doctors in mid-March, and they said they had run into shortages of more than 80 medications: anti-inflammatory, gastrointestinal, antiepileptic and anticonvulsant drugs, as well as antidepressants and antipsychotics.

About a dozen people contacted by the AP in different cities in late March said they had spent days searching for certain thyroid medications, types of insulin or even a popular pain-relieving syrup for children. Some said they were unable to find them at all.

“Patients I treat have lost some blood pressure medications,” Erlikh said. “And some doctors I know are reporting problems with certain very expensive, very important medications (used in) certain surgical procedures.”

Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko has repeatedly given assurances that drug availability is not a problem in the country and has blamed any shortages on panic-buying. He said the demand for certain drugs has spiked tenfold in recent weeks, and he has urged Russians not to hoard the medications.

Experts agree that panic-buying has played a role in creating drug shortages.

“People rushed to stock up, and in some cases, supplies that were supposed to last a year or a year and a half were bought out within a month,” Nikolay Bespalov, development director of the RNC Pharma analytical company, told AP.

Bespalov also pointed to logistical problems that occurred early in the crisis. While major Western pharmaceutical companies pledged not to withdraw vital medications from the Russian market, sanctions cut Russia’s key banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system, hindering international payments. Dozens of countries halted air traffic with Russia, disrupting supply chains.

The expert stressed the logistical issues have been largely resolved, but panic-buying, prompted by fears that foreign companies will halt supplies, may continue fueling shortages for some time.

“Clearly, until the emotions calm down, it will continue,” Bespalov said.

Local news sites — from Vladimir, just east of Moscow, to the Kemerovo region in Siberia — reported shortages of various medications in the final days of March amid continued panic-buying.

Russia’s health care watchdog Roszdravnadzor, however, said in a statement Friday that “the situation on the drug market is gradually returning to normal, panic-buying of pharmaceuticals is decreasing.”

Erlikh, the cardiologist, pointed to already-existing problems with quality medications in Russia, which according to some estimates imports up to 40% of its drugs.

After authorities launched an import substitution policy to counter sanctions over the 2014 annexation of Crimea and to promote its own medications over foreign-made ones, shortages of certain imported drugs became a problem.

The policy outlined a wide range of preferences to Russian businesses and eventually made it unprofitable for foreign pharmaceutical companies to supply some of their expensive, high-quality drugs to Russia.

In 2015, state procurement of drugs for hospitals and state-funded clinics, which account for up to 80% of Russia’s pharmaceutical market, became subject to the “three’s a crowd” rule, which excluded foreign businesses if at least two Russian companies were bidding for a contract.

The government also kept adding more drugs to the “vital medicines” list — a registry of over 800 essential drugs, for which the authorities set obligatory — and relatively low — prices. Companies can apply for changing the set price once a year, but the process is long, heavily bureaucratic and doesn’t lead to a guaranteed result.

“We have already been gradually losing one important original medication after another. Generics are taking their place, and while there are some rather good ones made in Europe, there are also some dubious ones made in Russia,” Erlikh said.

“Of course, when there is no original medication, a generic is better than nothing. But it is a situation of (deliberately) lowering the bar, it is not a good way to live,” he added.

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PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Lagging behind Russia in developing hypersonic weapons, the U.S. Navy is rushing to field its first, with installation on a warship starting as soon as late next year.

The United States is in a race with Russia and China to develop these weapons, which travel at speeds akin to ballistic missiles but are difficult to shoot down because of their maneuverability.

The Russian military says it already deployed hypersonic missiles, claiming on both Saturday and Sunday to have deployed them against targets in Ukraine marking the weapon’s first use in combat. The Pentagon couldn’t confirm a hypersonic weapon was used in the attacks.

The American military is accelerating development to catch up.

The U.S. weapon would launch like a ballistic missile and would release a hypersonic glide vehicle that would reach speeds seven to eight times faster than the speed of sound before hitting the target.

In Maine, General Dynamics subsidiary Bath Iron Works has begun engineering and design work on changes necessary to install the weapon system on three Zumwalt-class destroyers.

The work would begin at a yet-to-be-named shipyard sometime in fiscal year that begins in October 2023, the Navy said.

Hypersonic weapons are defined as anything traveling beyond Mach 5, or five times faster than the speed of sound. That’s about 3,800 mph (6,100 kph). Intercontinental ballistic missiles far exceed that threshold but travel in a predictable path, making it possible to intercept them.

The new weapons are maneuverable.

Existing missile defense systems, including the Navy’s Aegis system, would have trouble intercepting such objects because maneuverability makes their movement unpredictable and speed leaves little time to react.

Russia says it has ballistic missiles that can deploy hypersonic glide vehicles as well as a hypersonic cruise missile.

The U.S. is “straining just to catch up” because it failed to invest in the new technology, with only a fraction of the 10,000 people who were working on the program in the 1980s, said U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat who’s chair of a subcommittee that monitors the program.

“If we want to pursue parity, we will need to back this effort with more money, time, and talent than we are now,” he said.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine serves as a backdrop as the Pentagon releases its budget proposal that lays out its goals for hypersonics and other weapon systems later this month.

The three stealthy Zumwalt-class destroyers to be equipped with the new weapons have plenty of space to accommodate them — thanks to a design failure that works to the Navy’s advantage in this instance.

The ships were built around a gun system that was supposed to use GPS-guided, rocket-boosted projectiles to pound targets 90 miles (145 kilometers) away. But those projectiles proved to be too expensive, and the Navy canceled the system, leaving each of the ships with a useless loading system and a pair of 155-mm guns hidden in angular turrets.

The retrofit of all three ships will likely cost more than $1 billion but will give a new capability to the tech-laden, electric-drive ships that already cost the Navy $23.5 billion to design and build, said Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

“The engineering is not that hard. It’ll just take time and money to make it happen,” Clark said.

The Navy intends to field the weapons on the destroyers in the 2025 fiscal year and on Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines in the 2028 fiscal year, the Navy said.

The destroyers would be based in the Pacific Ocean, where they would be a deterrent to China, should it become emboldened by Russia’s attack on Ukraine and consider attacking Taiwan, Clark said.

The U.S. focus on hypersonic weapons represents a pivot after hesitating in the past because of technological hurdles. Adversaries, meanwhile, continued research and development.

Russia fired off a salvo of Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles in late December, heralding the completion of weapon testing.

But Russia may be exaggerating the capability of such super weapons to compensate for weakness in other areas, said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute.

For the time being, Russia doesn’t have many of the weapons, and it’s unclear how effective they are, he said.

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