US Army appears to have let slip plans for new hypersonic weapon in a photo posted online

• A photo from a big Army conference last fall posted to the official Flickr page of the secretary of the Army appears to reveal plans for a new type of hypersonic weapon, Aviation Week's Steve Trimble first reported Sunday.
• The photo shows Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy holding a briefing slide, among other papers, that reads: "Vintage Racer — Loitering Weapon System (LWS) Overview."
• Pentagon fiscal year 2021 budget documentation from February calls Vintage Racer a "recent success story," revealing that there has been testing.

It looks like the US Army let plans for a new hypersonic weapon slip in a photo posted on a photo-sharing website.

A photo taken at last fall's Association of the United States Army conference and posted on the official Flickr page of Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy shows the secretary with a briefing slide that reads "Vintage Racer — Loitering Weapon System (LWS) Overview," Aviation Week's Steve Trimble reported Sunday.

Most of the words on the slide are blurry and impossible to make out, but the six bullet points read: "Hypersonic ingress," "Survivable," "Time Over Target," "Multi-role," "Modular Payload," and "Cost Imposition Strategy."

A line at the bottom reads "Long Range, Rapid Ingress."

Although information is limited, the theory, Aviation Week reported, is that a hypersonic projectile capable of skirting enemy defenses could be launched into a general area and then release loitering air systems to seek out elusive targets like missile launchers and air-defense radars.

A Russian military expert told Aviation Week that this idea has been discussed, adding that loitering submunitions released by a hypersonic weapon could be target intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, among other things.

The Army did not respond to Insider's request for comment on the system.

Task & Purpose reported Monday that Vintage Racer does not appear in the Army's fiscal year 2021 research, development, test, and evaluation budget requests, but, as Trimble discovered, there is a reference to the project in the Department of Defense's FY 2021 budget documents.

Vintage Racer was described as a "recent success story" in DoD's RDT&E documents, with the Pentagon revealing that there has been testing and that "Vintage Racer matured an advanced capability to prosecute targets of interest."

"The project successfully validated aerodynamic design with wind tunnel testing and integrated a guidance subsystem for targeted kinetic effects before culminating in a fiscal 2019 flight test," DoD's budget document read.

The documentation and prototype technologies were transitioned to the US Army for further development and related acquisition, the Pentagon wrote.