The Rise of Hypersonic Weapons
thecipherbrief.com
thecipherbrief.com
Did the author completely forget about nuclear subs?
The article is pretty terrible in general. Hypersonics won't change the balance of anything, especially considering what a decent sized one can do. If you're delivering nuclear-levels of destruction with hypersonics then your opponent will retaliate with nuclear weapons. There will be no exception for "Oh, you used hypersonics on us, that's cool." If anything, hypersonics make the nuclear option more likely and nation states will be wary on ever using them on another nuclear power.
The article does play up a 'Russia/China will soon dominate the US' nonsense that gets ad impressions, but if these weapons ever hit a US carrier or city, then a nuclear response will be the most likely scenario. The development of these weapons has been pretty slow and no one is sabre-rattling with them for a reason. They'll fall under the category of weapons of mass destruction, which is probably what all the major powers want because the alternative is yet another arms race, on top of the low simmering nuclear arms race that exists today.
It's no longer the case that the US and Russia maintain nuclear bombers in air continuous.
I'm sure it could be restarted now if it looked to be necessary, but it doesn't seem to be.
If my memory does not fail me, the book COmmand Control claims that it did continue until well in the 90s.
> Speaking of heartless and barbaric, Schlosser covers Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” which he and his close adviser Henry Kissinger developed after Nixon took over the presidency in 1969...
> How to show the world he was a “madman”? Nixon and Kissinger came up with a plan in 1969. They ordered the Strategic Air Command to go on airborne alert for two weeks. “Ignoring the safety risks,” Schlosser notes, “B-52s loaded with hydrogen bombs took off from bases in the United States and flew circular routes along the coast of the Soviet Union. Neither the Soviets nor the Vietcong was fooled by the bluff.”
https://vva.org/arts-of-war/history/command-and-control-by-e...
That occurred after the Thule airbase accident that prompted the end of continuous air alert in 1969.
"The airborne alert program was terminated the day after the Thule accident. The risks no longer seemed justifiable, and many B-52s were now being used to bomb Vietnam."
The Thule accident was, of course, in 1968.
I don't recall there being anything else about a continuous alert being resumed afterwards, but I certainly could have forgotten.
Edit: since we're talking about this book, if anyone is interested in stuff I highly recommend it. The full title is Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser. Available wherever fine books blah de blah blah.
The entire foundation of US force projection is built upon the carrier battle group. If putting your $5b carrier in the South China Sea makes it vulnerable to getting taken out by a $5m missile, then the balance of power has changed.
Obviously there's nuclear weapons as the ultimate backstop, but if your adversary is China or Russia then that's MAD.
The obvious solution would be to just have many megatons of kinectic energy hit near the carrier group via a decently sized kinetic, but the US would treat that exactly as a nuclear attack by a foreign power and respond in kind. It would probably look like one to central command as well, mushroom cloud and all.
I think the idea that these things will be stealthy, maneuverable, unstoppable, accurate, and undetectable is a little much. These weapons come with quite a bit of liability and might be impractical in any non-total war scenarios. The US is not going to let China and Russia blow up carrier groups with multi-megaton weapons and not respond in kind with its own megaton weapons, either nukes or large kinetics against military bases or capital cities. Once that hotpoint is reached, nuclear war is assumed. A kinetic strike against USS Ronald Reagan will mean a kinetic or nuke strike against Beijing or Moscow. The Chinese and Russians would know our escalation policies and would act accordingly if they don't plan to start WWIII with these weapons. Whether these policies have been officially written yet is the only real question here. Its safe to assume multi-megaton attacks against the US will absolutely not be tolerated and will not be treated with a conventional response.
What about optical satellite observation?
Also, in wartime there will probably be decoys and other counter-measures that might be hard to differentiate from satellite resolution. You would want accurate tracking for your $50-100m launch that may or may not start WWIII.
I find these two assertions very surpsising. Which part of the process do you expect to be slow and what do you mean by slow? Why do you expect accuracy much smaller than the size of a pixel in an image?
That's a technique from WWI. For a modern long-distance radar a carrier is like the Sun in the sky (as you would expect from a huge pile of metal on a plain surface). It's too big, and also too "loud" in terms of radio emissions to be stealth.
In short, over-the-horizon radars are not exactly precise. AFAIK no OTH radar to date can be used to provide a firing solution, they all are warning/detection radars. They can also be jammed or destroyed, as they are huge and can't be moved or hidden easily. Finally, it's not enough to provide an initial targeting, you also need to guide the missile during its flight as carrier moves and evades. This is a huge problem, given that any signal can and will be jammed.
I think you underestimate how silent the carrier can be.
[0]: http://lexingtoninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/aircraft-ca...
If the point about China/Russia increasing their relative punching power vs. the US doesn't feel significantly to you, what about when they are sold on the open market to any country that wants one? Any country in the world being able to take out a carrier would change the way that power is projected in a very big way. Suddenly attack and defense are much more asymmetrical, which favours the small actors (this would work against Russia and China too, but they have less to lose than the US does in this regard).
On locating a carrier:
"Few if any nations today possess an assured capacity to track carriers continuously. All of the relevant methods — radar, electronic eavesdropping, electro-optical and acoustic sensors — have major drawbacks such as high cost, vulnerability to preemption, and inability to precisely discriminate. While that may change over time, aggressors will still face a daunting task in penetrating the layered defenses of a carrier battle group."
"The areas in which carriers typically operate are so vast that adversaries would be hard-pressed to find them even in the absence of active countermeasures by the battle group... The most practical way to conduct surveillance over such expanses is with satellites, which have a much wider field of vision than sensors operating inside the atmosphere. However, China does not presently possess military reconnaissance satellites capable of finding a carrier, and the commercial satellites to which it might turn take days or weeks to task and deliver imagery -- making them useless for finding a continuously moving vessel."
On tracking it:
"In order to keep up with the carrier's movements, an attacker must establish a continuous track of the vessel using some combination of land-based, sea-based, space-based and airborne sensors. Moreover, the track must be sufficiently precise so that it can provide targeting coordinates to weapons when they arrive in the carrier's vicinity. As of today, even the United States has difficulty accomplishing such a feat, and no other nation is close to having the requisite capabilities."
"Space-based or airborne radar with the capacity to track moving ground targets (such as the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS) has the greatest potential for providing reliable targeting information, because it combines precision with a capacity to operate day or night in all kinds of weather. However, few prospective adversaries are likely to have such systems before the end of the next decade."
Summary: Note that this article is circa 2001, so when they say "few prospective adversaries are likely to have such systems before the end of the next decade", I read that China and Russia could potentially have them now.
So I think there's a strong case for carriers being hard to track historically, but it sounds feasible that large nation-states have gained the ability to do so in the last 5-10 years, and it seems likely that that capability will be democratized further by low-cost commercial imaging (E.g. see SkyBox for the state-of-the-art in civilian high-resolution low-delay satellite imaging).
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-navys-new-13-billion...
But agree with your point, the calculus only gets worse as more eggs are put in the basket.
Alternatively, how deep do you have to go to escape the damaging effects of the shockwave from something slapping into the surface of the sea at mach 6?
As to how deep... not that deep, especially for a boomer.
It hurt. Hit so hard I got water under my eyelids. Felt like my face exploded. Knocked the wind out of me. Luckily: life vest.
There is also the matter of targeting these things. Water absorbs radar and if they are silent you have no way to target your bunker buster.
They've dealt with base penetration problems before and I'm sure there has been progression since.
I've got it! A high burst of energy to create a temporary Moses-tunnel straight to the sub.
That said, a sub at missile launch depth is susceptible to a hypersonic weapon from above. With sufficient mass, even a kinetic only impact from the surface could take out those subs. A nuclear depth charge can take out subs down to their crush depth although I don't know if you could deliver it on a hypersonic glider.
The defense for this stuff is lasers of course. An interesting technical weakness of hypersonic devices is that they are on the edge of their energy/drag limits (they are already struggling to travel through the soup of the atmosphere at those speeds). If you can ablate their leading edge with a laser to change their drag profile they may self destruct through atmospheric friction.
If you know where it is. If you do, the sub has already failed as a weapons system. We have all sorts of weapons that can take out subs if we know where they are.
The point of subs is that you don't know where they are. That's why we have them in the first place.
For instance the F-35 only recently became "operationally capable" - but it has been flying since 2006.
I'm not disagreeing with you that a test firing is vastly different from serial production, but the F-35 is the poster child for an unreasonably protracted and dysfunctional development process. It's a massively complex system with a dozen different major players all trying to pull it in conflicting directions with dozens of contractors all trying to make sure they diffuse the project across all 435 Congressional districts.
The overall implication that because the F-35 is a trainwreck that it's not possible to ever develop a weapons system on a fast timeframe - that I disagree with. The fact that we are dysfunctional does not make everyone else so.
http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/holy-smoke-gm-army-turn-o...
They went from rfp => selection => 1st prototype in 9 months.
Obviously, a car is a bit different than a 5th gen fighter. But still.
It's not enough to withstand a high temperature, or to try and move the heat away from the surface. At some point you need to dissipate that heat somehow or the payload will just melt. A material undergoing phase change is one of the most efficient ways to do it. This is why ice is so much more effective at cooling a drink than one of those hokey "whiskey stones".
This race amounts to a global game of chicken, and the stakes of a mistake are world war. Let's hope cooler heads prevail.
On the other hand, there are some pretty amazing applications of air breathing hypersonic technology. You could use it to launch equipment, satellites and people into space much more efficiently (air breathing means you don't need to carry an oxidizer!). Or imagine being able to fly from NY to Hong Kong in an hour! This kind of tech is not as imminant as the article is implying. We've only barely demonstrated small air breathing hypersonic vehicles as feasible (see X-51 and X-43). The X-43 was a crude initial test that demonstrated flights of only up to 12 seconds. The X-51 managed to go for 6 minutes. Scaling this up to a transportation vehicle will pose a significant engineering challenge.
What I worry about is actors smaller than a well funded nation state getting weapons like these, and for that we need intelligence.
There is no benefit.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in...
It may be true that delay would be the best option for maximizing probability of survivability in that scenario, however I do not think the capability exists to actually do this -- it might not even be possible to implement this strategy. I don't think it's possible to construct a control system that would manage the diverse array of retaliatory launch systems in a way that both preserves "guaranteed total annihilation of aggressor" and "arbitrary delay for retaliation after first strike"
There is no purpose in rushing to doomsday and a great deal of interested parties in not doing so.
Personally, I don't buy it. We've had many known near miss incidents that should have been escalated. I don't think that the people sitting in front of the keys will turn them.
US enjoys conventional dominance due to ability to project conventional force anywhere. This capability is in part supported by the ability to effectively shield remote force projection platforms from conventional threats. (For atomic, see MAD.)
HS conventional weapons can neutralize the defensive shields. This undermines the projection platforms. That would make US insecure. If it insists on remaining hegemon, it needs to shoot its load first. So, destablizing.
HS conventional and nuclear armed weapons look and act the same. An HS projectile coming your way gives you a short window of time to determine if it is conventional or atomic. Not a good time to toss coins. Shoot off atomic load first. Destabilizing.
That is the thesis.
I don't see how hypersonic weapons change either of that. They're not any faster than a missile, so the response time isn't worse, and they don't do anything to uncover submarines. What am I missing?
Is the problem with hypersonic weapons just that it looks like the players won't make that same choice?
HS launch could carry conventional or nuclear threat, it's not possible to know which after detection of launch. For mad, we must always treat these launches as nuclear -- and therefore in the end, no one uses these weapons (unless they are intending to launch global nuclear war)...?
Who are these members?
A) there are simultaneous launches against many different targets. Conventional or not, the enemy is trying to remove your ability to retaliate. The implication is clear.
B) Only a small number of weapons have been fired off at one or just a few targets. Even if the weapons inflict heavy casualties, your ability to retaliate remains intact.
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997_11-12/pdd
I imagine other countries with smaller arsenals may not have that option. Even your B may not necessarily be an option, if their command structure relies on centralized control and would be vulnerable to a decapitation strike.
My earlier point about Moskits was that such weapons already exist, and have already had this effect. We just haven't admitted it yet, and almost certainly won't until we overstep ourselves and somebody sends one of our carrier strike groups to the bottom.
So it is true, these new weapons are destabilizing.
The fact that US stumbled like a drunk into these conflicts that allowed these test cases by Russia and China to be on the table has to be one of the line items against the treasonous criminals that have been running this country for the past few decades. It did not have to be this way.
Not really. Everything you can do offensively with a hypersonic cruise missile you can do more cheaply with ballistic missiles, which use a 70 year old technology. It takes about twenty five minutes to hit something on the other side of the world.
We've been in that global game of chicken since the early days of the cold war. Nothing has changed, in that respect. SLBMs have been within five minutes coastal land targets for more than fifty years.
To really upset the nuclear applecart you'd need something like a reliable submarine detection system that could be deployed on satellites.
When they wrote the rules did they just arbitrarily assign a carrier a certain number of attacks per round? Because four attacks doing d100 damage aren't like one-hundred attacks doing d4 damage...
If a real carrier group would have survived the attack then they should change the rules.
The closing speed makes the difference. Which is also complicated for the little boats on the probably rough open seas where they'd encounter the carrier group. Carrier groups travel in miles-wide formations. Even if your first warning was your support-ships getting hit you'd still have minutes to react to the incoming threats. Time to get multiple aircraft up, set the guns to the right mode for targeting ships, etc.
It sounds like its the result of arbitrary rules letting you to attack someone by moving into their hex, etc. I don't think you'd get this result with a real-world battle exercise, where soldiers had to drive the boats tens of miles off-coast in radio silence for a coordinated attack on a hyper-aware enemy.
but a great internet legend, brought up over and over again.
I would be very interested in evaluating a substantive claim that, rather than van Riper's surprise attack being outside the scope of the wargame but entirely plausible and effective all the same, a retired general with no personal stake in the outcome of the game nonetheless cheated in order to try to make it come out the way he wanted, despite that it'd be trivially obvious he'd done so.
lasers can't track of course and range is limited by factor like atmosphere and earth curve, but still, thinking about an hypothetical future scenario hypersonic weapons would just get lasered down by automated point defences all the same as conventional speed ordinance.
[Edit] OK, I've done a bit of calculating, and I think you're right. The laser pulse could be a maximum of about 175 meters long.
Problem with hypervelocity weapons is that they have to be heavily armored and cooled just to survive the onslaught of air at mach 5 and above. You also are surrounded by a hot dense plasma, so much so that radios can't get through it.
So the power, tracking, accuracy, and compensation for radical differences in air pressure, air temperature, and related just to get to the surface which is radically stronger than your average airplane or missle.
Also note that there doesn't even necessarily need to be a big easy to set of bomb on said missle. Even a pure kinetic weapon can be pretty effective at mach 5 and up.
So certainly not impossible, but not going to be practical for awhile.
At some point though your airframe becomes airframes and flight dynamics change considerably.
... and it is getting pretty obvious that being able to blow things up doesn't make much difference anyway in a political sense. Simple terror doesn't work anymore to bring people around to your way of thinking. All the people that can be simply coerced are gone now.
Then that got me thinking about the reality of drop ships. Isn't that the next logical progression? I mean, currently we can put a battalion of paratroopers anywhere in the world with 48 hours notice. We can put a Ranger company anywhere in the world with 24 hours notice.
Does China and Russia believe that? It takes a few minutes to swap conventional and nuclear warheads.
If anything US is the leader in this new cold war.
It's when you want to deliver conventional explosives that you care about how big your rocket is. It's one thing for the rocket to be 3 times as big as the warhead (Tomahawk) and another to be 15 times as big (Trident 2). The Tomahawk is really slow though, so the idea of the hypersonic is to be faster, at the cost of having a smaller delivery ratio. The fastest current cruise missile, the Russian-Indian Brahmos has a 12% ratio of warhead to total mass (if launched from an airplane, less if launched from the ground), and a speed of about Mach 3. What would be the ratio for a hypersonic weapon? It shouldn't be less than 7% (otherwise you keep it "simple" and use the Trident 2 design) and it's unlikely it will be higher than the 12% of the Mach3 Brahmos-A missile. It will be somewhere in between, and most likely not that disruptive after all.
It seems like very very expensive way of bombing terrorists.