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A Hypersonic Missile on a Beer Budget

The U.S. needs affordable weapons to meet the threat from China and other adversaries. The defense company Castelion is attacking the challenge.

By Kate B. Odell, WSJ

June 12, 2026

The numbers are brutal: The U.S. may have spent one-third of its Tomahawk missiles in the Iran war, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Restocking them could take four years. If Xi Jinping instigates a crisis in Taiwan, will the U.S. be short of ammunition? That isn’t a war-game hypothetical.

President Trump’s detractors cite the missile shortage as proof that the bombing of Iran was stupid. The more defeatist argue it’s time to accept America’s diminished position and cede influence to China and Russia in a new “multipolar” world.

The better option is to rebuild—and diversify—the U.S. arsenal. The American free enterprise system is moving to shore up U.S. defenses, and the progress is faster than most observers appreciate. Even with budget dysfunction in Washington and sclerosis in the Pentagon bureaucracy, billions in capital is flowing into counterdrone microwaves, unmanned aircraft and more. America’s private economy is confronting the new character of warfare on display in Ukraine and Iran, and the Trump administration is moving quickly to capitalize on the innovation.

Few challenges are more consequential than the race for a cheap hypersonic missile. “The U.S. has been in a model of treating hypersonics almost like a boutique science project,” says Bryon Hargis, a co-founder of the defense-technology company Castelion. The U.S. is “very far ahead, I’d say, in the high-end technology. We are woefully far behind on the speed to develop, the capacity, and the cost,” Mr. Hargis says. “Almost all wars end up in an economic exchange ratio that determines the winner”—that is, the side whose weapons are cheaper, as many Americans have now noticed in Ukraine and Iran. I recently spoke with Mr. Hargis and another Castelion co-founder, Andrew Kreitz, over Zoom.

The Pentagon in May announced a new framework to buy Castelion’s low-cost hypersonic missile, known as Blackbeard, with an option to purchase up to 12,000 in coming years. Can the U.S. field a hypersonic missile on aircraft carriers by Mr. Xi’s 2027 deadline for having his forces ready to fight for Taiwan? And on a beer budget? As Mr. Kreitz puts it: “We are in a dead sprint to producing as many missiles as possible on the fastest timeline possible.”

Messrs. Hargis and Kreitz decline to tell me Blackbeard’s range, speed or other specifications. Generally speaking, a hypersonic missile travels at least five times the speed of sound and can maneuver in flight. “It’s very attractive to our adversaries because it allows them to negate all our spending in missile defense,” Mr. Hargis says. “A hypersonic system can more easily get around those defenses. And so our adversaries have been focused on that for some time.” That has left a missile gap, which the U.S. is trying to close.

“China is absolutely kicking our butt in terms of cost and manufacturing,” Mr. Hargis says. “China released something like three new hypersonic missiles . . . on the last Victory Day parade.” Meanwhile, Russia is “deploying and building at a greater rate than the U.S. right now.” Russia lacks the wealth to build to U.S. standards, but “it usually works, and it’s definitely way cheaper, and then you can usually build it quickly.”

He adds that “adversaries have noticed that the U.S. is focused on capability development, but our timelines are bad, our outcomes are poor in terms of schedule and cost and capacity, and they’re exploiting that.” That is the story line of many military programs, from ships to satellites—great stuff that can’t be built fast at volume.

Castelion hopes to shatter this status quo. Mr. Hargis describes the company’s hypersonics as a “scalable deterrence,” higher on the escalation ladder than economic sanctions but lower than “strategic nuclear threat,” with “the intention that it’s never used.” In late April, the Navy awarded the company a $105 million agreement to strap Blackbeard onto F/A-18 fighter jets.

That’s a big deal. The U.S. demand for long-range missiles in a Taiwan cataclysm would be insatiable. The People’s Liberation Army missile forces exist to push the U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific—to make it hard or impossible for the American fleet to intervene.

China keeps moving that line back further from their coast, as Mr. Hargis notes, with longer-range fires. A perennial debate in Washington is whether aircraft carriers are obsolete because they can’t operate within firing range of Chinese missiles.

A cheap hypersonic missile on aircraft carriers could help U.S. forces pop China’s defensive bubble—and thus help deter Beijing from causing a crisis in the first place. Building tens of thousands of such munitions would be a show that the U.S. is serious about not getting locked out of the Pacific.

Despite the blackout on the missile’s details, the product appears designed to overcome the Pacific “tyranny of distance,” in part by exploiting the speedy hypersonic response time. “Our adversaries,” Mr. Hargis says, “for a very long time, have known that the U.S. has great capabilities with cruise missiles to shoot static things that don’t move. And so they’ve designed everything that they do, they put on a mobile platform, so that they can basically shoot and scoot.”

A cruise missile can take “two hours to close the distance. They’re long gone if they were there. That’s a problem. . . . Hypersonics really solves distance, because you are flying in the upper atmosphere where there’s very low drag. It solves the time to the target.” What’s more, “it’s very survivable in terms of the weapon making it to the target, because they move so quickly. They’re maneuverable, they’re harder to shoot down.”

Castelion is building a factory in New Mexico and aims to have missiles rolling off the line by next year. This is a flash for America’s dysfunctional defense industrial base. Many new companies are designing their products to elude known constraints in defense workforce and supply chains.

“When you sit in a Castelion design review with our engineers,” Mr. Kreitz says, “it isn’t just: ‘Does this part work?’ ” Executives also want to know what it costs. “Just as importantly—actually, I think more importantly—how do you make 5,000 of them, how do you make 10,000 of them, 15,000? Where does the supply chain break on these? And if the supply chain is going to break, then you’re wrong and we need to design the part differently.”

In other words: “How can we look outside of the aerospace supply chain to procure parts that are highly available and low cost?” Messrs. Hargis and Kreitz decline to disclose the sticker price, though public budget documents suggest it is less than $500,000 a missile. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker noted at a recent hearing that Blackbeard is a steal at “roughly 3% of the price of our current exquisite hypersonic strike programs.”

Castelion is also under contract to put Blackbeard on the U.S. Army’s Himars rocket system, best known for its role in defending Ukraine. “Part of the concept of operations here,” Mr. Kreitz says, is “let’s have one missile system that with very, very minimal changes can be integrated onto land and air systems.”

The Pentagon’s “cost plus” contracting encourages tweaks and new bells and whistles for different military services and launchers. Mr. Hargis has a different message for the Pentagon: “Please don’t create another missile program.” Mr. Kreitz says that “instead of having 10 different very bespoke, low-production rate systems,” Castelion aims to produce “a very good, very broadly applicable missile system, Blackbeard, that we can build at very, very high scale and very, very high production rate. And we can drive costs out of the system that way.”

One irony of the narrative that Mr. Trump blithely burned missiles in Iran is that his administration is pressing real progress to deepen America’s magazines. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg has established a Munitions Acceleration Council, which aims to rev production of Patriot interceptors, Tomahawks and cheap hypersonics. The Pentagon recently announced deals for more than 10,000 inexpensive cruise missiles.

Some arms-control advocates argue that U.S. hypersonic development is provocative and invites a new arms race. Messrs. Hargis and Kreitz say they never hear that from Democrats in Congress. “Defense in general is very bipartisan,” Mr. Hargis says. “ ‘Hey, we want to deliver a high-end capability to deter China for the next 10 years at an affordable price, at a rate that would actually deter them’—that sells really well,” he quips. Then Mr. Kreitz gets serious: “If you look at the growth of the Chinese Navy and the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Forces, you can draw your own conclusion about whether we are the ones escalating.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Messrs. Hargis and Kreitz a question I’ve put to other defense executives: What accounts for the enormous influx of investment into defense technology, when 10 years ago nobody in Silicon Valley aspired to work on military products? Mr. Hargis acknowledges the premise. “When we opened the business, we couldn’t get a bank to take us,” he says. “We were lumped in with gambling and porn.”

“The perception for a long time was that defense was either in secular decline or was secularly flat,” Mr. Kreitz says. “There was not a belief, I think, on the street or amongst investors, that there was going to be a huge surge in spending or a need for a new approach to doing things, because, in my opinion, we just sort of got complacent in the post-Cold War era. It wasn’t thinkable.”

Then came a “one-two punch”: The Pentagon realized “how dire the situation was with Chinese progress in the late 2010s,” as Mr. Kreitz puts it—followed by the biggest land war in Europe since 1945. Ukraine “really laid bare how fragile and how sclerotic the defense industrial base had become,” Mr. Kreitz says. “I think people realized, look, this is actually necessary. There are bad guys out there. War is thinkable, and if you don’t deter it with these sorts of weapons, then you are under threat.”

At the same time, Mr. Kreitz says, “no one thought it was actually possible to go challenge” the big defense contractors. “No one thought it was possible to build a high-margin business. And I do think in that particular arena, SpaceX was very, very instrumental for showing that it can be done.” (Mr. Hargis used to work at SpaceX.) At a higher altitude, Mr. Hargis says, “there was a sense” after Ukraine “of ‘Now the world is dynamic, and we need to pay attention to it.’ ” Investors confronted the reality that “all my other trillions of dollars of investments will actually not be worth as much if we don’t care about defense.” As Mr. Hargis puts it, America’s success—“our economic success, our cultural success across the world—it is all backstopped by our military success.”

Mrs. Odell is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.