I'd love to pick this article apart, but instead I'll just offer this:
The Phoenix missile (which used to be carried by the F-14) is borderline hypersonic [0]. And it is shot at airplanes.
Now imagine an Exocet-type missile but at a much higher speed.
A fast missile does one very important thing - it reduces the time the defender has to react, and thereby increases the odds of the attack succeeding. Glide-paths, targeting, etc are just variations of an attack plan - speed is what kills.
Just note that hypersonic weapons are also used defensively. There's research into using them to take out ICBMs during the boost phase. This is the only part of the missile sequence that has a high chance of neutralizing the missile threat but also the most difficult phase to counteract.
And destroyed the first submarine that tested them! Russian, the typical failure of a new torpedo is guidance, which often results in the device describing a circular route instead of a straight one. Ending up back where it started. So they fired, and before you could say Jack Robinson it hit them, having traveled in a circle of a mile or so.
There's a downside to hypersonic - they are NOT agile especially in terminal guidance so they are primarily/only good for stationary targets. Going so fast carries this cost.
The hypersonic weapon win is when you need a short OODA loop in an engagement - perfect for that and we've see that happen already in Ukraine with them: the attack on Yavoriv - it was over and targets dead before ATC/Air Defense even realized there were incoming. That's a short OODA loop.
Not practical for US who has platforms to hit global targets at much lower costs, i.e. money spent on hypersonic research can build up enough JASSMs to last until WW5.
But IMO useful backup if adversaries manage to negate platforms like carriers and long range bombers. Basically, establishing conventional MAD with CONUS Prompt Global Strike using icbm/hypersonics.
Flip side is this is massively benefitial to PRC (or anyone else) who can't catchup in conventional force posture to hit CONUS with anything but hypersonics. For them it's low hanging asymmetric fruit that comprehensively deters US power projection. IMO we're entering era where advanced rocketry including meter level CEP and accurate terminal guidance will proliferate and obviate a lot advantages of current power projection platforms.
Honest question, how would you describe MAD as being practical? Bearing in mind that the treaties to maintain it were abandoned, and both sides invest (and act) heavily in rocking the boat?
Stressing that advanced hypersonics is venturing past nuclear MAD but building towards conventional MAD made feasible by proliferation of advanced rocketry as dual-use components become commoditized and US/west lose monopoly on space infra used for targetting/guidance. It's a new kind of mutual vunerability where strategic infra that underpins modern society i.e. semi fabs, server farms, energy nodes, captial ships docked for maintenance etc can be targetted by more and more players.
In terms of practicality, we were "stuck" with nuclear MAD because meter level surgical intercontinental strike capbility has so far been pipe dream. With nuclear MAD, we had stability-instability paradox, increase chance of low level conflicts against non nuclear states while nuclear states operated with relative impunity. Conventional MAD = even 3rd rate countries can potentially import a bunch of global strike ICBM platforms to threaten pain points of any would be attacker. Most countries can't sustain modern airforce let alone forward project carrier groups, but many countries can build some concrete tunnels to hide sufficient amount ICBM TELs to increase deterrence. It's not nuclear tier deterrance, but ability threaten some critical infra is better than current posture where most countries can't inflict pain more than a few hundred km outside their borders.
I don't know how things will change but my position is balance will have to shift once advanced rocketry proliferates because that's boat that everyone will want to rock simply because dual purpose conventional rocketry won't be subject to arms control. It's going to be about how states with advanced rocketry programs can control proliferation, i.e. US wants to seed Asia with IRBMs that can threaten PRC, and PRC starts exporting hypersonics to South America or other countries that can threaten US global assets.
I think it's hard to argue that MAD isn't in effect right this second. If there was no threat of massive retaliation and possible resulting extinction is there any doubt Russia would have used nuclear weapons in it's Ukraine invasion?
Why would they? There are 8 million Russians living in the country, and close social ties besides. Putin consistently lies and says 80% of the population is Russian and that Ukraine is Russia. Plus the fact that Russian people are generally not psychopathic murderers, the invasion could only be acknowledged as a limited operation, they depend on the world and European economies, the military destroyed other countries/regions far away from NATO and then had no need for the atom bomb either... yes I think there's room for doubt.
Hypersonics are already being used in warfare today [1][2][3]. They are already practical weapons and gaining parity in offensive and defensive capabilities is critical.
The CNN article is taking the definition of an HGV entirely out of context from the underlying CSIS article it links. From the CSIS article:
> Russia’s Northern Fleet has begun preparations to deploy the air-launched ballistic missile Kh-47M2 Kinzhal on MiG-31K carriers. The deployment of the new hypersonic weapon is consistent with Russia’s ongoing and persistent efforts...
They are. Chinese and Russian “advances” in hypersonics are pure marketing. The US was testing scramjets in the 1960s. The US has a hypersonic space plane. Alas, the media fell for it and billions are now being spent on “catching up” with our “peer” competitors.
All ballistic missile reentry vehicles are hypersonic too. Talk of "hypersonic" without specifying the technology and actual capabilities is quite silly. Presumably hypersonic cruise missiles is implicit context.. but I don't believe the general public understands that and the media is doing a generally terrible job of communicating it.
The Russian "hypersonic" missile is just the upper stage of a short ranged ballistic missile launched from an aircraft. Its just an existing weapon with more steps.
The Chinese hypersonic weapons everyone is worried about is a boost glide vehicle. Basically a ballistic missile with a hypersonic lifting body as its warhead as opposed to a blunt body RV you usually see. This makes it more maneuverable and potentially harder to hit.
The weapon the air force tested today is similar to that but meant to be launched from bombers instead of ground launched.
The actual scary ones are hypersonic cruise missiles. Nobody has fielded one operationally yet. But the US is by far the furthest ahead in this technology. In march they had a successful test of HAWC the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept. Scramjet powered cruise missiles like HAWC are more dangerous than conventional ballistic missile or boost-glide missiles because they actually fly. And therefore can do the things normal cruise missiles like Tomahawk can do. They can take circuitous routes. They can change their altitude. They can fly somewhat evasively. They can fly to an area and pick targets of opportunity. And other things.
Why does it matter? We've gotten much better at shooting down conventional cruise missiles. A few years back an Arleigh Burke destroyer had a number of Chinese built subsonic anti ship missiles fired at it by Houthi Rebels. It shot down every single one of them. These missiles are comparable to the Neptunes that recently sank Moskva in terms of performance. So modern warships aren't as vulnerable as Soviet era antiques. You need better weapons to kill them. hypersonic cruise missiles are much harder to intercept. Boost glides are of dubious utility in my opinion.
Russia also has an air-breathing hypersonic missile with a scramjet engine - 3M22 Zircon. It is being field-tested and is already starting production after more than a dozen successful tests including hitting moving target - making them much further in development than HAWC which only recently managed to fly for any distance without blowing up and never actually struck a target.
So your impression is not correct. The Russians and the Chinese actually are much further along for all classes of hypersonic missiles.
No they don't. They claim they do but if you believe Russian claims after the last three months then I can't help you.
They steal money from their military to buy yachts and mansions. Russia's wunderwaffe are not operational. The US spends more on its nuclear arsenal alone every year than Russia spends on its entire military. Where is the T-14? Where is the Su-57? They exist in propaganda videos and parades. That's it. You wont find them or zircon on the battlefield. Russia can't even afford to mass issue red dot sights to their infantry. Something America did 20 years ago. Do you really think they can afford some ridiculous scramjet cruise missile that does nothing to improve their national security?
The Russians/Soviets flew hypersonic missile prototypes before the millennium (at hypersonic speeds) - and NASA verified it. I see no reasons they can't do it again.
The rest of your response is not relevant.
And besides, if the Russians really lied about these tests conducted within US AWACS range, they'd be called out. That they haven't is tacit confirmation.
A test article form the cold war proves nothing about what's going on today. And a test does not mean there is an operational weapon. The US has been testing scramjets for years very publicly but I know you will be the first to jump up and say they don't have an operational weapon.
Russia cannot afford to field these wunderwaffe. Its simple economics.
Russian ex-Military and his prophetic (uncannily precise) predictions of what awaited RF in Ukraine and world at large. He discusses the fabled missiles in passing. (Google translate does a good job.)
>All ballistic missile reentry vehicles are hypersonic too
Sure, but ballistic trajectories are trivially interceptible. It's not just about speed. The new arms race is with hypersonic glide vehicles that are capable of maneuvering all the way to the target at mach 8+. With that, the weapon becomes impossible to intercept with any existing technology.
My money is still on Aegis BMD intercepting the missile during the terminal phase. Hypersonic glide-boost weapons are mainly for avoiding mid-course interception. When you're going hypersonic, 'maneuverable' is relative; the turning radius is quite huge and such missiles will be easy for Aegis to track during the terminal phase.
Moreover, even if Aegis fails to intercept it, the manoeuvre to avoid the intercepting missiles in the terminal phase at hypersonic speeds means a huge miss, at least for conventional warheads.
I don't know of any missiles that have enough situational awareness to attempt to actively avoid an interceptor. They might dispense decoys (like the Iskander does), but a hypersonic cruise missile won't have the appropriate radar to detect an incoming interceptor. It might have an ECM/ECCM package that can tell when it's being targeted by a radar system, but that's about it.
>When you're going hypersonic, 'maneuverable' is relative; the turning radius is quite huge and such missiles will be easy for Aegis to track during the terminal phase.
Except the associated plasma shielding makes it invisible to radar. And the Russian ones are capable of sea skimming and maneuvering at mach 8 in the terminal phase. At those speeds, you're talking horizon to impact in seconds. We really have nothing that can touch it.
We like to think of ourselves as massively advanced beyond Russia and China, and we are to an extent. But the reality is that the US military has wasted the last 20 years in pointless counterinsurgency operations that have narrowed our view to the actual threats we face, and de-prioritized this kind of cutting edge stuff. There's some serious catching up we'll need to do (both technologically and organizationally) to maintain deterrence against the rising conventional threats of authoritarian major powers.
>Except the associated plasma shielding makes it invisible to radar.
You mean makes it very visible to radar but blocks any rf emissions to and from the vehicle itself right? This is no different than reentry effects we see on spacecraft. They are easily tracked by radar but have a radio blackout period until they slow down enough.
>And the Russian ones are capable of sea skimming and maneuvering at mach 8 in the terminal phase. At those speeds, you're talking horizon to impact in seconds. We really have nothing that can touch it.
The Russian missile is a paper invention for propaganda. It effectively does not exist. And if it does then they only built one. It is not an operational weapon and never will be. Russia is a poor country that is run by thieves who siphon money from their military to buy mansions and yachts. Just like T-14 and Su-57, Zircon is a propaganda wunderwaffe that will never be in combat.
China is bigger problem. But at the moment they have just fielded boost-glide vehicles. Not scramjets.
> Except the associated plasma shielding makes it invisible to radar.
All hypersonic ballistic missile reentry vehicles have this plasma stealth. That doesn't stop Aegis BDM from tracking and intercepting them. Have you ever seen a reentry vehicle coming in? They're as bright as meteorites, very easy to see.
> And the Russian ones are capable of sea skimming and maneuvering at mach 8 in the terminal phase.
These are the hypersonic cruise missiles; very different from hypersonic boost-glide missiles. This is what I mean about the media talking about "hypersonic" generically without specifying the technology they're actually talking about; it leads to people believing that 'hypersonic' is itself the technology.
I think it is definitely a problem: not because we do not actually have the tech required (I believe we do, to some extent), but because Putin has so broken intelligence process he might come to the conclusion we don't, and makes some stupid moves because of that (although I'd have found this idea laughable ta best before 24 February). Therefore I expect a couple of carefully worded Reuters articles related to successful intercepting mach 5 missiles at first.
Iron dome can't even intercept all of the subsonic rockets fired by terrorists with very limited budgets. Even if the entire US GDP was directed towards missile defense, I doubt that China or Russia would have any trouble overwhelming these systems simply by throwing enough conventional MIRVs at it.
Being able to ensure a strike with a single missile is a force multiplier especially when it comes to deterrence. If you need 10 missiles to ensure one hit your enemy may think they have favourable odds in a first strike. If you only need 1 missile per hit then the outcome of a first strike is not so good if they don’t get every single one of your missiles.
A ballistic missile could be within a few hundred miles of any point near the coast and be there in less than 5 minutes. You're saying this is "trivial" to intercept, what does that mean?
A SLBM (sub-launched ballistic missile) can reach a coastal target in less than five minutes depending on the exact trajectory. Good luck trying to intercept that.
Presumably, but the ocean is a big place. Now todays threats are far different than at the peak of the Cold War. The Russian SSBN fleet is a shell of itself, and the PLAN is still just dabbling in sub-based deterrents. The diminished threat is matched by the absolute disrepair of USN anti-sub warfare skills. These have atrophied beyond description in the last 30 years.
the missile in TFA only achieved fivefold the speed of sound. Russias Avangard moves at twenty-seven times the speed of sound. thats faster than the re-entry speed for the space shuttle endeavor. it also advertises a newfound maneuverability.
Americans under-estimate their adversaries sadly quite often. when the TU95 bear first arrived during the cold war era its specifications were habitually lowballed by analysts until it appeared on radar over Canada. When the RQ710 was deployed in Iran with the same arrogant impunity, it was intercepted, landed, and dissected. heck, we spent about two decades insisting we could depose a cuban leader and just as long insisting we would "win" against the taliban.
and when the united states assumed china incapable of a cryptographic advantage, the nation summarily identified and executed more than a dozen spies thanks in part to dismissive hubris.
The US also overestimates the threats from its potential adversaries quite frequently. The Soviets weren't 10ft tall, and the modern Russian military has been shown to be quite fragile in Ukraine. Perhaps military intelligence is a bit harder than posting on HN.
I'm no expert, but I think one of the issues with the missiles from the 60's was that they got so hot from air friction that a plasma enveloped it which prevented it from being guided. Same as how comms are temporarily lost with space shuttles on re-entry. Maybe the Russians have overcome that issue.
>Alas, the media fell for it and billions are now being spent on “catching up” with our “peer” competitors.
These things are no joke. I felt the same before actually looking into it. China can effectively deny the South China Sea to our carrier fleets with their land based hypersonic weapons. There is absolutely no means of intercepting them with current technology.
They have already denied the US the South China Sea -- just by expanding their economy. The US is a joke here. China -- for example -- in the last 20 years has started more than 400 companies in the Philipenes at least and where else? Structural changes to the economy, basically. While Europe and the US persist in this 1970s: "we will give the primitives subsidies and cash prizes" -- demonstrating that they are totally out of touch with the region. Colonialism is over. These countries have money. China is actually installing economic zones and other structures which give them direct control over the region. Aircraft Carrier Groups are no match for this.
I'm not saying I like or dislike it. But its incrediably evident if you live in the region.
Its a good point -- but I guess when I mean "colonialism" I mean western countries trying to exploit old power structures and values to their advantage. Which is a loosing game really -- these things fade over time.
In your example China is creating new -- however sinister -- power structures on both sides. Physically with the contested islands and fishing vessels and also economically through investment and government agreements.
So it's true it's a kind of colonizing -- but it's a very different version from the past.
> Its a good point -- but I guess when I mean "colonialism" I mean western countries trying to exploit old power structures and values to their advantage. Which is a loosing game really -- these things fade over time.
Language doesn't however and large parts of Africa for example speak a European language as native language.
> In your example China is creating new -- however sinister -- power structures on both sides. Physically with the contested islands and fishing vessels and also economically through investment and government agreements.
Projects which are often debt traps and which usually hire non-local work forces.
> So it's true it's a kind of colonizing -- but it's a very different version from the past.
Consider the possibility that technology changes with each decade and the previous system is...you know...now obsolete.
I assume you have a smart phone and not an Amiga. By analogy, if your enemy has "iPhone" level weapons, would you want to face them with an "Amiga" level weapon? I doubt it.
I don't know whether MIRVs, each carrying a dozen or so atom bombs, compare to HGVs like the Amiga does to the iPhone. I'd like to say absolutely not but I can't. Either way calling ballistic missiles "obsolete" is incomprehensible to the dead.
What's the defense against a hypersonic missile then? Current Aegis and CIWS defensive tech will not hit something traveling that fast. Surely the Pentagon doesn't even need to justify budget increases when we give them more budget than they ask for every year regardless.
>Aegis BDM is designed to hit hypersonic reentry vehicles
Ballistic hypersonic reentry vehicles. The entire point is that these new weapons are maneuverable in the atmosphere at mach 8+ all the way to the terminal phase.
They don't maneuver for shit in the terminal phase. Boost-glide weapons avoid mid-course interception by staying relatively low in the upper atmosphere rather than following a high ballistic trajectory well into space. Once they're in the terminal phase their maneuvering capability is comparable to older maneuvering reentry vehicles (which are nothing new; the novel part is skipping the ballistic mid-course phase.)
It is a real thing that they can put a several nukes in one of those and kill the entire population of New York, or London, or Paris in five minutes.
Also it is real that Putin has used exactly that card, that threat as a negotiation tactic, in order to get away with invading a foreign country, in order to compensate for the joke of a country they are.
Putin has specifically said that: that he developed those weapons, that they can be nuclear and no country can neutralize them.
History teaches us that accommodated Societies usually fall under much primitive rules like the Mongols with Genghis Khan, or the Huns, The Romans (against the Greeks), the Germanic tribes(against the Romans), the Arabs(against the Persian and Byzantine empires), the British against the Spanish Empire, the Russians against the Germans and so on.
The US, or UK, France, Poland or Germany just can't ignore it, whenever they like it or not. There is someone out there telling Ukraine is their property or else.
They need to develop a neutralization of those weapons.
A country just can't ignore an Arms race if the adversary follows it, they have to follow as well.
