The United States Department of Defense (DOD) is exploring the establishment of new overland flight corridors for testing hypersonic weapons — both in the United States and abroad.
The DOD has made it a priority to keep pace with competitors China and Russia on hypersonics. The term refers to two types of weapons under U.S. development: hypersonic glide vehicles (HGV), which are launched by rocket before gliding to a target, and hypersonic cruise missiles (HCM), which are powered by high-speed, air-breathing engines, according to a February 2025 report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service.
The next-generation weapons “dramatically compress the timescale … on the battlefield” compared with their conventional counterparts, according to a March 2025 report from the Atlantic Council. The think tank offers these comparisons:
“To deliver effects on a target at [800 kilometers], a traditional subsonic cruise missile … would take approximately one hour of flight time. Hypersonic cruise missiles can make that trip in less than ten minutes. A hypersonic glide vehicle can make the trip between Guam and the Taiwan [Strait] in under 30 minutes.”
The Atlantic Council also noted that these weapons “cruise or glide above most air-defense systems and below most ballistic-missile defense systems and are highly maneuverable.”
Currently, the DOD uses over-the-sea ranges to test the weapons’ ability to hit their targets, according to a March 2025 report in Defense News. However, as the Defense Department has tried to ramp up hypersonic testing, it became evident that more test corridors were needed — especially overland ranges, which can assess performance in “more stressing conditions, such as a faulty navigation system or an enemy decoy,” according to Defense News.
For example, the U.S. Army’s “Dark Eagle,” a missile that carries an HGV jointly developed with the Navy, had successful “end-to-end” tests in 2024 and is expected to be deployed in fiscal year 2025.
The Defense Department’s exploration of new sites also comes in response to the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which called for the DOD to provide options for at least two more flight corridors, according to Defense News. An initial study identified more than 1,500 locations worldwide, George Rumford, director of the DOD’s Test Resource Management Center (TRMC), told Defense News.
That larger list has been shortened to three corridors: One, in Australia, relies on the trilateral security agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., known as AUKUS, according to Defense News. The others are over Alaska and at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The sites will require protracted planning and approval processes — as well as money for infrastructure — before they can become operational, according to Defense News. In November 2024, the DOD said it would collaborate with its AUKUS Partners on up to six flight campaigns by 2028 called the Hypersonic Flight Test and Experimentation project, according to the defense news website C4ISRNET.