(WASHINGTON) — Consumer prices rose 7.1% in November, continuing a months-long decline from a 40-year record reached over the summer.
Economists had predicted a CPI increase of 7.2%.
Monthly inflation also fell significantly. Prices rose 0.1% in November, cooling down from a 0.4% increase in October.
The top contributor to the monthly price increase came from shelter costs, which rose 0.6% in November. Food prices also jumped over the month, rising 0.5%.
But prices fell for a host of goods, including gasoline, used cars and trucks and medical services.
The decline in inflation follows a string of aggressive rate hikes from the Federal Reserve aimed at bringing prices down to normal levels.
The inflation data arrives a day before the Fed is expected to impose another borrowing cost increase. Economists project the Fed will raise rates by 0.5% on Wednesday, a slowdown from three consecutive jumbo-sized rate hikes of 0.75% but still a significant intensification of its fight against price increases.
By raising borrowing costs, the Fed has tried to slash inflation by cooling the economy and choking off demand. The approach, however, risks tipping the U.S. into a recession and putting millions out of work.
So far, however, the labor market has proven resilient, bolstering the hopes of policymakers seeking to avert a shutdown but also raising fears of a prolonged bout of inflation driven by wage gains.
Hiring last month exceeded expectations and wages grew a blistering 5.1% compared to a year earlier, offering welcome relief for workers strained by price hikes.
But rising wages often push companies to hike prices to make up for the added costs, which can worsen inflation and make it more difficult to reverse.
Despite the robust job market, growing evidence suggests the Fed’s rate hikes have put the brakes on some economic activity.
Home sales fell for the ninth month in a row in October, the most recent month on record. Sales of existing homes, such as single-family homes and condominiums, were down about 28% from a year earlier.
Meanwhile, the personal savings rate fell to 2.3% last month, the lowest rate in nearly two decades, according to data from the Commerce Department. The failure to stash extra funds suggests that savings stockpiled during the pandemic have strained under the weight of high prices.
(MOSCOW, Idaho) — It has been four weeks since four University of Idaho students were killed at their off-campus home in Moscow. The Vandal family has since come together to heal and support one another over the past month.
Authorities have still not made any arrests or found a murder weapon in the deaths of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle, leaving some residents and students on edge. Despite the tragedy in the tight-knit community, students took a moment to celebrate over the weekend as the school held its winter commencement on Saturday.
Goncalves, who was 20 years old, was supposed to be one of those graduates.
“It’s been a tough few weeks for our community. And I want to acknowledge an enormous loss in our Vandal family,” said University of Idaho President C. Scott Green, who spoke Saturday before the crowd of graduates and parents who attended.
One University of Idaho alumna, Kerry Uhlorn, said she wanted to ensure students felt safe on campus following the tragic events. Uhlorn, a 2007 graduate and member of the Delta Gamma sorority, took to social media and created a page called “DO GOOD – UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO,” a saying and nod to her affiliation with Delta Gamma.
Together, Uhlorn and the group raised more than $20,000 and purchased 2,187 Birdies, a personal safety device, for the Vandal community, she told ABC News.
“I’ve had messages from people I’ve never met, people that […] weren’t even Vandals that just are so touched by this. It’s kind of like a bright light in this really dark situation,” Uhlorn said.
Even before the events last month, Uhlorn described the community as close and tight-knit — with these events bringing everyone closer together.
“I think this horrible thing has just made everybody realize how much more we are as a group and how much we can accomplish when we work together,” she said.
On campus, physical reminders of the losses are visible, as students start finals on Monday.
Greek Row is honoring the four students with flags and banners on their chapter houses throughout campus.
One chapter, Pi Beta Phi, which Mogen and Kernodle belonged to, set up a memorial angel tree on their porch. The women posted to their social media page inviting all members of the community to place an ornament to honor their members this holiday season.
Sigma Chi, the fraternity Chapin belonged to, has its flag at half-staff.
And in the festively decorated town of Moscow, business have adorned their windows with the names of those who were killed, and the tree at the center of town is decorated with notes of remembrance and roses to honor their fellow Vandals.
Despite the pain and darkness of the events, the community has given a new meaning to the phrase “Vandal Strong.”
“This whole thing just reminded me how proud I am to be a Vandal,” Uhlorn added.
(NEW YORK) — After over 50 years working in public service, Dr. Anthony Fauci is stepping down at the end of the month, though he’s not retiring. Fauci told ABC News he wants to do something outside of federal work while he still has the health, vitality and drive to do so.
And as he gets ready to leave as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, one of the things that worries him the most about the state of science and medicine in the U.S. is misinformation.
“Misinformation and disinformation is really hurting so many things, including people’s trust in science,” Fauci told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Jen Ashton at the NIH lab. “It becomes very difficult to get people to fully appreciate the truth of what’s going on — which will ultimately impact how we respond, in this case, to a pandemic, like COVID-19.”
Some of that misinformation directly centered around Fauci. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when officials first introduced mask mandates and stay-at-home guidelines, Fauci was a target for conservatives opposed to public health measures. He was falsely accused of wanting to “microchip” Americans with vaccines, of lying to Congress, and trying to amass political power.
Just this past weekend, new Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted Fauci should be prosecuted.
Fauci faced threats starting in 2020, and health department leaders were worried enough about the risk that he got a beefed-up security detail.
“It’s preposterous, how someone who’s done nothing but encourage the population of this country and the world to abide by good public health practices — like getting vaccinated, and keeping up to date on your boosters, and to be careful, such as with indoor congregate settings — that person, i.e. me, all of a sudden becomes the object of vicious attacks,” he said.
Fauci said the most upsetting aspect is the threats to his family.
“What really bothers me is harassing my children and my wife. Give me a freaking break,” he said.
The COVID-19 vaccine is one of the major targets of disinformation, and Fauci was intimately involved in the process. The National Institutes of Health partnered with Moderna on developing an mRNA vaccine, despite the fact that there had never been an approved mRNA vaccine and that Moderna had never put a product on the market.
Fauci said there was some pushback within the government around that decision. But he was confident it was the right call.
“A lot of people, as you might imagine, were saying, ‘Well, why are you doing this? This has never been proven before,'” he said. “And yet, because of the confidence we had in the science, we went with it, and it turned out to be the right choice.”
COVID-19 vaccinations saved more than three million lives in the U.S., according to data released Tuesday from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit that researches the healthcare system
There’s also been swirling misinformation in and around conversations about the origins of the coronavirus. Scientists may never have a clear-cut answer, and if they ever find one, it could take years, Fauci said. But right now, the data strongly suggests a natural origin for the virus, likely in a bat, he said.
Still, he said he has an open mind about the possibility the virus escaped from a lab — even though he thinks the preponderance of evidence so far suggests that’s not likely.
He said that one of the challenges of getting clear answers is the complexity of the relationship between American and Chinese scientists.
“The hostility and the accusatory nature of it, unless that changes dramatically, I don’t think we’re going to get the information that we need,” Fauci said.
Despite the backlash around public health officials’ actions at the start of the pandemic, Fauci said it’s hard to say if officials should have done anything differently.
“We were dealing with a moving target, where things were different from January, to February, to March, to April, to a year later,” he said. “To have a redo would be to have a magic wand and say from day one, we knew everything we needed to know about the virus.”
The misinformation and attacks aren’t why Fauci is leaving public service — he said he tries to just tune it out.
But the challenges around health misinformation aren’t going away. Twitter said last month that it would stop enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policies, even as cases, hospitalizations and deaths from the disease in the United States climb.
That’s one reason why Fauci said he might consider joining social media. Without the pulpit of the federal government, he might need to find another way to communicate with the public.
“I do want a venue, or a forum, to be able to express some ideas,” he said. “I wouldn’t rule it out.”
Republican lawmakers have promised to call Fauci back on the record to defend the government’s response to the pandemic. Fauci, who has testified before Congress hundreds of times over the past decades, said he welcomes the opportunity.
“It’s a little bit dicey now because there’s such a degree of divisiveness that’s non-productive,” he said. “All of a sudden … it became normalized to just say things that were completely not true. I hope we get back to differences that are constructive, and part of the greatness of our country.”
Watch Dr. Ashton’s interview with Dr. Fauci on GMA3, Tuesday, Dec. 13 (check local listings) and on ABCNL Prime at 7 p.m.
(NEW YORK) — United Airlines said Tuesday it planned to purchase 100 Boeing 787 Dreamliners, with options to buy an additional 100.
The airline said the order for up to 200 aircraft amounted to the “the largest widebody order by a U.S. carrier in commercial aviation history.”
United CEO Scott Kirby said in a statement that the airline had exited the COVID-19 pandemic as “the world’s leading global airline.”
“This order further solidifies our lead and creates new opportunities for our customers, employees and shareholders by accelerating our plan to connect more people to more places around the globe and deliver the best experience in the sky,” he said.
The order for 787 aircraft comes a few months after the Federal Aviation Administration’s August announcement that Boeing could resume Dreamliner deliveries. Boeing had been forced to halt 787 deliveries in May 2021 after manufacturing quality issues and structural issues were discovered. The FAA first raised 787 concerns in September 2020, when the agency said it was investigating manufacturing flaws.
Boeing shares rose about 2% in pre-market trading on Tuesday, with United shares trading down by about 1%.
The airline also said it had exercised an option to purchase 44 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft for delivery before 2026, along with 56 more MAX aircraft for delivery before 2028.
United said it now plans to take delivery of a total of about 700 new narrow and widebody planes by the end of 2032, “including an average of more than two every week in 2023 and more than three every week in 2024.”
The 100 widebody aircraft announced on Tuesday are expected to be delivered between 2024 and 2032, according to the airline. The planes will replace United’s fleet of 767 planes and many of its 777 aircraft. United has said it plans to retire all of its 767 aircraft by 2030.
Retiring the ageing planes will give United an environmentally friendly boost, the airline said, with per-seat carbon emissions expected to drop by about 25%.
Gerry Laderman, United’s EVP and CFO, said, “This order solves for our current widebody replacement needs in a more fuel-efficient and cost-efficient way, while also giving our customers a best-in-class experience.”
United said in October that it expected its fourth-quarter adjusted margin to top the same 2019 quarter for the first time since the pandemic began.
“Earnings recovery out of the pandemic has kept pace with, if not led, peers and messaging has been very confident,” analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note to clients ahead of the announcement on Tuesday morning.
The number of travelers passing through U.S. airports has almost returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to daily checkpoint data from the Transportation Security Administration.
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday charged Sam Bankman-Fried, the embattled former CEO of cryptocurrency giant FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, with defrauding investors.
“FTX’s collapse highlights the very real risks that unregistered crypto asset trading platforms can pose for investors and customers alike,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement.
Bankman-Fried had been arrested Monday in the Bahamas after federal prosecutors in New York filed criminal charges contained in a sealed indictment, according to the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Monday that specific charges were expected to be unsealed Tuesday.
In a statement, Williams said: “Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
A source familiar with the charges told ABC News that Bankman-Fried is facing a multi-count fraud indictment that comes one month after FTX filed a $32 billion bankruptcy.
The arrest “followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition,” the Bahamas Attorney General’s Office said.
Bankman-Fried is due to appear in a courtroom in Nassau, Bahamas, Tuesday morning before his eventual transfer to New York for prosecution. The exact timing of his extradition was not clear Monday night. He was also due to appear before Congress on Tuesday.
Since the collapse of FTX, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have been looking at Bankman-Fried, sources have told ABC News.
The Southern District declined to comment on the arrest.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it “has authorized separate charges relating to his violations of securities laws, to be filed publicly tomorrow in SDNY.”
In response to the arrest announcement, Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said, “The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.”
“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, the Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere,” he added.
FTX, once a crypto darling, filed for bankruptcy protection in November after a rival cryptocurrency exchange announced it was backing out of a plan to acquire it.
Bankman-Fried had been scheduled to appear before Congress Tuesday to testify before the House Financial Services Committee in a hearing titled “Investigating the Collapse of FTX, Part 1.” Rep. Maxine Waters, chairwoman of the committee, said in a statement Monday night that she was “surprised” to hear of the arrest.
“While I am disappointed that we will not be able to hear from Mr. Bankman-Fried tomorrow, we remain committed to getting to the bottom of what happened, and the committee looks forward to beginning our investigation by hearing from Mr. John Ray III tomorrow,” she added.
John Ray, FTX’s new CEO guiding the company through bankruptcy proceedings, is still expected to testify.
Bankman-Fried, in a series of tweets, had said he’s “willing to testify” after initially resisting the committee’s request.
“I still do not have access to much of my data — professional or personal. So there is a limit to what I will be able to say, and I won’t be as helpful as I’d like,” Bankman-Fried wrote. “But as the committee still thinks it would be useful, I am willing to testify on the 13th.”
Bankman-Fried, in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, denied that he knew “that there was any improper use of customer funds.”
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday charged Sam Bankman-Fried, the embattled former CEO of cryptocurrency giant FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, with defrauding investors.
“FTX’s collapse highlights the very real risks that unregistered crypto asset trading platforms can pose for investors and customers alike,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement.
Bankman-Fried had been arrested Monday in the Bahamas after federal prosecutors in New York filed criminal charges contained in a sealed indictment, according to the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Monday that specific charges were expected to be unsealed Tuesday.
In a statement, Williams said: “Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
A source familiar with the charges told ABC News that Bankman-Fried is facing a multi-count fraud indictment that comes one month after FTX filed a $32 billion bankruptcy.
The arrest “followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition,” the Bahamas Attorney General’s Office said.
Bankman-Fried is due to appear in a courtroom in Nassau, Bahamas, Tuesday morning before his eventual transfer to New York for prosecution. The exact timing of his extradition was not clear Monday night. He was also due to appear before Congress on Tuesday.
Since the collapse of FTX, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have been looking at Bankman-Fried, sources have told ABC News.
The Southern District declined to comment on the arrest.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it “has authorized separate charges relating to his violations of securities laws, to be filed publicly tomorrow in SDNY.”
In response to the arrest announcement, Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said, “The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.”
“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, the Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere,” he added.
FTX, once a crypto darling, filed for bankruptcy protection in November after a rival cryptocurrency exchange announced it was backing out of a plan to acquire it.
Bankman-Fried had been scheduled to appear before Congress Tuesday to testify before the House Financial Services Committee in a hearing titled “Investigating the Collapse of FTX, Part 1.” Rep. Maxine Waters, chairwoman of the committee, said in a statement Monday night that she was “surprised” to hear of the arrest.
“While I am disappointed that we will not be able to hear from Mr. Bankman-Fried tomorrow, we remain committed to getting to the bottom of what happened, and the committee looks forward to beginning our investigation by hearing from Mr. John Ray III tomorrow,” she added.
John Ray, FTX’s new CEO guiding the company through bankruptcy proceedings, is still expected to testify.
Bankman-Fried, in a series of tweets, had said he’s “willing to testify” after initially resisting the committee’s request.
“I still do not have access to much of my data — professional or personal. So there is a limit to what I will be able to say, and I won’t be as helpful as I’d like,” Bankman-Fried wrote. “But as the committee still thinks it would be useful, I am willing to testify on the 13th.”
Bankman-Fried, in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, denied that he knew “that there was any improper use of customer funds.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday afternoon will sign legislation protecting same-sex and interracial marriage.
Biden is hosting a celebration starting at 3:30 p.m. ET on the White House South Lawn with lawmakers and Cabinet members as the Respect for Marriage Act becomes law.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Monday that Biden “will be joined by a bipartisan group of lawmakers as well as advocates and plaintiffs in marriage equality cases across the country.”
“There will be musical guests and performances,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that the president “will also note that there is much more work to be done” and he will repeat his call to pass federal legislation known as the Equality Act to expand civil rights protections for LGBTQ people.
The historic marriage bill passed with bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress after months of negotiation, particularly over provisions related to religion.
The House voted last week 258-169 to send the bill to Biden’s desk after the Senate passed it 61-36. A minority of Republicans joined Democrats in both votes.
Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay senator, helped guide the legislation through Congress. Baldwin has said the bill “will protect the hard-fought progress we’ve made on marriage equality.”
It became a priority for Democrats after the Supreme Court’s June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which five conservative justices ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and the national guarantee to abortion access.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion, said he believed the court should reconsider other precedents based on similar legal doctrine, including 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges — which found that the 14th Amendment requires all states to license same-sex marriages.
The Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t include Obergefell’s national requirement but will mandate that individual states recognize same-sex and interracial marriages that were lawfully performed in another state.
Some Republicans who voted for it in Congress noted additional language around protecting religious groups who still object to same-sex marriage.
Critics like Utah Sen. Mike Lee said it didn’t go far enough, however.
Biden celebrated the Respect for Marriage Act’s passage last week, saying then that it will “give peace of mind to millions of LGBTQI+ and interracial couples who are now guaranteed the rights and protections to which they and their children are entitled.”
“After the uncertainty caused by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Congress has restored a measure of security to millions of marriages and families,” he said in a statement. “They have also provided hope and dignity to millions of young people across this country who can grow up knowing that their government will recognize and respect the families they build.”
Biden has long been outspoken on the issue. In 2012, he famously preempted then-President Barack Obama in publicly supporting same-sex marriage.
“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” Biden said during an interview at the time on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“Who do you love? Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love?” Biden said then. “And that’s what people are finding out, what all marriages at their root are about.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was emotional as the bill was passed in the House on Thursday. Pelosi, stepping down from her leadership role in the new Congress, said she was happy that this bill was one of the last she was signing as the top House Democrat.
“At last, we have history in the making,” she said at the bill enrollment ceremony last week. “But not only are we on the right side of history, we’re on the right side of the future, expanding freedom in America.”
(NEW YORK) — Special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed the secretary of state’s offices in Georgia and New Mexico for communications with or involving former President Donald Trump, his 2020 campaign aides, and a list of Trump allies involved in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
As ABC News has previously reported, Smith has also sent subpoenas to the secretary of state’s offices in Michigan and Arizona and to local election officials in Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin — battleground states targeted by Trump and his allies in their efforts to contest the election.
The subpoena sent to New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, which was obtained by ABC News, is dated Nov. 22 and is also signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Burke.
Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, was the recipient of Trump’s now-famous phone call in January 2021, in which has asked Raffensperger to “find” the exact number of votes he needed to win the state. Trump has repeatedly defended the call, calling it “perfect.”
Smith, a longtime federal prosecutor and former head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, was tapped last month by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the DOJ’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election and Trump’s handling of classified materials after leaving office.
The appointment of the special counsel was triggered by Trump’s announcement last month that he is running for president for a third time, which created a conflict of interest, according to the DOJ special counsel guidelines.
(UVALDE, Texas) — When a gunman attacked an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, only 20% of the deputies in the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office had received training on how to handle an active-shooter situation, according to the findings of an after-action review announced Monday.
The lead investigator brought in by Uvalde’s county commissioners also reported the elected county sheriff, Ruben Nolasco, had not undergone active-shooter training in the nearly two years he’s held the post as the county’s top lawman. There were 16 sheriff’s officers among the nearly 400 law enforcement officers on scene during the rampage in May.
Former judge and police procedure consultant Richard Carter, retained in the wake of the school shooting, said he “conducted a forensic review of Uvalde sheriff’s office…I did not conduct an investigation of actions or inactions.”
Carter said one of his key recommendations is that all personnel in the sheriff’s department be trained on how to handle active-shooter incidents — something that was only added to the department’s policy manual four months after 19 students and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School.
Officials with the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions from ABC News, including how many deputies are currently employed by the agency and how many present on May 24 had completed active-shooter training.
Nolasco and his actions that day are being investigated by the Texas Department of Public Safety, and senior officials at DPS have reported to investigators that he acted like an incident commander outside the school, as police waited more than an hour for the order to attack the shooter. Nolasco has denied he was in command and has made only limited comments in the months since the shooting. Carter said Texas law does not require sheriff’s departments to have active-shooter training.
“I would anticipate that in the next session of legislature — I would be disappointed and shocked — if there was not legislation that made it a requirement, a mandatory course that all Texas police officers be required to take an active shooter response course,” said Carter.
County officials declined to release a copy of Carter’s report. Carter announced the results of his review at a meeting of the county commissioners, which was even more emotional because of the presence of Commissioner Mariano Pargas, the man who was in charge of the Uvalde City Police Department during the May massacre and has since retired from the force before he could be fired. It was Pargas’ first public appearance since he retired last month.
Jesse Rizo, uncle of Jacklyn Cazares who was killed at Robb, told commissioners the after action review still leaves the families of victims with unanswered questions.
“It is beyond comprehension,” Rizo said. “It solely focuses on policy and procedure. The families come up here to want answers. What they want to know is the detailed information.”
Rizo spoke directly to Pargas, saying, “It doesn’t take a manual to tell you what to do. You failed them. It’s time for you to resign.”
In an emotional scene outside the courthouse, families of victims confronted Pargas urging him to “step down.” Pargas, who was escorted by multiple sheriff’s deputies to his car, did not respond to comment.
Brett Cross, guardian of 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia who was killed in the shooting, told ABC News, “they want to hide behind the badge. It is sickening.”
U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Richard P. Ebensberger
(WASHINGTON) — The Air Force last week successfully tested a hypersonic AGM-183A missile off the coast of southern California — striking a target after reaching more than five times the speed of sound — in a sign that U.S. weapons are catching up to similar Chinese and Russian capabilities.
The missile was launched from a B-52H bomber on Friday. It’s the first test of a missile prototype that the Air Force hopes will become its first hypersonic missile.
Unlike two previous airborne tests of the missile’s booster system that reached hypersonic speeds, Friday’s test, which was announced by the Air Force on Monday, was of a full prototype with an attached warhead that struck a target after reaching hypersonic speeds.
Hypersonic weapons are designed to fly at lower altitudes than ballistic missiles while still striking at long-range targets.
The U.S. has been behind Russia and China in developing such weapons, as both countries’ militaries have already fielded hypersonic systems.
The missile the Air Force is developing is known as both the AGM-183A and the ARRW, which stands for air-launched rapid response weapon, and is intended to be fired from the air.
The test of a full prototype operational missile, or what the Air Force calls an “all-up-round” test, was similar to the two previous booster tests in that the prototype was released from a B-52 bomber flying off the coast of southern California.
“The ARRW team successfully designed and tested an air-launched hypersonic missile in five years,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei, the Armament Directorate Program’s executive officer, said in a statement. “I am immensely proud of the tenacity and dedication this team has shown to provide a vital capability to our warfighter.”
The 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base in California executed the ARRW test flight.
In addition to the air-launched hypersonic missile that the Air Force is working on, the military is also developing land-launched hypersonic weapons.
While seen as a long-distance targeting option, Russia has used some of its air-launched hypersonic missiles to strike inside Ukraine, a relatively short distance compared to its capability.
These attacks have been seen as Russia trying to demonstrate its advanced military technologies — or potentially out of need as its stock of precision-guided missiles has decreased significantly since its invasion began in February.
Though China and Russia have developed hypersonic missile systems like the ones the U.S. is working on, the term hypersonic has also been used to describe other weapons systems that operate differently.
That was the case in 2021 when it was disclosed that China had tested a system known as a fractional orbital bombardment system that could potentially carry a conventional or nuclear warhead anywhere in the world at hypersonic speeds.
In that test, China launched a rocket that carried a maneuverable glide vehicle that orbited the earth before reentering the atmosphere and traveling at a hypersonic speed toward a target.
