Pentagon opens a new round in its hypersonic weapons race

The Pentagon just opened the door for private companies to pitch prototype hypersonic weapons capable of flying more than five times the speed of sound, releasing a formal Request for Solutions on July 9 that gives industry until August 10 to respond.

The opportunity, titled Next Generation Hypersonics for the Department of War, runs through a fast-track contracting mechanism called the Strategic and Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems consortium, commonly shortened to S2MARTS, and is being administered by the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Crane Division in Indiana.

Hypersonic weapons travel at speeds exceeding Mach 5, roughly one to five miles per second, fast enough to cross vast distances in minutes rather than hours while maneuvering unpredictably in flight, a combination that makes them extraordinarily difficult for existing missile defense systems to track and intercept. That speed and maneuverability advantage has driven a global arms race over the past decade, with China, Russia, and the United States all racing to field operational hypersonic capabilities, and the Pentagon has increasingly turned to specialized rapid-acquisition contracting tools specifically to close the gap faster than the military’s traditional, multiyear procurement process typically allows.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Crane Division established the consortium in 2019 under what the government calls Other Transaction Authority, a legal mechanism authorized under federal law that lets the Pentagon bypass many of the slower procedural requirements of standard defense contracts in exchange for working through a vetted network of private companies and research institutions. That structure has already funneled roughly $3 billion in funding toward defense prototypes across hypersonics, trusted microelectronics, and electromagnetic spectrum technology since the consortium’s founding, according to figures published by S2MARTS manager NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator, giving the government a track record of using this specific contracting vehicle to move hypersonic prototypes from concept toward flight testing considerably faster than conventional acquisition programs.

The July 9 release follows a formal announcement process S2MARTS has used repeatedly for major opportunities, having first flagged this specific hypersonics effort as “coming soon” back on June 2, 2026, before hosting a virtual industry teaming event on June 12 where companies had three minutes each to pitch their capabilities directly to potential government and industry partners. That kind of structured networking event has become a standard feature of how S2MARTS runs its competitions, giving smaller or less established companies a direct channel to connect with larger primes or complementary technology providers before formal proposals are due, rather than relying entirely on cold outreach or existing government relationships to find the right teaming partners.

The Joint Hypersonics Transition Office partnered with NSWC Crane in February 2026 to award six separate Other Transaction Agreements through S2MARTS to companies including Leidos, GoHypersonic, Kratos SRE, Purdue Applied Research Institute, Aurex, and Halo Engines, all supporting the transition office’s broader science and technology mission for next-generation hypersonic capabilities. Separately, the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Accelerator program, known as MACH-XL, opened its own related solicitation earlier in 2026 focused specifically on demonstrating producible hypersonic weapon systems across different launcher platforms and configurations, drawing more than 200 industry attendees to an in-person event in Crane, Indiana, where teams met directly with government leadership including George Rumford, senior advisor to the Deputy Secretary of War and director of the Test Resource Management Center.