As far as I know ICBMs are still unstoppable once out of the boost phase and are moving at mach 20 by the time they leave the territory of the launching nation. The good news is that hypersonic missiles don't put us in any more danger than we're already in. The bad news is that despite being worthless we'll probably still spend a couple trillion dollars on them.
>Actually no, there is lots of tech to stop ICBMs, in launch, orbital and re-entry phase.
what's the success rate on those? afaik they're irrelevant, at least to russia/us because you can evade them by simply launching enough missiles (you only need a few missiles to take out all major population centers).
Destroying their ability or willingness to make war. Doesn't need to be occupation, but if they can still fight, you haven't won yet. And destroying cities usually doesn't do much for stopping them from fighting. It mostly just makes them want to fight harder.
The US lost the Vietnam War because we lost the willingness to fight. We can't effectively end the Afghanistan war because we can neither keep them from fighting, nor keep them from wanting to fight.
The problem is launching enough missiles. Interceptors are expensive to develop, but cheap to make more of, and have relatively low cost of command and control (it doesn't matter if one gets launched by accident, right now). ICBMs are expensive to develop, expensive to make more of, and are expensive for command and control (because if one gets launched by accident, the world ends). So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs.
But beyond that, interceptors make the entire targeting situation more complex. If you've got 1000 warheads, and no defenses, you can hit 1000 targets (not actually true, because you have a certain amount of failure rate, but anyway). If you're facing 10 interceptors, and some of your targets must be destroyed, then you have to launch enough warheads at each target that must be destroyed to still go through even if all of them are intercepted. So now you have ~90 must destroy targets you can actually hit with your 1000 warheads, even though you're only facing 10 interceptors. Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.
>So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs.
What's the source for this? Because I've also heard the opposite. Also, given that interceptors have to travel faster and more accurate than warhead ICBMs, you'd think they're more expensive to develop and have a higher unit cost.
>Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.
* The calculation you presented only really makes sense for very high intercept success rates. If the intercept rate is (conservatively) 80%, if the enemy sends 10 missiles, and you use all 10 interceptors on each, there's still a 91% chance of at least one missile coming through (1-0.8^10). The odds get better if you have double the number of interceptors (34%), but it's still unacceptably high. You'd need overwhelmingly more interceptors.
* I doubt there's 90 "must destroy" targets. If you spend all your interceptors protecting one target, even if that survives, your country is still utterly devastated that there's 0 hope of a counter attack. Does it really matter that washington, DC survived but the rest of the us is reduced to rubble?
The price for aircraft and spacecraft is almost entirely related to how much it weighs. A missile that's 10x heavier is going to be 10x more expensive, generally speaking, for a given nation. GBI is approximately 21 tons. A Minuteman III is approximately 33 tons.
But you exclaim "The warheads are different!" It's hard to find the price, but an EKV is somewhere on the order of $20 million each. The W87-1 will cost somewhere between $8.6 and $14 billion for the entire program... not including the fissile pits that are being reused. This is still more per warhead than the EKV.
Yes, the interceptors have to be more accurate, but they also use entirely different guidance systems. They don't actually have to travel faster, because they just have to be in the same place at the same time as the target, and the target can't really do anything to stop them.
The problem with your statistical approach is that there's a chance that the target survives. And these are defined as must destroy targets. Places like launch control centers for ICBMs, Cheyenne Mountain for command control. Places you need to destroy to avoid them turning your own cities into self-lit parking lots. Because you aren't going to start a nuclear war to have a Pyrrhic victory.
Because the point of the US nuclear deterrent is to turn you into a self-lit parking lot, on demand, in thirty minutes or less. And by making sure we can do that, we keep other countries from thinking that they can start using WMDs. Does it really matter that you destroyed Washington DC if you no longer have a country? The biggest advantage of interceptors is not that you saved a city that was targeted. Rather, you made the opposition make a choice on what would actually get targeted. A city blown up by 3 nukes isn't much different from one blown up by 1, but it's significantly different from a city blown up by zero.
Example: back when the UK used V-bombers, they had 200 warheads targeted across the USSR. As Soviet defenses got better, the number of targets being hit was reduced. By the end of the Polaris program, all of the UK's warheads were targeted on Moscow.
And I'd be surprised if there's only 90 must destroy targets in the US. Not that Russia has 1000 warheads, but the US also doesn't have 10 interceptors, because it was example numbers to make the math easy.
This is generally incorrect in several different ways. ICBMs are not invulnerable after their boost phase and ballistic missile defense continues to improve rapidly. The U.S. operates a small number of mid-course interceptors as part of the GMD system[1] to defend against small scale attacks from states such as North Korea. The low number of interceptors does not upset the balance of power with any larger nuclear states but that may change in the near future. The U.S. has been pursuing a new kill vehicle for its interceptors to replace the current EKV[2]. The MOKV was based on an earlier program to put multiple kill vehicles on a single rocket[3]. This would allow for a single rocket to potentially intercept up to 6 incoming warheads. What's more, this interceptor could be fitted to the SM-3 anti-ballistic missile missile used by the navy, massively increasing the total number of possible interceptors. Hypersonic missiles do not follow a predictable trajectory and fly much lower than ballistic missiles making their detection and engagement extremely difficult. Detection is actually the larger of the two issues. From the time a nuclear armed hypersonic missile is detected to the time it impacts could be fewer than 5 minutes. Far far less than the ~30 minutes of warning you get for ballistic missiles. This timeframe is too short for a proper chain of command and massively increases the risk of mistakes being made. It also incentivizes first strikes. Unfortunately, any nation that does not have this capability is at a massive disadvantage when confronted by a nation that does. Even if not used for nuclear strikes, hypersonics have the ability to destroy key, heavily defended targets with essentially no notice. This will likely make them extremely important for future engagements, especially naval ones. The U.S. has a large and very well defended navy which is key to its military strategy. China and Russia's focus on hypersonics is no coincidence.
I don’t see the MAD principle changing in light of these new weapons. The major players will still rely on it, but to ensure they can hold ip their end of the “deal” I expect we’ll see a lot more submarine based IBCMs. Compensating for any early knockout of ground missiles like minutemen etc.
To fully neuter MAD you would need to be 100% sure and then some that you got everything that the enemy had. Even a single missile getting through would be mean multiple warheads get deployed. That's too high a price to pay. And I am fairly certain that the decision to launch would not be obeyed without resistance.
I guess that would change when underwater drones can be mass produced to such a degree that they could detect and hunt down all nuclear subs within strike distance almost instantly. It's unclear to me whether that's even realistic based on raw materials required.
MAD isn't a principle. It's an effect. The actual principle is Assured Destruction. It's just that everyone else also follows the same principle: we want to be sure of being able to destroy our enemies.
We might also see airborne alerts resume (bombers flying around with nukes ready to avoid being caught on the ground)
I have studied the Cold War and SDI ("Star Wars".)
Russian and US leaders thought that MAD was idiotic - that defending your country against your adversaries was of the highest importance, not retaliating after your capital was in ashes.
That was the motivation for the Moscow ABM ring (still exists) and SDI (the ABM part worked, the lasers didn't.)
MAD is for policy wonks and technocrats, and is not what leaders rely on.
If anyone is interested in what could happen during an actual nuclear war, I’m reading a novel on the subject called Arc Light by Eric L Harry.
It’s quite good so far. Weirdly terrifying, given that the action and writing is so clinical. So far it’s just fairly plain events. No drama or tears. And yet... terrifying and somehow moving.
So I was thirteen, and living in England when that came out. They advertised it on TV with the shot of the woman pissing herself in the middle of the high street. I was really, quite concerned about nuclear war for really quite some time.
I was twenties. The era government sent everyone the "Protect and Survive" leaflet and showed the public information films, Threads gave everyone nightmares. It stuck with you, unforgettable, people were talking about it for ages after.
The grimmest, bleakest TV ever made. Quite remarkable considering it obviously had a budget of pennies. Yet I'd also highly recommend it.
"The Day After" is a schmaltzy Hollywood feel-good family movie in comparison.
I remember watching Threads for the first time. It is the most hardest hitting movie I have ever seen. I could barely will myself to get out of bed the next day after I watched it the first time. A shocking, shocking but brilliant depiction.
"The weapons could even suddenly pierce the steel decks of one of America's 11 multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers, instantly stopping flight operations, a vulnerability that might eventually render the floating behemoths obsolete."
In a real shooting war they are very vulnerable high value targets which exist more for the egos of the upper ranks than for usefulness in combat. They work to intimidate adversaries and defeat much less capable opponents, but are too easily destroyed when coming up against a competent military.
You need to control the airspace to be successful in war and in order to do that you need to be able to project your power across seas so that the fight is on their doorstep not ours. The carriers are there to make sure that if someone wants to cross the ocean with ill intent, they can deny them the airspace far out at sea making them struggle to even get to the country they seek to attack. The US always prefers to play an away game.
Also, don't forget carriers are never alone and surrounded by multiple aegis guided missile cruisers which are the most accurate missile defense systems in existence.
I think against China or Russia the carriers will be destroyed quite quickly. Against an inferior army like Iran, they will be okay.
The purpose of aircraft carriers are more often to launch attacks against inferior nations or highly inferior subnational entities so they are useful there.
Yea, a lot of people underestimate the speed at which a carrier can move. So much so that it would be outside the blast radius of any ICMB targeted at the carriers last known position when the missile is launched. Most ICBMs cant change trajectory mid-flight.
Actually yea it can because the more re-entry vehicles you use the smaller the blast radius of each will be. the fireball radius of the largest current US-made warhead is only .71km at 455kt on the Trident missile (W-88). It carries 12 re-entry vehicles which could blanket approximately a 3sq km zone. An aircraft carrier can move at approximately 1km per minute. so you have approximately 90 seconds to launch and hit the target with one of the US's best weapons.
You can't use regular photons to detect one because that requires getting in a plane and going out to find them. You're an even bigger sitting duck in a plane in the air than the carrier is sitting on the water. Radar will find you and interceptors will destroy you before you get close enough to see their exact position. You using a plane and radar runs into the same issue.
If you sit on the shore and use active radar tracking then you're leaving yourself open to decoy ops and EM countermeasures.
Satellites don't loiter over the area long enough to get a tracking lock. Ships can take evasive maneuvers and US Navy ships move very fast.
It is still pretty difficult [1]. The sheer scale of the oceans is not appreciated by many. We can accept that space is vast beyond normal comprehension, but finding ships or even carrier strike fleets in the oceans is still a non-trivial challenge. Even at hypersonic speeds, traversing the range of a missile is measured in above ten minutes ranges. Tracking all commercial traffic shows how vast the oceans are [2], as each of those dots on a map cover a territory far vaster than the ship itself. It is a sufficiently non-trivial problem that commercial tracking relies upon AIS transponders instead of imaging, even in dense commercial traffic areas like the Straits of Malacca or the Bosphorus.
Whoever solves the problem will first become very rich from defense contracts.
Long range hypersonic/cruise missiles with micronucleaer warheads. They have them demoing right now, they'll eventually work out the bugs.
That said, it's all armchair because a) We don't know what they really have b) we don't know what kind of amazing gear the US has hidden away or c) how any of it will really hold up in a war.
None of it has been tested.
So maybe the Russians launch a bunch of newfangled missiles and they basically don't find their target. Maybe they all do.
Maybe the Russian s300's totally wipe out F22s, or maybe it's a mirage and they are irrelevant. So many factors: training, conditions, countermeasures, sabotage, overwhelming force etc. etc..
Maybe the vast number of crappy Chinese subs overwhelm the US navy over there. Maybe the US has a combination of tech+procedure that makes all of those little diesel subs pointless. Or maybe they only need 1 or 2 to 'get through'.
My bet is that the Carriers are vulnerable, that Russia and China don't really have the ability to project much outside their nations (though Taiwan and HK are close), that the Americans will move around the world with impunity in a hot situation, except right in the vicinity of Russia/China where it would be a mess because they are both smart nations with 'good enough' gear, and China has a zillion bodies to throw at any problem.
This comment is being downvoted to grey, but it seems completely in line with TFA. If we acknowledge that “unstoppable” missiles exist, and that aircraft carriers are high value, doesn’t that imply they will be the first to go in an actual war?
You're assuming that finding the handful of "high-value" aircraft carriers you want to target is easy, whilst it very much isn't. If that becomes the bottleneck, there are lots of possible defenses.
Great Powers can hit while they still have their satellites. But in a real hot war, there will be a race to take those satellites all out as well.
In a real hot war between Great Powers, the ability to destroy will be quite huge, especially against strategic targets, compared to defense abilities.
Just because they are vulnerable in an all out war doesn't mean they are not useful. After all something like 12 USN carriers were sunk in WWII but every military historians would agree they were pivotal in winning the war in the pacific.
It is widely acknowledged in war-fighting circles that America's aircraft careers are only useful in policing actions - i.e. to be used as a threat of war, and not actually of any use in conditions of total war, since they are big, fat, slow moving high-value targets that can easily be taken out with widely deployed missiles designed for the job - i.e. the P-270 MOSKIT (SS-N-22 Sunburn) missiles, which Russia developed specifically to counter the threat.
Americans don't like to be told this, nor will they work to understand it beyond a glib "America, Fuck yeah!" style response, but the American naval surface fleet is probably one of the first casualties in an all-out war. The MOSKIT is deployed specifically to target these carriers, and there is - so far - no defence against them. Laser-based defences are being developed to defend against the threat, but are not widely deployed across the fleet.
America will lose its carriers in the first minutes of all-out war.
How proven and tested is the phalanx and similar against "real" Carrier killers? Hell, even the iron dome isn't super reliable. Compare the price of one carrier to 100 ship killing missiles.
That's a remarkable story. Wiki says there's a 2004 documentary about it called The Perfect War. Unfortunately the relevant reference (6) is dead, and I can't find even a mention of this documentary outside the wiki article. I'd love to see it.
No.
The Millennium Challenge is typically cited as an example of a badly botched exercise rather than a real world defeat scenario.
It had:
Navy ships constrained to small areas to prevent disruption to commercial craft which would never be the case in an actual war
Small boats firing simulated cruise missiles weighing significantly more than the entire boats supposedly carrying them.
Motorcycle based messengers "simulated" by just using radios except no one bothered to add any kind of message delay or any other kind of constraint a motorcycle messenger might have compared to radio communication.
USN ships in the simulation teleporting into the center of a massive armada of simulated small boats due to a modeling error
All ship defenses being turned off during the engagement resulting from said error because everything was in the wrong place.
None of the USN ships even knowing that they were supposedly under attack until the "battle" was over.
Ships being "re-floated" as a result of the above screw up
It's generally unwise to try to draw any conclusions at all, positive or negative, based on its results. Also, there's a reason countries all over the world continue to build aircraft carriers. It's because they're useful. A carrier group essentially controls a moving sphere of territory with a radius of around 500nmi. Being able to launch dedicated AWACS[1] allows for far superior battlefield awareness compared to any other naval asset and air launched anti-ship missiles allow for striking range far greater than any other naval asset. Carrier groups are also a lot harder to find than you might think. Nuclear powered carriers are fast, faster than almost any other ships, and don't stay in one place. Keeping tabs on them is difficult, even if you have satellites. In the open ocean they're very difficult to confront because they will almost know more about the locations of opposing forces than the opposing forces know about their location thanks to real time aerial recon. The horizon is as far as radars can usually see and if you're in a plane that horizon is much further away. Carriers are not going away any time soon. They provide far too much utility which is not offered by any other kind of ship.
Quiet subs are essentially mobile minefields. If the battlegroup runs over it, yeah, it's going to have a bad day. But it's unlikely to do so unless you have some chokepoint to make the battlegroup run over it. And that's the thing with the exercises where it's been useful: it's been in relatively small areas, so they can just sit and wait for the carrier to come by.
You could make the case that ICBMs make conventional armies obsolete, and I would guess many people in the 50s/60s did.
In a similar vein, videoconferencing, email, telephones should make international business travel obsolete. That shows no sign of happening either. I guess because humans react differently to things that are right in front of them, rather than remote and hypothetical.
Climate catastrophe, overpopulation, resources running out (especially water), species being wiped out to the point where it will actually affect us, the end of antibiotics, large areas becoming uninhabitable...
I wonder what happens to mutually assured destruction when the world is guaranteed a number of huge wars over resources?
Wouldn't "water running out" be the result of financial resource allocation failure (towards energy production and desalination) caused by politics, rather than the lack of resources per se?
No individual is responsible for things like this (if only!). This is a systems-level failure. It's only going to get worse; our short-term incentives are all wrong and our systems are set up to favor short-term thinking. Anyone with "power" who attempts to go against the existing incentives will be shut down. You need a mass movement supporting some real visionaries who are capable of solving the underlying systemic issues before there will be any real movement towards change. Unfortunately this takes time, and we may be out of time.
radar arrays and space or ground lasers, etc. but essentially lasers.
but a new age of war will be upon us. When all of the weapons get used up and the factories making them destroyed, and the radar installations and satellites fried with EMP's, then again it will be up to 17 year-olds fighting the fat man's war.
Missile interceptions with lasers isn't easy, and if you have two working lasers for interception, the adversary can always try firing four missiles at once.
This is pretty ignorant of the capabilities of the nuclear triad.
At some point, any missile defense system is going to have to estimate damage and pick some targets, but leave others. When there are multiple vehicles,.you're pretty much fucked.
The idea that a missile defense system can prevent full-on nuclear warfare is false. It's meant for one-off strike deterence, not for full on war.
If you don't stop a nuclear launch vehicle when it's on the ground or very shortly after launch, your chances at stopping it are slim.
They will not. The usual threat is this: A russian sub with a few Granit warheads shoots some from outside of Washington DC or LA or NY. They are too fast to be interceptable, too heavy and the reaction time is too low to react in any meaningful way. That's how the cold war and the space shield stopped being a threat.
And as it happened someone already did shoot the Pentagon for a little warning message. That's the most likely explanation. But most likely not Russia, just one of their hypersonic nuclear missiles probably from the Kursk, without the warhead.
They can only reach that speed during boost (3-5 mins) and reentry (2 mins). The remainder of the time (25 mins or so of suborbital flight) is very detectable.
The issue with hypersonic weapons is that they can fly low enough to be undetectable, and fast enough to reach their target before anyone knows what happened. That's enough to make any nation feel insecure and vulnerable and trigger happy.
We've had submarine nukes for a while too, they aren't really detectable until it's too late. They can also be blown up off shore to cause a megatsunami and wipe out the whole city.
Doesn't all of this mean that we're nearing the limits of kinetic-energy based weapons and are on the cusp of a new age of laser weapons? I mean, sure - these missiles are hard to hit, but I'm guessing that something moving at the speed of light is going to trump it, easily ..
There exists a metastable isotope of hafnium which is able to undergo stimulated emission, producing gamma ray laser light. There was some controversy of wheter x-rays could also stimulate this emission but that isn't a prerequisite for light amplificafion in this case.
Gamma ray optics is difficult because of the short wavelengths but refraction has been demonstrated at very oblique angles. Fiber optics also has very oblique angles for its total internal reflection. Doped fiber lasers is a well-know field with lots of industrial application.
Producing metastable hafnium can be done with e.g. a cyclotron. It is not very efficient, but for an extreme existential threat it is probably not insurmountable. Hafnium produced in this way could be used a nuclear bomb which isn't actually regulated by treaties, so there is even more controversy to navigate than just that from academia. There is no neutron flux between nuclei. All the energy is stored in the metastable structure inside the nuclei.
Unlike regular fiber lasers there would be no pumping once the fiber is installed. Instead it would come pre-charged and be single-use. Its shelf-life isn't indefinite.
"Meanwhile, in the late-twentieth-century phase of the arms race, the role of unpredictable chance increased. When hours (or days) and miles (or hundreds of miles) separate defeat from victory, and therefore an error of command can be remedied by throwing in reserves, or retreating, or counterattacking, then there is room to reduce the element of chance. But when micromillimeters and nanoseconds determine the outcome, then chance enters like a god of war, deciding victory or defeat; it is magnified and lifted out of the microscopic scale of atomic physics. The fastest, best weapons system comes up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which nothing can overcome, because that principle is a basic property of matter in the Universe. It need not be a computer breakdown in satellite reconnaissance or in missiles whose warheads parry defenses with laser beams; if a series of electronic defensive impulses is even a billionth of a second slow in meeting a similar series of offensive impulses, that is enough for a toss of the dice to decide the outcome of the Final Encounter.
Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid.
How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle.
Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid.
How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle.
Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an indu...
This is the reason that the next generation of close-range active intercept technologies that have been undergoing testing for many years now in the US are (1) hyperkinetic and (2) have a detection-to-engage latency measured in tens of milliseconds. Even if you are moving at hypersonic velocities, closing several kilometers is a lifetime compared to the reaction speed of defensive systems with these properties. The US has been experimenting with and studying this particular defense problem for 30 years.
An interesting aspect of US military R&D is that whenever they design a new type of weapon system they concurrently start design of a defense against that type of weapon system. It creates a bit of an internal arms race but also keeps their defensive capability balanced with their offensive capability.
These aren't unstoppable. The key is early detection, and filling the approach path with as much debris as possible. The high relative velocity does the rest.
Hypersonic weapons are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they are incredibly fast. On the other, going fast highly constrains your trajectory. A predictable trajectory equals a defensible approach.
The difference with these hypersonic missiles over ballistic ones is they can manoeuvre at high G. Early detection is of limited use if the thing swerves away from where your debris is.
I had understood that regular missiles (such as ICBMs) are pretty much unstoppable too. There are some anti missile programs but publicly available test results are poor, even with extremely favorable test conditions.
The Iranian missile that shot down the US drone was of the hypersonic variety (though I’m pretty sure just about any modern SAM could shoot down a drone), so people are more interested than previously.
ICBM intercept has been a solved problem for (at least) a quarter century in the US, the core capability is quite reliable. The practical gaps show up in two tangential areas: upgrading systems designed for anti-aircraft applications to also intercept ballistic missiles and enabling kinetic intercept on hypersonic rocket platforms.
The first case, which includes examples like the Patriot missile system, are making missile systems do something they were never designed to do. You can only modify them so far but it is cheaper to modify them than to design an entirely new system, if you can make it work. In practice though, many of these are being slated for replacement as it was a stopgap measure.
The second case is more interesting. Conventional missile motors designed for ballistic intercept can consistently hit the target. But they are too slow to close the distance to the target, allowing the inbound missile to get closer than the military would like. Hyperkinetic interceptors can close the target very quickly, but the materials performance envelope required does not play well with precise terminal guidance systems due to ablation of the missile as it transits the atmosphere. Basically, the necessary precision of control could not be delivered over the entire flight time due to materials degradation. (This is related to why incoming hypersonic missiles have limited maneuverability -- maneuvering destroys the structural integrity of the materials it is made from.) The US appears to have solved the problem of hyperkinetic intercept of hypersonic targets in recent years.
I think what confuses people is that the tests of new systems are only designed to test the things that currently don't work well. They know they can reliably discriminate decoys and do kinetic intercept, that is proven capability and doesn't need to be tested. What they need to test is things like precision terminal guidance when attached to one of these newfangled hyperkinetic rocket motors that ablates itself mid-flight, which turned out to be a much more difficult challenge.
>ICBM intercept has been a solved problem for (at least) a quarter century in the US, the core capability is quite reliable.
This is a bold claim (one might say absurdly bold) that demands extensive support if you don’t want readers to dismiss your commentary completely. Let’s start from here: the problem solution can only be inferred from tests, because no ICBMs have ever been launched at a target.
Those tests must have provided overwhelming confidence for the real world scenario. So how are those test result?
It's generally best to assume that articles like this happened because the companies involved contacted the reporters. I'd note that this article has both a product photo at the top, and a sales pitch in the headline ("hypersonic missiles are unstoppable").
the flurry of articles about 'hypersonics' have me questioning the nature of the propoganda value of these articles, regardless of any discussion on the substance of how 'true' the existence of these technologies is claimed to be.
really, first strike in a 'nuclear war' is nothing because it's unlikely.
the real thing you should be worried about is how these wespons change the calculus of those who don't have them or have ways to detect them, when dealing with the superpowers that have them.....
that , and drone delivered bioweapons being used to genocide the third world. that's what's more likely to be used , and that's what you should be thinking about.
the endless stream of propogated media coverage on hypersonics has a reason. and that has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of 'hypersonics'
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[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadHypersonic flight basically avoids all the weaknesses exploited by this older anti-ICBM tech.
what's the success rate on those? afaik they're irrelevant, at least to russia/us because you can evade them by simply launching enough missiles (you only need a few missiles to take out all major population centers).
But the story of nuclear war is a bit more complicated than that. Sadly, city destruction doesn't usually fall into core considerations of win/loss.
What does? Acts of occupation?
The US lost the Vietnam War because we lost the willingness to fight. We can't effectively end the Afghanistan war because we can neither keep them from fighting, nor keep them from wanting to fight.
But beyond that, interceptors make the entire targeting situation more complex. If you've got 1000 warheads, and no defenses, you can hit 1000 targets (not actually true, because you have a certain amount of failure rate, but anyway). If you're facing 10 interceptors, and some of your targets must be destroyed, then you have to launch enough warheads at each target that must be destroyed to still go through even if all of them are intercepted. So now you have ~90 must destroy targets you can actually hit with your 1000 warheads, even though you're only facing 10 interceptors. Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.
What's the source for this? Because I've also heard the opposite. Also, given that interceptors have to travel faster and more accurate than warhead ICBMs, you'd think they're more expensive to develop and have a higher unit cost.
>Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.
* The calculation you presented only really makes sense for very high intercept success rates. If the intercept rate is (conservatively) 80%, if the enemy sends 10 missiles, and you use all 10 interceptors on each, there's still a 91% chance of at least one missile coming through (1-0.8^10). The odds get better if you have double the number of interceptors (34%), but it's still unacceptably high. You'd need overwhelmingly more interceptors.
* I doubt there's 90 "must destroy" targets. If you spend all your interceptors protecting one target, even if that survives, your country is still utterly devastated that there's 0 hope of a counter attack. Does it really matter that washington, DC survived but the rest of the us is reduced to rubble?
But you exclaim "The warheads are different!" It's hard to find the price, but an EKV is somewhere on the order of $20 million each. The W87-1 will cost somewhere between $8.6 and $14 billion for the entire program... not including the fissile pits that are being reused. This is still more per warhead than the EKV.
Yes, the interceptors have to be more accurate, but they also use entirely different guidance systems. They don't actually have to travel faster, because they just have to be in the same place at the same time as the target, and the target can't really do anything to stop them.
The problem with your statistical approach is that there's a chance that the target survives. And these are defined as must destroy targets. Places like launch control centers for ICBMs, Cheyenne Mountain for command control. Places you need to destroy to avoid them turning your own cities into self-lit parking lots. Because you aren't going to start a nuclear war to have a Pyrrhic victory.
Because the point of the US nuclear deterrent is to turn you into a self-lit parking lot, on demand, in thirty minutes or less. And by making sure we can do that, we keep other countries from thinking that they can start using WMDs. Does it really matter that you destroyed Washington DC if you no longer have a country? The biggest advantage of interceptors is not that you saved a city that was targeted. Rather, you made the opposition make a choice on what would actually get targeted. A city blown up by 3 nukes isn't much different from one blown up by 1, but it's significantly different from a city blown up by zero.
Example: back when the UK used V-bombers, they had 200 warheads targeted across the USSR. As Soviet defenses got better, the number of targets being hit was reduced. By the end of the Polaris program, all of the UK's warheads were targeted on Moscow.
And I'd be surprised if there's only 90 must destroy targets in the US. Not that Russia has 1000 warheads, but the US also doesn't have 10 interceptors, because it was example numbers to make the math easy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Kill_Vehicle
To fully neuter MAD you would need to be 100% sure and then some that you got everything that the enemy had. Even a single missile getting through would be mean multiple warheads get deployed. That's too high a price to pay. And I am fairly certain that the decision to launch would not be obeyed without resistance.
We might also see airborne alerts resume (bombers flying around with nukes ready to avoid being caught on the ground)
Russian and US leaders thought that MAD was idiotic - that defending your country against your adversaries was of the highest importance, not retaliating after your capital was in ashes.
That was the motivation for the Moscow ABM ring (still exists) and SDI (the ABM part worked, the lasers didn't.)
MAD is for policy wonks and technocrats, and is not what leaders rely on.
It’s quite good so far. Weirdly terrifying, given that the action and writing is so clinical. So far it’s just fairly plain events. No drama or tears. And yet... terrifying and somehow moving.
There's also an interesting, realistic simulation of how a conflict betweeen Russia and NATO might start.[2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0D3A5dnAqg
The grimmest, bleakest TV ever made. Quite remarkable considering it obviously had a budget of pennies. Yet I'd also highly recommend it.
"The Day After" is a schmaltzy Hollywood feel-good family movie in comparison.
Aren't they already obsolete?
Also, don't forget carriers are never alone and surrounded by multiple aegis guided missile cruisers which are the most accurate missile defense systems in existence.
The purpose of aircraft carriers are more often to launch attacks against inferior nations or highly inferior subnational entities so they are useful there.
If you sit on the shore and use active radar tracking then you're leaving yourself open to decoy ops and EM countermeasures.
Satellites don't loiter over the area long enough to get a tracking lock. Ships can take evasive maneuvers and US Navy ships move very fast.
Whoever solves the problem will first become very rich from defense contracts.
[1] http://theconversation.com/hundreds-of-ships-go-missing-each...
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/this-map-shows-every-...
That said, it's all armchair because a) We don't know what they really have b) we don't know what kind of amazing gear the US has hidden away or c) how any of it will really hold up in a war.
None of it has been tested.
So maybe the Russians launch a bunch of newfangled missiles and they basically don't find their target. Maybe they all do.
Maybe the Russian s300's totally wipe out F22s, or maybe it's a mirage and they are irrelevant. So many factors: training, conditions, countermeasures, sabotage, overwhelming force etc. etc..
Maybe the vast number of crappy Chinese subs overwhelm the US navy over there. Maybe the US has a combination of tech+procedure that makes all of those little diesel subs pointless. Or maybe they only need 1 or 2 to 'get through'.
My bet is that the Carriers are vulnerable, that Russia and China don't really have the ability to project much outside their nations (though Taiwan and HK are close), that the Americans will move around the world with impunity in a hot situation, except right in the vicinity of Russia/China where it would be a mess because they are both smart nations with 'good enough' gear, and China has a zillion bodies to throw at any problem.
In a real hot war between Great Powers, the ability to destroy will be quite huge, especially against strategic targets, compared to defense abilities.
Americans don't like to be told this, nor will they work to understand it beyond a glib "America, Fuck yeah!" style response, but the American naval surface fleet is probably one of the first casualties in an all-out war. The MOSKIT is deployed specifically to target these carriers, and there is - so far - no defence against them. Laser-based defences are being developed to defend against the threat, but are not widely deployed across the fleet.
America will lose its carriers in the first minutes of all-out war.
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrier...
>RAM and CWIS
Yeah, jury is still out on the MOSKVIT survivability, but hey .. lets hope we never find out.
It had:
Navy ships constrained to small areas to prevent disruption to commercial craft which would never be the case in an actual war
Small boats firing simulated cruise missiles weighing significantly more than the entire boats supposedly carrying them.
Motorcycle based messengers "simulated" by just using radios except no one bothered to add any kind of message delay or any other kind of constraint a motorcycle messenger might have compared to radio communication.
USN ships in the simulation teleporting into the center of a massive armada of simulated small boats due to a modeling error
All ship defenses being turned off during the engagement resulting from said error because everything was in the wrong place.
None of the USN ships even knowing that they were supposedly under attack until the "battle" was over.
Ships being "re-floated" as a result of the above screw up
It's generally unwise to try to draw any conclusions at all, positive or negative, based on its results. Also, there's a reason countries all over the world continue to build aircraft carriers. It's because they're useful. A carrier group essentially controls a moving sphere of territory with a radius of around 500nmi. Being able to launch dedicated AWACS[1] allows for far superior battlefield awareness compared to any other naval asset and air launched anti-ship missiles allow for striking range far greater than any other naval asset. Carrier groups are also a lot harder to find than you might think. Nuclear powered carriers are fast, faster than almost any other ships, and don't stay in one place. Keeping tabs on them is difficult, even if you have satellites. In the open ocean they're very difficult to confront because they will almost know more about the locations of opposing forces than the opposing forces know about their location thanks to real time aerial recon. The horizon is as far as radars can usually see and if you're in a plane that horizon is much further away. Carriers are not going away any time soon. They provide far too much utility which is not offered by any other kind of ship.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye
https://web.archive.org/web/20071116120858/http://www.knbc.c...
You could make the case that ICBMs make conventional armies obsolete, and I would guess many people in the 50s/60s did.
In a similar vein, videoconferencing, email, telephones should make international business travel obsolete. That shows no sign of happening either. I guess because humans react differently to things that are right in front of them, rather than remote and hypothetical.
Yes. http://www.johntreed.net/sittingducks.html
Rather, show us what the world specifically needs.
I wonder what happens to mutually assured destruction when the world is guaranteed a number of huge wars over resources?
Maybe some rich people will make it out alive by moving to mars for a while.
radar arrays and space or ground lasers, etc. but essentially lasers.
but a new age of war will be upon us. When all of the weapons get used up and the factories making them destroyed, and the radar installations and satellites fried with EMP's, then again it will be up to 17 year-olds fighting the fat man's war.
Missile interceptions with lasers isn't easy, and if you have two working lasers for interception, the adversary can always try firing four missiles at once.
At some point, any missile defense system is going to have to estimate damage and pick some targets, but leave others. When there are multiple vehicles,.you're pretty much fucked.
The idea that a missile defense system can prevent full-on nuclear warfare is false. It's meant for one-off strike deterence, not for full on war.
If you don't stop a nuclear launch vehicle when it's on the ground or very shortly after launch, your chances at stopping it are slim.
And as it happened someone already did shoot the Pentagon for a little warning message. That's the most likely explanation. But most likely not Russia, just one of their hypersonic nuclear missiles probably from the Kursk, without the warhead.
The issue with hypersonic weapons is that they can fly low enough to be undetectable, and fast enough to reach their target before anyone knows what happened. That's enough to make any nation feel insecure and vulnerable and trigger happy.
There exists a metastable isotope of hafnium which is able to undergo stimulated emission, producing gamma ray laser light. There was some controversy of wheter x-rays could also stimulate this emission but that isn't a prerequisite for light amplificafion in this case.
Gamma ray optics is difficult because of the short wavelengths but refraction has been demonstrated at very oblique angles. Fiber optics also has very oblique angles for its total internal reflection. Doped fiber lasers is a well-know field with lots of industrial application.
Producing metastable hafnium can be done with e.g. a cyclotron. It is not very efficient, but for an extreme existential threat it is probably not insurmountable. Hafnium produced in this way could be used a nuclear bomb which isn't actually regulated by treaties, so there is even more controversy to navigate than just that from academia. There is no neutron flux between nuclei. All the energy is stored in the metastable structure inside the nuclei.
Unlike regular fiber lasers there would be no pumping once the fiber is installed. Instead it would come pre-charged and be single-use. Its shelf-life isn't indefinite.
Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an indu...
An interesting aspect of US military R&D is that whenever they design a new type of weapon system they concurrently start design of a defense against that type of weapon system. It creates a bit of an internal arms race but also keeps their defensive capability balanced with their offensive capability.
Hypersonic weapons are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they are incredibly fast. On the other, going fast highly constrains your trajectory. A predictable trajectory equals a defensible approach.
Why is this topic in the news right now?
The first case, which includes examples like the Patriot missile system, are making missile systems do something they were never designed to do. You can only modify them so far but it is cheaper to modify them than to design an entirely new system, if you can make it work. In practice though, many of these are being slated for replacement as it was a stopgap measure.
The second case is more interesting. Conventional missile motors designed for ballistic intercept can consistently hit the target. But they are too slow to close the distance to the target, allowing the inbound missile to get closer than the military would like. Hyperkinetic interceptors can close the target very quickly, but the materials performance envelope required does not play well with precise terminal guidance systems due to ablation of the missile as it transits the atmosphere. Basically, the necessary precision of control could not be delivered over the entire flight time due to materials degradation. (This is related to why incoming hypersonic missiles have limited maneuverability -- maneuvering destroys the structural integrity of the materials it is made from.) The US appears to have solved the problem of hyperkinetic intercept of hypersonic targets in recent years.
I think what confuses people is that the tests of new systems are only designed to test the things that currently don't work well. They know they can reliably discriminate decoys and do kinetic intercept, that is proven capability and doesn't need to be tested. What they need to test is things like precision terminal guidance when attached to one of these newfangled hyperkinetic rocket motors that ablates itself mid-flight, which turned out to be a much more difficult challenge.
This is a bold claim (one might say absurdly bold) that demands extensive support if you don’t want readers to dismiss your commentary completely. Let’s start from here: the problem solution can only be inferred from tests, because no ICBMs have ever been launched at a target.
Those tests must have provided overwhelming confidence for the real world scenario. So how are those test result?
It's generally best to assume that articles like this happened because the companies involved contacted the reporters. I'd note that this article has both a product photo at the top, and a sales pitch in the headline ("hypersonic missiles are unstoppable").
really, first strike in a 'nuclear war' is nothing because it's unlikely.
the real thing you should be worried about is how these wespons change the calculus of those who don't have them or have ways to detect them, when dealing with the superpowers that have them.....
that , and drone delivered bioweapons being used to genocide the third world. that's what's more likely to be used , and that's what you should be thinking about.
the endless stream of propogated media coverage on hypersonics has a reason. and that has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of 'hypersonics'