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.