Hypersonic Agility
How not being Agile enough could be lethal to millions
The pursuit of developing a hypersonic missile by China, Russia, the United States, and North-Korea, shows that the ones adopting an Agile way of working are succeeding. And, perhaps to your surprise, it’s not the only Western power on this list that has done so.
As a matter of fact, the US seems to be the ones dragging their feet and running the risk of missing out. That could be detrimental to the balance of global power, and thus, lethal for some. If China upends the US in military progress, the twenty-three million inhabitants of Taiwan would be at serious risk.
Last Thursday, after news surfaced about yet another Chinese test of a hypersonic missile, second most senior US General John Hyten shared his worries about the pace at which China’s military is developing capabilities, calling it “stunning”.
At a Defense Writers Group roundtable that morning, Hyten warned that “the pace they’re moving and the trajectory they’re on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it. It will happen. So I think we have to do something.”
And that’s where the trouble starts. Just a week before the apparently successful Chinese test, the United States military failed a hypersonic missile test, with no new test scheduled yet. All in all, the US has carried out nine such tests, compared to hundreds of Chinese hypersonic missile tests. Hyten acknowledges that the US is lagging enormously with its development of new state-of-the-art military capabilities, and he blames it on the cultural differences.
“We’ve decided that failure is bad,” according to Hyten, adding that, “Failure is part of the learning process. And if you want to get back to speed, [it] means taking risks and that means learning from failures and that means failing fast and moving fast.”
Failure is part of the learning process
Even though the word “Agile” was not mentioned once by Hyten, as you can see he is apparently very much aware of Agile terminology.
General Hyten vented more of his frustration by mentioning that even North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, has learned the lesson of failed tests to speed up development. Unlike Kim Jong Un’s father, Hyten said, “He decided not to kill scientists and engineers when they failed, he decided to encourage it and let them learn by failing. And they did. So the 118th biggest economy in the world — the 118th — has built an ICBM nuclear capability because they test and fail and understand risk.”
Even though General Hyten, and earlier also his boss Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, focused on the development of a hypersonic missile — with General Milley calling the successful Chinese test “very close to a Sputnik moment” — the complications of the mentioned cultural differences could be disastrous for millions. Hyten mentioned that “the Department of Defense is still unbelievably bureaucratic and slow. We can go fast if we want to but the bureaucracy we put in place is just brutal.” This means that not just the development of a hypersonic missile is hampered, but that development in general, decision-making, prioritizing, and getting things done is too slow for the US military to respond quickly enough to global upheavals. And by extension, so is the Western military might — for what is NATO, if not the US military, plus a little extra.
The implication is that when China, Russia, North Korea, or some surprise agitator jumps onto the world military stage, there won’t be anyone to stop them in time. When, for instance, China decides it’s time to assimilate Taiwan — which is not a far-fetched idea, seeing how tensions are building up rapidly in the last few months — mere harsh words from the West won’t do the trick, the Chinese will not be that impressed by the once so mighty American military. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as the saying goes. Just like when the Russians took the Crim, the West will weigh its options — is the price to pay for intervention too high, or is the price for not intervening too high? If nothing is changed about the way the US military develops and plans, that choice is no longer in US hands — it will be sidelined by a far more Agile opponent.
It goes to show that sometimes, adopting an Agile way of working is about more than surviving in the market, sometimes it’s simply about surviving. Full stop.
