“We as a nation should be thinking about how is it that we are best utilizing the skills, talents, the capabilities that exist in our academic research institutions. Some places we do that really well, and other places we don’t do enough.”
“Environmental monitoring, what does that have to do with breaking China? Which is a great question, except that if you spend the time and think about it, anything that’s probably really good at environmental monitoring might have some interesting applications for the Commander in the Indo-Pacific Command and the components, and to the discussion about, you know, breaking China.”
“What they did, working with at the University of Hawaii, they found that anything that’s traveling at hypersonic speeds has a unique acoustic signature. They call it an N-wave. And so, if you tune your sensor to be able to pick up that N-wave, guess what? You are going to pick up a hypersonic object.”
“Now, this isn’t going to give us targeting or tracking solutions, but what they developed is a concept towards being able to have a very low-cost, very ubiquitous sensor network in the Western Pacific.”
“If I’m a commander, either as the Area Air Defense Commander responsible for the whole theater, or I’m a hub and spoke commander using the U.S. Air Force Agile Combat Employment concept, I want to know what is out there, particularly I want to know what’s approaching my installations. Well, okay, so if you have an acoustic sensing network that’s out there that’s got, you know, persistence in terms of being on fishing boats or on buoys or on high altitude balloons, and they’ve launched something, it depends on what it is. And it’s only going to cue to other higher end sensors that will be able to then provide to the track target and engage portion of the kill chain. But right now, they don’t have that. There’s nothing out there floating around in the maritime domain’s that’s helping with the air domain, making sense and sensing and making sense of what’s going on in the air domain.”
“And so, they’ve gotten support, just recently briefed the INDOPACOM J5 team, and it’s very likely that we’ll be demonstrating this capability in the next 12 months and hopefully have a first instantiation fielded in about 24 months. And it won’t be only for hypersonics. If they want to tune the sensor to be able to pick up some other acoustic signal, they certainly can do that. But it’s a very innovative way of going after hypersonics. So that’s APEX.”
“All this kind of stuff that we’re talking about, if it was fielded in the Taiwan Straits, it would really be helpful if you’re trying to sense and make sense of what’s going on and coming across. What if we had a similar network of acoustic sensors that were in the Arabian Gulf right now? Would the Commander of the Prince Sultan Air Base or somewhere else be better informed as what’s coming across? I think they would. But we don’t have that in the Arabian Gulf. We should ask ourselves why, and when are we going to get it?“
Lt General (Ret.) Jon “Ty” Thomas comments during the MDAA Virtual CRT: Breaking China, 3 April 2026
University of Hawaii ARTEMIS Program: The program named ARTEMIS – Advanced Reconnaissance and Tracking for Environmental Monitoring and Indo-Pacific Security – A collaborative program between the University of Hawaii and the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. The program aims to create a leading institution for space studies by utilizing the University’s world-class facilities and MDAA’s connections in the government and policy sector. The ARTEMIS program is an 8-month executive training initiative starting in August 2025.
ARTEMIS Project APEX: This project proposes the development of a distributed, low-cost, multi-phenomenology sensor network to provide persistent detection and tracking of hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) across the Indo-Pacific region. Key partners include the University of Hawaii’s Applied Research Laboratory and regional defense stakeholders. This initiative is essential to address critical defense gaps and enhance regional security against hypersonic threats.