AUKUS Hypersonic vs Russia and China: HyFliTE and HACM

In November 2024, the US, Australia, and the UK signed the HyFliTE project arrangement — Hypersonic Flight Test and Experimentation — committing US$252 million to six trilateral flight test campaigns through 2028, drawing on shared facilities across all three countries. It was framed as a milestone in AUKUS Pillar II advanced capability development. Sixteen months later, the programme's ambition looks intact. The broader Western hypersonic enterprise around it does not.

1. HyFliTE: Where It Stands

No HyFliTE flight tests have been publicly reported as of March 2026. The programme appears to be in its preparatory phase — establishing test protocols, aligning facilities, and integrating data from national programmes.

The most significant trilateral progress occurred in April 2025, when the UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), supported by Gas Dynamics Ltd (a UK SME), completed 233 successful static scramjet engine test runs over six weeks at NASA Langley Research Center, achieving speeds up to Mach 5. This feeds into the UK MOD's "Team Hypersonics" programme, which targets a hypersonic weapon technology demonstrator by 2030.

The trilateral work split reflects complementary strengths rather than a clean division of labour:

2. The Programmes HyFliTE Depends On Are Slipping

HyFliTE is a testing framework, not a weapon programme. Its value depends on the health of the national programmes feeding into it. That health is deteriorating.

HACM (Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile) — the US Air Force's primary air-breathing hypersonic weapon, with Raytheon as prime contractor and Northrop Grumman building the engine — is a year behind schedule. Its first flight test slipped from Q1 FY2025 to FY2026. The preliminary design review, held September 2024, was six months late. Total flight tests have been reduced from seven to five. Raytheon has warned it will "significantly exceed its cost baseline." The GAO flagged the delays in a June 2025 report. FY2026 funding request: US$802.8 million, up from US$466.7 million in FY2025.

SCIFiRE (Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment) — the US-Australia bilateral scramjet cruise missile programme building on 15 years of HIFiRE collaboration — is also behind schedule with a reduced number of test flights before entering service. The Pentagon expects to begin fielding munitions starting FY2027, though this timeline is under pressure.

ARRW (Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon) — Lockheed Martin's boost-glide weapon, previously defunded — has been revived in FY2026 with a US$387.1 million request, suggesting the USAF is hedging against HACM delays by restarting a parallel programme.

3. The Threat Has Accelerated

When this article was first published in November 2024, it referenced Russia's Avangard glide vehicle and China's DF-17 as the primary threat benchmarks. Both were already operational. The picture has since worsened considerably.

Russia — Oreshnik. First used in combat on 21 November 2024 against Dnipro, Ukraine (with dummy warheads). Putin announced production and service entry in August 2025. The system was deployed to Belarus in December 2025 and used operationally against Lviv on 8 January 2026 — the first ballistic missile strike on Lviv Oblast. Reported speeds exceed Mach 10. Russia also retains the Kinzhal (air-launched) and Tsirkon (naval cruise missile) in active service.

China — DF-27A. Tested on 25 February 2025: flew 2,100 km in 12 minutes at an average of Mach 8.6. Anti-ship capable, designed to threaten carrier groups out to approximately 8,000 km (Second Island Chain, Guam). This represents the maturation from the experimental DF-ZF programme (tested since 2014) into a deployable system. China is also developing scramjet-powered cruise missiles, including the Lingyun-1 prototype.

The asymmetry is structural: Russia and China have operational hypersonic strike systems. The United States has no operational hypersonic weapon and no operational hypersonic interceptor.

4. The AUKUS Pillar II Problem

HyFliTE exists within AUKUS Pillar II, which covers eight advanced capability workstreams: undersea, quantum, AI and autonomy, advanced cyber, hypersonics, electronic warfare, innovation, and information sharing. The political scaffolding has advanced — the State Department published the final ITAR exemption rule on 30 December 2025, implementing the AUKUS defence trade exemption.

But the exemption has not solved the underlying problem. The Excluded Technology List (ETL) — specifying which technologies remain outside the licence-free transfer zone — is far broader than industry expected, blocking licence-free transfer of high-end technologies including hypersonics and unmanned systems. The United States Studies Centre has argued that "AUKUS Pillar II is failing in its mission" due to regulatory barriers. Australian officials acknowledged in January 2025 that "more work needs to be done."

The irony is precise: the ITAR exemption was meant to enable trilateral hypersonic cooperation, but the ETL carves out hypersonics from the exemption's scope. HyFliTE's flight test cooperation can proceed through government-to-government channels, but the industrial integration that would make it strategically meaningful remains constrained.

5. What HyFliTE Can and Cannot Do

HyFliTE's value is real but bounded. It provides shared test infrastructure, reduces duplication across national programmes, and creates a framework for data pooling that none of the three nations could achieve bilaterally. Australia's Woomera Range Complex offers long-range overland test corridors that neither the US nor the UK can easily replicate domestically. The UK's scramjet propulsion expertise (demonstrated at Langley in April 2025) complements US airframe integration and Australian air-launch capabilities.

What HyFliTE cannot do is compensate for programme-level delays in HACM and SCIFiRE, override the ETL's restrictions on industrial technology transfer, or close the operational gap with Russian and Chinese systems before the end of the decade. US$252 million across three nations over four years is a testing budget, not a weapons programme.

The open question is whether HyFliTE generates sufficient flight test data to accelerate the programmes that depend on it — or whether it becomes a coordination layer on top of programmes that are individually falling behind. The FY2027 NDAA cycle, which will set the next tranche of hypersonic funding, will indicate which trajectory prevails.

Sources and Further Reading

• DefenseScoop — AUKUS HyFliTE agreement, November 2024
• The Defense Post — UK-US scramjet propulsion test, April 2025
• Air and Space Forces Magazine — HACM flight test delay
• DefenseScoop — GAO warns HACM behind schedule, June 2025
• DefenseScoop — ARRW revival FY2026
• USSC — "AUKUS Pillar II is failing in its mission"
• Breaking Defense — ITAR barriers to Pillar II, January 2025
• DLA Piper — AUKUS ITAR exemption final rule, December 2025
• Al Jazeera — Oreshnik strikes Lviv, January 2026
• Defence Security Asia — China DF-27A test, February 2025