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Crucially though, no crude oil shipments from Mexico. Cuba themselves have said that they haven’t received any oil shipments since December 2025. Their main airport is about to run of jet fuel tomorrow for civilian flights. Cuba needs to make a plan to get oil fast, the situation does not look positive. Humanitarian aid is obviously good, but it’s not going to keep logistics running and the lights on.
and yet we have not developed hypersonic missiles
This really depends on what is classified as a “hypersonic missile”.
For just reaching over Mach 5, the US was doing this with modified V2s after WW2. The US did plenty of research on maneuverable re-entry vehicles for ballistic missiles during the cold war, and deployed the Pershing-II with such in the 1980s.
However, technically, none of those are considered hypersonic missiles, even if they reach hypersonic speeds at some point in flight and have portions of their trajectory that are non ballistic. Hypersonic missiles are usually about sustained hypersonic speeds within the earth’s atmosphere on a trajectory that is not ballistic for the majority of it’s flight, with glide vehicles and cruise missiles. Under that definition, the US Army has the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), also called the Dark Eagle, a hypersonic glide vehicle.
Aside from that, the US has developed lots of hypersonic manned aircraft/spacecraft and “missiles”, hell the first principles of what we know about hypersonic flight come from the X-15 test aircraft that was first flown by the US in the 1960s (essentially a manned hypersonic missile that could land on salt flats), “the most successful research airplane in history” according to Neil Armstrong. The Space Shuttle was also essentially a manned hypersonic glide vehicle. If you look at modern missiles (both interceptors and the ones made to take out targets), they take a lot of design cues from the X-15 and Space Shuttle. From lateral thrusters and thick control surfaces to maneuver at high speed in the thinner air of the upper atmosphere (first pioneered on the X-15, so it’s hard to disagree with Armstrong there), to every second hypersonic glide vehicle looking like a mini Space Shuttle. Then there’s the X-51 Waverider, which achieved over 200 seconds of hypersonic flight utilising a scramjet, for a total flight time of 240 seconds 12 years ago. There are plenty of hypersonic test beds around.
What the US hasn’t developed, aside from the LHRW, is a hypersonic weapons system. This is very different from a test aircraft or missile, for various reasons revolving around force structure and doctrine. The US could, if they wanted to, weaponise the X-51 and have a 700+km range scramjet powered hypersonic cruise missile tomorrow. Over the past two years we’ve seen how Israel was able to weaponise their Sparrow target missiles used to test the Arrow air defence system, into weapons such as air launched ballistic missiles that can take out targets in Iran.
So the US could do that to something like the X-51. The reason they don’t do it is because no one will buy it, not the air force, not the navy. And this is because of questions around force structure and what these branches of the US military want. The air force, in particular, wants a miniaturised hypersonic missile that can be launched by tactical fighter jets, and doesn’t require a B-52 bomber to launch it like the X-51 did and ARRW does currently. The US air force is also not interested in jerry rigging F-15s to carry a single large missile. They want a minituarised X-51, that a US F-15 or Australian F-18 can carry multiple of. That’s what the HACM is supposed to be.
For the Navy, it’s even more complicated, they want a missile that can safely be stowed on an aircraft carrier in existing infrastructure (they do not want to retrofit every aircraft carrier for a new missile) that can target ships, and they Navy doesn’t operate large bombers so it has to be small, the air force still has the luxury of falling back on larger missiles if HACM doesn’t pan out, the navy does not. This means very strict requirements on size, fuels used in the missile, the guidance system for anti ship combat, while still meeting a high enough performance standard to make it worth the money and a leap in capability over existing weapons, like say the SM-6, which can be used in an anti ship role, and carried by F-18 fighters. This is why HALO is in limbo or cancelled, struggling to meet performance requirements and stay in the restrictions.
Yeah but those ended in December. Cuba themselves say no oil has arrived since December.