Not nearly as vulnerable as China and Russia want you to believe.

Hypersonic missiles are a danger to carriers, and that danger must be respected and accounted for; however carriers have ways of mitigating that risk. Here’s some reasons:

• Carriers are moving targets. No matter how accurate the information was in the enemy “kill chain” and when a hypersonic missile was launched, when the missile arrives in the target area the carrier will not be there any more. And carriers are a lot faster than people think. How fast? That’s classified. Just know that carriers ain’t “slow-moving” targets.
• Propagandists like to portray an engagement with a carrier as a one-on-one duel. Just the missile versus the carrier, but that’s NOT how it works. They are lying to you. Carriers are ALWAYS escorted by at least four other combat vessels, and commonly more than that. Each of them carry SM-6 missiles that are capable of intercepting ballistic and hypersonic missiles. That they can unleash a firestorm of chaff and decoys to distract an incoming missile. Their sophisticated AEGIS systems can produce complex jamming and false targets. That’s a mountain of data for a simple-minded missile to process in a very short amount of time.

China’s DF-17 hypersonic missiles; their alleged “carrier killers.”

• The limitations of physics don’t give a damn about your ideology. Nations like China and Russia like to claim big, scary numbers to frighten people. They’ll claim their missile can travel at Mach 10, for instance. The way they write this, they make it sound like the missile will be moving at Mach 10 through the entire flight regime, but that’s an impossibility, and physics is the reason. A Mach 10 missile isn’t unreasonable. ICBMs have been able to hit Mach 25 since the 1960s, but these performance numbers are given at high altitude where the air is thin and air resistance is minimal. When the top speed of fighters is given, that top speed was at high altitude, and that’s for a reason. It can’t go that fast at sea-level. Same for hypersonic missiles. If it’s top speed was Mach 10 at 80,000ft, well it’s target is at sea level, and that means it ain’t doing no Mach 10 at sea level. That means more time for defenders to react, more time for interceptors to launch and intercept.
• Lastly, there’s the issue of ionization. The enormous plasma field produced from flying at Mach 5+ blocks electromagnetic signals. This renders a hypersonic missile deaf and blind. We’ve already discussed how carriers are moving targets. So that means a hypersonic missile must reacquire the target independently, but it can hardly do that if plasma fire is blocking it from “seeing” anything. It can’t take mid-course corrections because radio communications are also blocked by the ionization fields. Sure, they can hit fixed targets, but not moving ones like carriers.

So, yes hypersonic missiles are dangerous, but don’t let the propagandists fool you. They aren’t as scary as they want you to believe.