The single largest US Defense procurement goals is the ability to sink '400 ships in 48hours' as the key performance metric in a Taiwan defense scenario. [1]
The authors are career academics who get press by being 'contrarian'. The argument they make in their paper (that this editorial is based on) is fundamentally a straw man. They compare ballistic missiles trajectories to hypersonic trajectories and conclude 'ballistic is faster', while ignoring they key point that hypersonic weapons are *conventional in US force posture (i.e. non-nuclear) compared to ballistic weapons.
And they ignore that hypersonic trajectories are significantly harder to intercept, b/c of intercept timelines are governed by radar horizon issues and greater design cross range of hypersonic aerobodies.
[1] See "The Kill Chain" https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Chain-Defending-America-High-Tec...
