The Beijing ceremony raised speculation about a possible growing threat posed by China’s advancements in hypersonic technology. Today it leads the field in hypersonic missiles, followed by Russia.
The US, meanwhile, is playing catch-up, while the UK has none.
Mr Freer of the Council on Geostrategy think tank, which received some of its funding from defence industry companies, the Ministry of Defence and others, argues that the reason China and Russia are ahead is relatively simple.
“They decided to invest a lot of money in these programmes quite a few years ago.”
Meanwhile, for much of the first two decades of this century, many Western nations focused on fighting both jihadist-inspired terrorism at home, and counter-insurgency wars overseas.
Back then, the prospect of having to fight a peer-on-peer conflict against a modern, sophisticated adversary seemed a distant one.