Recent American military interest in hypersonic missiles definitely feels like a case of "Russia and China are playing with these, we want to play with one too".
There's logic to the idea that, if your adversaries are suddenly interested in something, it is probably worth your time to make sure you're not missing anything.
Of course, there's also logic to generating red herrings to waste your adversaries' resources, and the US has done that to others.
Their logic is known though, and it's simply to deliver nukes in the face of American ballistic missile defence (BMD) systems. The US doesn't face any BMD to defeat, so they just want hypersonics because the others have them. And with the heating mentioned in the text being such that you can't put any good sensing into them, a hypersonic without a nuke is simply a very fast missile that almost always misses its target.
>I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be... increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow... a mine shaft gap!
This was a big upgrade on the original Pershing missile that kept the same launcher but was competitive with the Soviet SS-20 that weighed three times as much because it had an autonomous guidance that could directly impact a target even when the mobile launcher was at an unsurveyed location.
This is not advanced or exotic technology for a missile with the P II's range, you don't need exotic materials (that little dome on the bottom is a radar antenna, not a heat shield) and it can get 25 g acceleration with those little fins that you might not notice if you don't look carefully. Thus it is something third-world countries can field if they want to.
That kind of missile can break unpredictably two or more times on reentry and thus confound anti-missile defenses of all kinds. The Russians had a nuclear-armed ABM system in the Moscow area at that time (and still do) and they found it intimidating.
That kind of nuclear-armed ABM might be able to fire a large number of shots and get lucky, but the kinetic kill systems that we use to protect our naval groups would be helpless against it.
That's why China is developing an anti-ship weapon with similar capabilities; instead of soaking up the inaccuracy of the launch point, the missile can handle the uncertainty of where a ship is going to be when the missile arrives.
With a nuclear warhead that kind of missile could obliterate an aircraft carrier -- but even with conventional warheads it could cause a lot of trouble, this is what a smaller ship looks like when it has been hit by 4 2000 lb conventional bombs
We also had the Mk.500 Evader and AMaRV programs, nuclear-armed SLBM and ICBM ballistic missile warheads designed specifically to evade missile defenses with nuclear warheads.
We didn't produce them because they weren't needed at that time against their near-term target sets, not because they didn't work.
That answers the question of how China benefits from a hypersonic missile program. It doesn't answer the question of how the US does. The US doesn't need to hold American aircraft carriers operating in East Asia at risk.
It seems likely that Russia and China will increase their naval capacity (Russia especially as the arctic melts fully due to global warming.) It makes sense to have this technology.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, as you're completely right. Though China's fleet is the 'pacing threat' more so than Russia's.
The single largest US Defense procurement goals is the ability to sink '400 ships in 48hours' as the key performance metric in a Taiwan defense scenario. [1]
The authors are career academics who get press by being 'contrarian'. The argument they make in their paper (that this editorial is based on) is fundamentally a straw man. They compare ballistic missiles trajectories to hypersonic trajectories and conclude 'ballistic is faster', while ignoring they key point that hypersonic weapons are *conventional in US force posture (i.e. non-nuclear) compared to ballistic weapons.
And they ignore that hypersonic trajectories are significantly harder to intercept, b/c of intercept timelines are governed by radar horizon issues and greater design cross range of hypersonic aerobodies.
The US must have some secret trump cards up their sleeves? How could they be so far ahead by the 1990's and now we in the situation it looks like we're in? They must've been investing and planning...
> merely evolutionary change that isn't worth the price
> These missiles are, in reality, an old technology with a massive price tag
Isn't that the entire point of the military–industrial complex ? (Or even capitalism in general) Come up with new products with various level of real world benefits, it doesn't matter as long as it keeps people busy and money flowing
The government's corrupt relationship with the military-industrial complex is about as far away from capitalism as you can get. It is corporatism. It is trillion+ dollar corporate benefit program for defense contractors. Big buying decisions are made by Congress mainly based on what they think is best for their reelection, not actual needs. Government has a monopoly on violence and the products are highly specialized so they are the only customer, which means there is no market in place.
With no market and only one customer that makes terrible decisions none of the mechanisms of capitalism would even have a chance to have an effect.
How do you call a system in which for profit private companies generate trillions of $ every year and come up with new products every few years to keep the machine going ?
Dick Jones [big exec at Omni Consumer Products talking about the ED 209 enforcement robot after it wastes a middle-ranking exec during a demo/presentation]:
I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!
I started my career in an aerospace parts company, what they made was fairly unique globally (and through various acquisitions they had no real domestic competition in the US, which guaranteed them many contracts). Many of my colleagues could not understand how the company was so well off when our products were being sold so cheap. I had to remind them that everything we made had a 5-10 year mandatory refresh cycle and no commercial, and few military, aircraft operators were going to manage that on their own (actually testing the LRUs and sensors, refurbing them, and replacing them). Everything came back to us for a guaranteed income stream over 20-100 years, depending on the expected life of the aircraft.
If you can swing a DOD or DOD-adjacent supply contract for an aircraft, you're probably set for life.
Isnt the US way behind on this tech tho? Also whatever is currently being developed would be top secret. How can IEEE know what they are talking about if their information is incomplete and out of date.
Cool video of the (hypersonic) Sprint anti-ballistic missile, designed to intercept incoming ICBMs once they get below the ionosphere and are more visible to radar:
Yes, David Wright, the guy who wrote that article, recycles the same opinion piece about how the Patriot Missile wasn't very effective in Gulf War I and never mentions that every part of that system has been upgraded 2 or 3 times since then.
Yeah, I guess you could argue that the SDI program wasn't a complete failure, just oversold, and did waste a lot of time and money pursuing ideas that never panned out.
Robert Jastrow wrote a book titled "How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete" and quite a bit of that happened with the application of cybernetics and advanced technology to war.
For instance there was the old doctrine of holding back a Russian invasion of Europe with small yield tactical neutron bombs. Then weapons like this were invented:
A stick of those dropped from a B-52 will do more damage to a tank division than a single 1kt warhead. Similar sorts of devices were demoed but not fielded for use on land (think of a vehicle that can fire and control hundreds of anti-tank missiles from concealment with no detectable radio signature made from off-the-shelf parts)
Progress on lasers has been steady like progress in semiconductors, sometimes I am shocked at how easy it is to buy a dangerous laser. There have been very good laser weapon demos since the 1990s the main practical problem has been moving away from dangerous chemistry to fiber laser modules that can be integrated with the rest of the weapon and duplicated to increase output. These are being fielded now against drones.
There are handheld anti-personnel lasers that will heat the outermost 1 mm of your clothes to 20,000 K which has an effect like a flash bang and also makes an electromagnetic pulse that directly stimulates pain sensations: it can knock you down (e.g. with the impact of expanding plasma) and discombobulate you pretty bad without causing much tissue damage.
Word of it got out and the fear that people would use it as a torture device shut it down.
If SDI failed at anything it was replacing the Space Shuttle.
SDI (Reagan "Star Wars") spent a great deal of money to little direct effect other than enormously enriching recipients, but freaked out the Soviet military to the point that they crashed the Soviet economy, resulting in the collapse of the USSR and ultimately the rise of Putin. It is hard to say whether it is an improvement, for us or for the citizens of the former SSRs.
I traveled to a semiconductor conference in Hungary on SDI money dispensed by US AFNOR. The paper was on migration of point defects in semiconductors. Defect research was of great interest to Soviets because their devices had a much higher concentration of them than the West's, and they hoped to make them work anyway.
Arguably the actual purpose was the enrichment, and crashing the Soviet economy an unpredicted result. Billionaires generated by the program, as by the Iraq invasion, have been reliable providers for corrupt politicians since.
There was also Sprint follow-on called LoAD (LoADS can be seen as well, note that this was a later program than Sentinel's LoADS...) that was designed to protect MX silos. That was similarly sporty.
The Russians have lots of neat videos of their A-135 Gazelles launching. Those still protect Moscow and the all-important Don-2N battle management radar — once and probably still a massive warhead sink in a nuclear exchange. Reportedly the 1989 SIOP called for 69 consecutive warheads on that DGZ.
What a frustrating article! Another case of 'no threat model security analysis'
Hypersonic missiles are the perfect anti-aircraft-carrier weapon. Thats why China and Russia have invested. It's a cheap counter to America's greatest strength.
That means the article is basically correct! It's a waste of money for the USA- we are not an underdog looking to counter a power that outspends us by trillions.
But the article is also completely backwards and wrong! In the USA we've run a near-austerity budget for decades to support an enormous war machine premised on aircraft carriers being important, and now that has been if not neutralized, severely nerfed.
Nope. Fissile material is relatively calm unless it's actually fissioned, which usually requires more than just shooting it. And the radiation it does emit won't penetrate skin.
Basically, don't eat, snort or attempt relations with it and you're probably fine.
Eh, not sure how the word "Russian" ended up in that comment. It was an American design before it was a Russian one.[1] Plus, there was an added feature in some American plans I've read about (but can't immediately locate) of long-term loitering over adversarial territory and discharge of radioactive material.
Presumably the choice of noting Russia here is because they are presently and actively suggesting they're going to field one of these soon, and are apparently developing the concept - whereas Project Pluto was the sort of standard fantastical deployment of nuclear technology popular in the 60s, subsequently discounted as being A Bad Idea.
Yeah, I thought the Russians did field a long-term-high-speed-loiter nuclear submarine drone in the last few years. My military-tech-enthusiast friends were all very worried and I'd be lying if I said none of it rubbed off.
This stuff could all be false flag on the US side.
We worked on this stuff for so long and have so much experience with ballistic missiles it's probably pointless as the article said.
For all anyone knows the X-37 is fully operational with orbital ballistic weapons that would greatly outclass hypersonic missiles. Weapons accelerated from orbit would be very fast, require way less energy, be smaller so it could be holding more of them than we realize, give a target far less warning & time to react.
All the research stuff could be a smokescreen. It's been hanging around in orbit for more than a decade cloaked in mystery.
They are also more visible, hypersonic missiles stay low so the curvature of the earth makes tracking and neutralizing them (missile defense) difficult and costly.
A weapon launched from space is hypersonic by definition, the X-37 itself travels at hypersonic speed all the time and moves faster than these missiles.
The X-37 is very hard to track because it can make dramatic orbit changes using the earth itself as cover and appear from a different direction.
It's all theoretical but a weapon like that launched from space is going to accelerate faster (it's already hypersonic when it comes off the rail) & generate less heat signature until it re-enteres the atmosphere.
And if carrier groups can be sunk by these missiles it would make way more sense to have them on a space platform or a submarine platform than on ships.
The X-37's very long missions suggest that it doesn't really have any uses, and these long missions are just to park it someplace where it looks less like it has just been mothballed.
What about hypersonic anti-ship missiles? I guess generally speaking, missiles against moving targets. Perhaps that's useful? US Navy sure seems concerned about those being deployed by China.
That said, ballistic missiles can actually maneuver quite a bit during the terminal.
Also, I always understood that the very impossibility of confusing them with ballistic missiles headed for Moscow was the decisive feature.
Article makes the case for exoatmospheric ballistic missiles as a superior technology based on lack of drag. For intercontinental ranges, the argument probably holds. For short and medium ranges, particularly air-to-ship and ship-to-ship, the advantage of hypersonic trajectories becomes apparent in that there is very little time from launch to impact and very little time for interception / countermeasures.
TLDR: This seems to be about boost-glide vehicles, where the real action is in really fast conventional missiles like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M22_Zircon.
Uhh so the author is saying that missiles designed to go faster will actually be slower because of drag? Is there a source on that claim or is it just speculation? I'm imagining someone at DARPA reading this and thinking, "Drag! Of course! That's why our missiles keep going so slow! If only we had thought of that!"
The drag argument is that ballistic missiles spend a fair amount of time above the atmosphere, and that hypersonic missiles don't. Such that in the end, the ballistic missiles get there faster.
That’s a great visual! Thanks for sharing. One thing to note from the article is these hypersonic weapons will generate insane amounts of heat which will show up on satellite imagery so they’re not as stealthy as that visual purports. Additionally, they’re powered by the same type of rocket boosters as an icbm so the same type of early launch detection system would still work to alert the moment a missile has been launched.
The article, though, doesn't mention that the arc trajectory of ballistic missiles means they are spotted faster.
But such missiles are nowadays - as far as I know - primarily detected via infrared from space and not radar stations near the target which turns the atmospheric trajectory into a disadvantage due to heating of the vehicle which is also mentioned in this article.
Hypersonic missiles are faster than cruise missiles but slower than ballistic missiles and confusing the two is a common mistake in the popular press when talking about how fast hypersonic missiles are.
In terms of ground speed, yes, but in terms of flight time, no. ICBMs are also easily identified and tracked compared to low flying cruise missiles. Hypersonic weapons are essentially shorter range cruise missiles. How do you defend against these? The narrative is that as long as nuclear weapons are prolific, anything that sidesteps deterrence is a threat to the species.
The good news is that this doesn't seem like it affects submarines significantly. So the defending nation should still have second-strike capability, making it unwise to initiate an attack.
Speaking of, imagine someone sending a satellite full of "ICBM" to space, covertly enough. How do you identify what it is? It's even harder than finding submarines if there's enough "chaff" launches. Dead Hand is a toy in comparison. You have no chance to intercept as the delay is too short and speeds are orbital. Better hope your spies know which satellites are weapon platforms.
Cruise missiles are already extremely hard to defend against, in as much as doing so requires the defender to identify all nearby ships, submarines, airplanes and other covert launch points. (ECM is not good enough, SAM also has no chance. Cannons and interceptors have low chance of spotting these as well.) Hypersonic version does not bring all that much to the table there, if anything.
They aren't designed to go faster than ballistic missiles, they are designed to go faster than cruise missiles, and just overall very fast for something moving in the atmosphere. On a space scale they aren't very fast, about a sixth of LEO orbital velocity.
Keeps comparing hypersonic missiles to ballistic. Concluding there is no benefit. But what about cruise missiles and air launched long range missiles?
Also assumes that all hypersonic weapons will use rocket engines. But that is exactly why interest is back, there are now air-breathing jets that power hypersonic missiles. Meaning range, maneuverability, size improve compared to rockets.
This article ignores the primary use case for China and Russia: US carrier battle groups. In this roll, these missiles target the human element in the defensive systems by reducing the the time from detection to impact below human response capability. Humans monitor sensors, make decisions, and activate active defense systems. Until these systems are fully automated, hypersonic missiles are a huge advantage for China.
Automated point defense systems are not a very far leap from the existing PDS systems which auto-acquire and auto-track. The difference, I think, is the effective range.
The point of a ballistic missile is that it's ballistic - the trajectory is defined during the launch phase with only limited control during midcourse phase and essentially none during the terminal phase.
This is fine if you're delivering a payload against a stationary target with an exact fix, and with a nuclear payload you get to be smart about fuzing to achieve maximum overpressure if your downrange distance isn't quite right.
For a target that's less than precisely fixed, and that's maneuvering (which is going to be a case for a carrier battle group), and for a conventional explosive munition, this isn't good enough.
Citing a conclusion about cost from WW2 era Germany isn't a great argument. Every such product cost more in the distant past when prevailing techniques are only just barely feasible.
Dyna-soar was a Space Plane; a human rated space vehicle. Yes it ultimately found no useful role and was shut down. There is little meaningful overlap between such a program and an unmanned missile system; the relevance of Dyna-soar is close to zero.
Twice it is stated that hypersonic missiles have "few" advantages over cruise or ballistic technologies. But few isn't zero and the difference could be crucial. Doubtless the authors would love to credibly claim there are zero advantages, but they can't, because that is false. The implicit advice here is that we learn about the importance of these "few" advantages when they're applied to our forces by an opponent.
We then end with the classic "pressing needs elsewhere" cop-out. "Pressing needs" are infinite. We seek value in our policies and investments and this writing fails to convince that hypersonic weapons have no value.
>> There is little meaningful overlap between such a program and an unmanned missile system; the relevance of Dyna-soar is close to zero.
Except that part of Dyna-soar was dipping back into atmosphere for plane change maneuvers. That dipping in and out of atmosphere to make course changes would seem very relevant to missiles.
But this quote is more telling of the author:
"Thus, while hypersonic weapons fly a more direct path to their targets, they lose much of their speed throughout flight, ultimately taking longer to reach their targets than comparable ballistic missiles."
No. A ballistic missile follows a ballistic trajectory. That means it is on a very fixed schedule, a tight min/max flight time to the target based on predictable spheres-in-a-vacuum physics. A hypersonic missile on a lower trajectory can indeed get to some targets sooner. It will require more fuel/energy to do so, as opposed to following the higher ballistic path, but fuel efficiency isn't a big deal when you are delivering nukes.
Sorry but citing technical similarities doesn't salvage the Dyna-soar argument for me. Dyna-soar program was a manned bomber/reconnaissance platform. The recent efforts of advanced nations centers on missile development. The lack of a mission for the former has nothing to do with the latter.
The difference is so great that I feel the use of Dyna-soar in this context to be misleading, and that probably deliberate.
There are a range of ballistic trajectories that can work. If you want to get there faster, you can use a shallower trajectory (they usually call this a depressed trajectory). This takes more energy, so you get a shorter range for a given missile. The other problem is that the warhead spends more time in the atmosphere.
Most ballistic missiles use unguided reentry vehicles, so the best accuracy comes from a high trajectory that comes almost straight down onto the target, so it spends the least time interacting with the unpredictable atmosphere.
However, if the reentry vehicle is guided, depressed trajectories become more practical. The U.S. did this in the past with the Pershing II, which had terminal radar guidance, and we have a half-way version of this with path length fusing on the Trident II, where the warhead is not guided, but the detonation point is controlled based on trajectory error.
Russia has tested these in the past few years and could have deployed them. IMO it's an underappreciated threat because it could allow attacks against hard targets with less than 10 minutes of warning.
> We seek value in our policies and investments and this writing fails to convince that hypersonic weapons have no value.
So for defence spending you need not ask for "good value", you're willing to spend billions as long as zero value can credibly be denied? If they have great values, surely you could list some of them? After all you imply hypersonics have many, and dire advantages!
Anyway, the article does mention some advantages (later detection by OTH radar and ability to perform some evasive manoeuvrers), and then explains why these do not provide outstanding benefits. I guess you found this bit lacking and wanted a mention of some of the many other unique qualities hypersonics have?
> After all you imply hypersonics have many, and dire advantages!
No such implication exists for my part. I made no mention of a budget figure. Please don't ascribe to me things which I did not write. I don't know if my legislature or military do or will find hypersonics worthy of billions. My point is that this writing did nothing to convince me that they aren't.
> and then explains why these do not provide outstanding benefits
I don't believe we can really know how hypersonics might be employed. Militaries have been punished for their lack of vision many times in history. Until we do know what is possible the examples given are straw men.
You seem hard to convince that money could go elsewhere, but perfectly fine to let it go to these projects on no particular basis at all. That's not actually a neutral stance, however much you avoid writing outright praise of hypersonic weapons.
In in a small sense sense your last objection is of course almost trivially true for any weapon: each war uses them based on the experience of the last conflict, and armies are always finding novel ways to deploy them.
However, if one takes a larger view it is demonstrably false: physics is not so unknown that these weapons could whatever they want, so to call the models used for the article so off the mark as to become straw men is simply wrong.
> Twice it is stated that hypersonic missiles have "few" advantages over cruise or ballistic technologies. But few isn't zero and the difference could be crucial.
But isn't that the author's point? That these weapons are evolutionary, not revolutionary?
Whether hypersonic weapons are evolutionary or revolutionary isn't presently knowable or based on any meaningful measurement. Cleverly written guesswork.
That argument works perfectly well both ways you know, meaning arguments in favour of their utility are equally speculative until we've had us a proper war.
Hypersonics is mired in controversy, and may or may not be usable against strike groups, but there is a class of fast-moving missiles that certainly will be viable STS missiles in a conflict, are ready now, and are fast enough to cause concern.
While we're on missiles its a bit scary how widespread rocket launches. 10 years ago the thought of N Korea and Iran launching long range rockets seemed a an impossible task, now I'm losing count of the commercial companies launching satellites into space. I aint rocket science any more.
When it comes to going fast through the atmosphere I always think of the Sprint anti-ballistic missile [1]. From zero to Mach 10 in five seconds, accelerating at 100 g, glowing white with a skin temperature of thousands of degrees, to intercept an incoming ICBM that is less than 10 seconds away from impact by detonating its own low-yield thermonuclear warhead in front of the target. There are also a few bits of footage [2] on YouTube.
> the claim that hypersonic weapons can reach their targets faster than existing ballistic missiles
The majority who are seriously working in these fields do not advocate for such systems based on this class of claims.
> This extreme heating limits performance in two ways. First, it constrains glider geometry, as features like sharp noses and wings may be unable to withstand aerothermal heating.
Everybody working in this field understands this and has various approaches to the problem.
> Second, this heating renders hypersonic missiles vulnerable to detection by the satellite-mounted sensors that the United States and Russia currently possess, and that China is reportedly developing.
Also well-known. While you are going to be thermo-structurally constrained, Boyd's Energy-Maneuverability theory is decades old and relevant to these systems.
> Yet the performance of hypersonic weapons against missile defenses is strategically meaningful only if it offers a new capability (i.e., if these weapons do something existing missiles cannot). This is not the case.
The speed and what it confers is a new capability.
> the technical basis fails to justify the price.
In the U.S., this is more a reflection of the U.S.' failure to maintain its leadership in hypersonics since the 1960s and 1970s. NASP was a disaster of a program and a bad idea (though it did provide huge benefits in terms of learning and technology programs). As is typical in U.S. behavior, upon the cancellation of NASP, there was a slamming shut of funding to hypersonics that undermined healthy sustainment of expertise and facilities. Present-day expenditures are helping the country get out of the pit it entered.
There are a number of valid technical & programmatic criticisms of hypersonic systems and the U.S. hypersonic efforts. This article touched only on cost without any compelling support.
While I'm not a credentialist, neither of the authors appear to be aerospace engineers, and it shows in this article. They would have been well-served by vetting this through people actually involved in the programs referenced.
> The majority who are seriously working in these fields do not advocate for such systems based on this class of claims.
Come now, just openly admit it is and important claim to dispel, don't hide behind careful conditionals like "most" and "serious". It's not like the "few" and "nonsensical" actors are unimportant:
"Hypersonic weapons move faster than anything currently being used, giving adversaries far less time to react, and they provide a much harder target to counteract with interceptors"
DOD News, "Hypersonics Testing Accelerates"
"New tanks, military satellites, rockets and missiles, even a hypersonic missile that goes 17 times faster than the fastest missile currently available in the world."
US Commander in Chief, West Point graduation speech.
> "Hypersonic weapons move faster than anything currently being used, giving adversaries far less time to react, and they provide a much harder target to counteract with interceptors"
This is true if you understand the context. Ballistic missiles are for nuclear strikes. Whoever is saying "anything currently being used" means conventional. These hypersonic weapons are conventional, i.e., non-nuclear.
> US Commander in Chief, West Point graduation speech.
That's not at all germane. No one in the DoD or in Congress is working on or funding these systems because Donald Trump thought they were the fastest possible weapons system. Heavy U.S. spending in hypersonics preceded Trump. You'll also note for example, Trump sticking his technically illiterate self into debates about the catapults used in the new generation of aircraft carriers. It changed nothing in terms of what DoD or Congress did with that program.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadOf course, there's also logic to generating red herrings to waste your adversaries' resources, and the US has done that to others.
Or at least that's the story we tell when the budget it spent with nothing to show for it.
The fact that China is specifically targeting the US should be a wake-up call.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pershing_II
This was a big upgrade on the original Pershing missile that kept the same launcher but was competitive with the Soviet SS-20 that weighed three times as much because it had an autonomous guidance that could directly impact a target even when the mobile launcher was at an unsurveyed location.
This is not advanced or exotic technology for a missile with the P II's range, you don't need exotic materials (that little dome on the bottom is a radar antenna, not a heat shield) and it can get 25 g acceleration with those little fins that you might not notice if you don't look carefully. Thus it is something third-world countries can field if they want to.
That kind of missile can break unpredictably two or more times on reentry and thus confound anti-missile defenses of all kinds. The Russians had a nuclear-armed ABM system in the Moscow area at that time (and still do) and they found it intimidating.
That kind of nuclear-armed ABM might be able to fire a large number of shots and get lucky, but the kinetic kill systems that we use to protect our naval groups would be helpless against it.
That's why China is developing an anti-ship weapon with similar capabilities; instead of soaking up the inaccuracy of the launch point, the missile can handle the uncertainty of where a ship is going to be when the missile arrives.
With a nuclear warhead that kind of missile could obliterate an aircraft carrier -- but even with conventional warheads it could cause a lot of trouble, this is what a smaller ship looks like when it has been hit by 4 2000 lb conventional bombs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition#/...
That won't sink a carrier but it could stop flight operations for a while and have them steaming back to San Diego.
We didn't produce them because they weren't needed at that time against their near-term target sets, not because they didn't work.
The single largest US Defense procurement goals is the ability to sink '400 ships in 48hours' as the key performance metric in a Taiwan defense scenario. [1]
The authors are career academics who get press by being 'contrarian'. The argument they make in their paper (that this editorial is based on) is fundamentally a straw man. They compare ballistic missiles trajectories to hypersonic trajectories and conclude 'ballistic is faster', while ignoring they key point that hypersonic weapons are *conventional in US force posture (i.e. non-nuclear) compared to ballistic weapons.
And they ignore that hypersonic trajectories are significantly harder to intercept, b/c of intercept timelines are governed by radar horizon issues and greater design cross range of hypersonic aerobodies.
[1] See "The Kill Chain" https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Chain-Defending-America-High-Tec...
> These missiles are, in reality, an old technology with a massive price tag
Isn't that the entire point of the military–industrial complex ? (Or even capitalism in general) Come up with new products with various level of real world benefits, it doesn't matter as long as it keeps people busy and money flowing
With no market and only one customer that makes terrible decisions none of the mechanisms of capitalism would even have a chance to have an effect.
How do you call a system in which for profit private companies generate trillions of $ every year and come up with new products every few years to keep the machine going ?
Dick Jones [big exec at Omni Consumer Products talking about the ED 209 enforcement robot after it wastes a middle-ranking exec during a demo/presentation]:
I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!
If you can swing a DOD or DOD-adjacent supply contract for an aircraft, you're probably set for life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dl9Ovwmnxw
It looks fake. I'm bummed I'll likely never see something like that in person...at least in a test.
For instance there was the old doctrine of holding back a Russian invasion of Europe with small yield tactical neutron bombs. Then weapons like this were invented:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon
A stick of those dropped from a B-52 will do more damage to a tank division than a single 1kt warhead. Similar sorts of devices were demoed but not fielded for use on land (think of a vehicle that can fire and control hundreds of anti-tank missiles from concealment with no detectable radio signature made from off-the-shelf parts)
Progress on lasers has been steady like progress in semiconductors, sometimes I am shocked at how easy it is to buy a dangerous laser. There have been very good laser weapon demos since the 1990s the main practical problem has been moving away from dangerous chemistry to fiber laser modules that can be integrated with the rest of the weapon and duplicated to increase output. These are being fielded now against drones.
There are handheld anti-personnel lasers that will heat the outermost 1 mm of your clothes to 20,000 K which has an effect like a flash bang and also makes an electromagnetic pulse that directly stimulates pain sensations: it can knock you down (e.g. with the impact of expanding plasma) and discombobulate you pretty bad without causing much tissue damage.
Word of it got out and the fear that people would use it as a torture device shut it down.
If SDI failed at anything it was replacing the Space Shuttle.
I traveled to a semiconductor conference in Hungary on SDI money dispensed by US AFNOR. The paper was on migration of point defects in semiconductors. Defect research was of great interest to Soviets because their devices had a much higher concentration of them than the West's, and they hoped to make them work anyway.
Arguably the actual purpose was the enrichment, and crashing the Soviet economy an unpredicted result. Billionaires generated by the program, as by the Iraq invasion, have been reliable providers for corrupt politicians since.
No, that was not really the cause of the collapse of the Soviet economy.
There was also Sprint follow-on called LoAD (LoADS can be seen as well, note that this was a later program than Sentinel's LoADS...) that was designed to protect MX silos. That was similarly sporty.
The Russians have lots of neat videos of their A-135 Gazelles launching. Those still protect Moscow and the all-important Don-2N battle management radar — once and probably still a massive warhead sink in a nuclear exchange. Reportedly the 1989 SIOP called for 69 consecutive warheads on that DGZ.
Hypersonic missiles are the perfect anti-aircraft-carrier weapon. Thats why China and Russia have invested. It's a cheap counter to America's greatest strength.
That means the article is basically correct! It's a waste of money for the USA- we are not an underdog looking to counter a power that outspends us by trillions.
But the article is also completely backwards and wrong! In the USA we've run a near-austerity budget for decades to support an enormous war machine premised on aircraft carriers being important, and now that has been if not neutralized, severely nerfed.
Rather than allocate resources to our own hypersonic missiles and carrier defense, we should be using something other than massive floating targets.
Massive aircraft carriers primary purpose is to burn money.
Basically, don't eat, snort or attempt relations with it and you're probably fine.
What would it matter if it were hypersonic?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
ed- typos
"They're pulling Crazy Ivans all over the place!".
We worked on this stuff for so long and have so much experience with ballistic missiles it's probably pointless as the article said.
For all anyone knows the X-37 is fully operational with orbital ballistic weapons that would greatly outclass hypersonic missiles. Weapons accelerated from orbit would be very fast, require way less energy, be smaller so it could be holding more of them than we realize, give a target far less warning & time to react.
All the research stuff could be a smokescreen. It's been hanging around in orbit for more than a decade cloaked in mystery.
The X-37 is very hard to track because it can make dramatic orbit changes using the earth itself as cover and appear from a different direction.
It's all theoretical but a weapon like that launched from space is going to accelerate faster (it's already hypersonic when it comes off the rail) & generate less heat signature until it re-enteres the atmosphere.
And if carrier groups can be sunk by these missiles it would make way more sense to have them on a space platform or a submarine platform than on ships.
edit: I mean with less lead time and mission planning, systems integration like for conventional satellite launch methods.
That said, ballistic missiles can actually maneuver quite a bit during the terminal.
Also, I always understood that the very impossibility of confusing them with ballistic missiles headed for Moscow was the decisive feature.
TLDR: This seems to be about boost-glide vehicles, where the real action is in really fast conventional missiles like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M22_Zircon.
The article, though, doesn't mention that the arc trajectory of ballistic missiles means they are spotted faster: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...
But such missiles are nowadays - as far as I know - primarily detected via infrared from space and not radar stations near the target which turns the atmospheric trajectory into a disadvantage due to heating of the vehicle which is also mentioned in this article.
Cruise missiles are already extremely hard to defend against, in as much as doing so requires the defender to identify all nearby ships, submarines, airplanes and other covert launch points. (ECM is not good enough, SAM also has no chance. Cannons and interceptors have low chance of spotting these as well.) Hypersonic version does not bring all that much to the table there, if anything.
He isn't. He's saying the drag creates a large heat signature which makes them vulnerable to existing detection techniques.
Keeps comparing hypersonic missiles to ballistic. Concluding there is no benefit. But what about cruise missiles and air launched long range missiles?
Also assumes that all hypersonic weapons will use rocket engines. But that is exactly why interest is back, there are now air-breathing jets that power hypersonic missiles. Meaning range, maneuverability, size improve compared to rockets.
And US is way behind in this.
The point of a ballistic missile is that it's ballistic - the trajectory is defined during the launch phase with only limited control during midcourse phase and essentially none during the terminal phase.
This is fine if you're delivering a payload against a stationary target with an exact fix, and with a nuclear payload you get to be smart about fuzing to achieve maximum overpressure if your downrange distance isn't quite right.
For a target that's less than precisely fixed, and that's maneuvering (which is going to be a case for a carrier battle group), and for a conventional explosive munition, this isn't good enough.
Citing a conclusion about cost from WW2 era Germany isn't a great argument. Every such product cost more in the distant past when prevailing techniques are only just barely feasible.
Dyna-soar was a Space Plane; a human rated space vehicle. Yes it ultimately found no useful role and was shut down. There is little meaningful overlap between such a program and an unmanned missile system; the relevance of Dyna-soar is close to zero.
Twice it is stated that hypersonic missiles have "few" advantages over cruise or ballistic technologies. But few isn't zero and the difference could be crucial. Doubtless the authors would love to credibly claim there are zero advantages, but they can't, because that is false. The implicit advice here is that we learn about the importance of these "few" advantages when they're applied to our forces by an opponent.
We then end with the classic "pressing needs elsewhere" cop-out. "Pressing needs" are infinite. We seek value in our policies and investments and this writing fails to convince that hypersonic weapons have no value.
Except that part of Dyna-soar was dipping back into atmosphere for plane change maneuvers. That dipping in and out of atmosphere to make course changes would seem very relevant to missiles.
But this quote is more telling of the author:
"Thus, while hypersonic weapons fly a more direct path to their targets, they lose much of their speed throughout flight, ultimately taking longer to reach their targets than comparable ballistic missiles."
No. A ballistic missile follows a ballistic trajectory. That means it is on a very fixed schedule, a tight min/max flight time to the target based on predictable spheres-in-a-vacuum physics. A hypersonic missile on a lower trajectory can indeed get to some targets sooner. It will require more fuel/energy to do so, as opposed to following the higher ballistic path, but fuel efficiency isn't a big deal when you are delivering nukes.
The difference is so great that I feel the use of Dyna-soar in this context to be misleading, and that probably deliberate.
Most ballistic missiles use unguided reentry vehicles, so the best accuracy comes from a high trajectory that comes almost straight down onto the target, so it spends the least time interacting with the unpredictable atmosphere.
However, if the reentry vehicle is guided, depressed trajectories become more practical. The U.S. did this in the past with the Pershing II, which had terminal radar guidance, and we have a half-way version of this with path length fusing on the Trident II, where the warhead is not guided, but the detonation point is controlled based on trajectory error.
Russia has tested these in the past few years and could have deployed them. IMO it's an underappreciated threat because it could allow attacks against hard targets with less than 10 minutes of warning.
So for defence spending you need not ask for "good value", you're willing to spend billions as long as zero value can credibly be denied? If they have great values, surely you could list some of them? After all you imply hypersonics have many, and dire advantages!
Anyway, the article does mention some advantages (later detection by OTH radar and ability to perform some evasive manoeuvrers), and then explains why these do not provide outstanding benefits. I guess you found this bit lacking and wanted a mention of some of the many other unique qualities hypersonics have?
No such implication exists for my part. I made no mention of a budget figure. Please don't ascribe to me things which I did not write. I don't know if my legislature or military do or will find hypersonics worthy of billions. My point is that this writing did nothing to convince me that they aren't.
> and then explains why these do not provide outstanding benefits
I don't believe we can really know how hypersonics might be employed. Militaries have been punished for their lack of vision many times in history. Until we do know what is possible the examples given are straw men.
In in a small sense sense your last objection is of course almost trivially true for any weapon: each war uses them based on the experience of the last conflict, and armies are always finding novel ways to deploy them.
However, if one takes a larger view it is demonstrably false: physics is not so unknown that these weapons could whatever they want, so to call the models used for the article so off the mark as to become straw men is simply wrong.
I'm not hard to convince. All that's necessary is good arguments. There weren't any here.
But isn't that the author's point? That these weapons are evolutionary, not revolutionary?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkworm_(missile)
especially
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-301
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA
> the claim that hypersonic weapons can reach their targets faster than existing ballistic missiles
The majority who are seriously working in these fields do not advocate for such systems based on this class of claims.
> This extreme heating limits performance in two ways. First, it constrains glider geometry, as features like sharp noses and wings may be unable to withstand aerothermal heating.
Everybody working in this field understands this and has various approaches to the problem.
> Second, this heating renders hypersonic missiles vulnerable to detection by the satellite-mounted sensors that the United States and Russia currently possess, and that China is reportedly developing.
Also well-known. While you are going to be thermo-structurally constrained, Boyd's Energy-Maneuverability theory is decades old and relevant to these systems.
> Yet the performance of hypersonic weapons against missile defenses is strategically meaningful only if it offers a new capability (i.e., if these weapons do something existing missiles cannot). This is not the case.
The speed and what it confers is a new capability.
> the technical basis fails to justify the price.
In the U.S., this is more a reflection of the U.S.' failure to maintain its leadership in hypersonics since the 1960s and 1970s. NASP was a disaster of a program and a bad idea (though it did provide huge benefits in terms of learning and technology programs). As is typical in U.S. behavior, upon the cancellation of NASP, there was a slamming shut of funding to hypersonics that undermined healthy sustainment of expertise and facilities. Present-day expenditures are helping the country get out of the pit it entered.
There are a number of valid technical & programmatic criticisms of hypersonic systems and the U.S. hypersonic efforts. This article touched only on cost without any compelling support.
While I'm not a credentialist, neither of the authors appear to be aerospace engineers, and it shows in this article. They would have been well-served by vetting this through people actually involved in the programs referenced.
Come now, just openly admit it is and important claim to dispel, don't hide behind careful conditionals like "most" and "serious". It's not like the "few" and "nonsensical" actors are unimportant:
"Hypersonic weapons move faster than anything currently being used, giving adversaries far less time to react, and they provide a much harder target to counteract with interceptors"
DOD News, "Hypersonics Testing Accelerates"
"New tanks, military satellites, rockets and missiles, even a hypersonic missile that goes 17 times faster than the fastest missile currently available in the world."
US Commander in Chief, West Point graduation speech.
This is true if you understand the context. Ballistic missiles are for nuclear strikes. Whoever is saying "anything currently being used" means conventional. These hypersonic weapons are conventional, i.e., non-nuclear.
> US Commander in Chief, West Point graduation speech.
That's not at all germane. No one in the DoD or in Congress is working on or funding these systems because Donald Trump thought they were the fastest possible weapons system. Heavy U.S. spending in hypersonics preceded Trump. You'll also note for example, Trump sticking his technically illiterate self into debates about the catapults used in the new generation of aircraft carriers. It changed nothing in terms of what DoD or Congress did with that program.