Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
An interesting aspect of US military R&D is that whenever they design a new type of weapon system they concurrently start design of a defense against that type of weapon system. It creates a bit of an internal arms race but also keeps their defensive capability balanced with their offensive capability.
To fully neuter MAD you would need to be 100% sure and then some that you got everything that the enemy had. Even a single missile getting through would be mean multiple warheads get deployed. That's too high a price to pay. And I am fairly certain that the decision to launch would not be obeyed without resistance.
We might also see airborne alerts resume (bombers flying around with nukes ready to avoid being caught on the ground)
Russian and US leaders thought that MAD was idiotic - that defending your country against your adversaries was of the highest importance, not retaliating after your capital was in ashes.
That was the motivation for the Moscow ABM ring (still exists) and SDI (the ABM part worked, the lasers didn't.)
MAD is for policy wonks and technocrats, and is not what leaders rely on.
It’s quite good so far. Weirdly terrifying, given that the action and writing is so clinical. So far it’s just fairly plain events. No drama or tears. And yet... terrifying and somehow moving.
There's also an interesting, realistic simulation of how a conflict betweeen Russia and NATO might start.[2]
The grimmest, bleakest TV ever made. Quite remarkable considering it obviously had a budget of pennies. Yet I'd also highly recommend it.
"The Day After" is a schmaltzy Hollywood feel-good family movie in comparison.
Aren't they already obsolete?
Also, don't forget carriers are never alone and surrounded by multiple aegis guided missile cruisers which are the most accurate missile defense systems in existence.
The purpose of aircraft carriers are more often to launch attacks against inferior nations or highly inferior subnational entities so they are useful there.
If you sit on the shore and use active radar tracking then you're leaving yourself open to decoy ops and EM countermeasures.
Satellites don't loiter over the area long enough to get a tracking lock. Ships can take evasive maneuvers and US Navy ships move very fast.
Whoever solves the problem will first become very rich from defense contracts.
[1] http://theconversation.com/hundreds-of-ships-go-missing-each...
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/this-map-shows-every-...
That said, it's all armchair because a) We don't know what they really have b) we don't know what kind of amazing gear the US has hidden away or c) how any of it will really hold up in a war.
None of it has been tested.
So maybe the Russians launch a bunch of newfangled missiles and they basically don't find their target. Maybe they all do.
Maybe the Russian s300's totally wipe out F22s, or maybe it's a mirage and they are irrelevant. So many factors: training, conditions, countermeasures, sabotage, overwhelming force etc. etc..
Maybe the vast number of crappy Chinese subs overwhelm the US navy over there. Maybe the US has a combination of tech+procedure that makes all of those little diesel subs pointless. Or maybe they only need 1 or 2 to 'get through'.
My bet is that the Carriers are vulnerable, that Russia and China don't really have the ability to project much outside their nations (though Taiwan and HK are close), that the Americans will move around the world with impunity in a hot situation, except right in the vicinity of Russia/China where it would be a mess because they are both smart nations with 'good enough' gear, and China has a zillion bodies to throw at any problem.
In a real hot war between Great Powers, the ability to destroy will be quite huge, especially against strategic targets, compared to defense abilities.
Americans don't like to be told this, nor will they work to understand it beyond a glib "America, Fuck yeah!" style response, but the American naval surface fleet is probably one of the first casualties in an all-out war. The MOSKIT is deployed specifically to target these carriers, and there is - so far - no defence against them. Laser-based defences are being developed to defend against the threat, but are not widely deployed across the fleet.
America will lose its carriers in the first minutes of all-out war.
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrier...
>RAM and CWIS
Yeah, jury is still out on the MOSKVIT survivability, but hey .. lets hope we never find out.
It had:
Navy ships constrained to small areas to prevent disruption to commercial craft which would never be the case in an actual war
Small boats firing simulated cruise missiles weighing significantly more than the entire boats supposedly carrying them.
Motorcycle based messengers "simulated" by just using radios except no one bothered to add any kind of message delay or any other kind of constraint a motorcycle messenger might have compared to radio communication.
USN ships in the simulation teleporting into the center of a massive armada of simulated small boats due to a modeling error
All ship defenses being turned off during the engagement resulting from said error because everything was in the wrong place.
None of the USN ships even knowing that they were supposedly under attack until the "battle" was over.
Ships being "re-floated" as a result of the above screw up
It's generally unwise to try to draw any conclusions at all, positive or negative, based on its results. Also, there's a reason countries all over the world continue to build aircraft carriers. It's because they're useful. A carrier group essentially controls a moving sphere of territory with a radius of around 500nmi. Being able to launch dedicated AWACS[1] allows for far superior battlefield awareness compared to any other naval asset and air launched anti-ship missiles allow for striking range far greater than any other naval asset. Carrier groups are also a lot harder to find than you might think. Nuclear powered carriers are fast, faster than almost any other ships, and don't stay in one place. Keeping tabs on them is difficult, even if you have satellites. In the open ocean they're very difficult to confront because they will almost know more about the locations of opposing forces than the opposing forces know about their location thanks to real time aerial recon. The horizon is as far as radars can usually see and if you're in a plane that horizon is much further away. Carriers are not going away any time soon. They provide far too much utility which is not offered by any other kind of ship.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye
https://web.archive.org/web/20071116120858/http://www.knbc.c...
You could make the case that ICBMs make conventional armies obsolete, and I would guess many people in the 50s/60s did.
In a similar vein, videoconferencing, email, telephones should make international business travel obsolete. That shows no sign of happening either. I guess because humans react differently to things that are right in front of them, rather than remote and hypothetical.
Hypersonic weapons are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they are incredibly fast. On the other, going fast highly constrains your trajectory. A predictable trajectory equals a defensible approach.
Why is this topic in the news right now?
The first case, which includes examples like the Patriot missile system, are making missile systems do something they were never designed to do. You can only modify them so far but it is cheaper to modify them than to design an entirely new system, if you can make it work. In practice though, many of these are being slated for replacement as it was a stopgap measure.
The second case is more interesting. Conventional missile motors designed for ballistic intercept can consistently hit the target. But they are too slow to close the distance to the target, allowing the inbound missile to get closer than the military would like. Hyperkinetic interceptors can close the target very quickly, but the materials performance envelope required does not play well with precise terminal guidance systems due to ablation of the missile as it transits the atmosphere. Basically, the necessary precision of control could not be delivered over the entire flight time due to materials degradation. (This is related to why incoming hypersonic missiles have limited maneuverability -- maneuvering destroys the structural integrity of the materials it is made from.) The US appears to have solved the problem of hyperkinetic intercept of hypersonic targets in recent years.
I think what confuses people is that the tests of new systems are only designed to test the things that currently don't work well. They know they can reliably discriminate decoys and do kinetic intercept, that is proven capability and doesn't need to be tested. What they need to test is things like precision terminal guidance when attached to one of these newfangled hyperkinetic rocket motors that ablates itself mid-flight, which turned out to be a much more difficult challenge.
This is a bold claim (one might say absurdly bold) that demands extensive support if you don’t want readers to dismiss your commentary completely. Let’s start from here: the problem solution can only be inferred from tests, because no ICBMs have ever been launched at a target.
Those tests must have provided overwhelming confidence for the real world scenario. So how are those test result?
It's generally best to assume that articles like this happened because the companies involved contacted the reporters. I'd note that this article has both a product photo at the top, and a sales pitch in the headline ("hypersonic missiles are unstoppable").
Hypersonic flight basically avoids all the weaknesses exploited by this older anti-ICBM tech.
what's the success rate on those? afaik they're irrelevant, at least to russia/us because you can evade them by simply launching enough missiles (you only need a few missiles to take out all major population centers).
But the story of nuclear war is a bit more complicated than that. Sadly, city destruction doesn't usually fall into core considerations of win/loss.
What does? Acts of occupation?
The US lost the Vietnam War because we lost the willingness to fight. We can't effectively end the Afghanistan war because we can neither keep them from fighting, nor keep them from wanting to fight.
But beyond that, interceptors make the entire targeting situation more complex. If you've got 1000 warheads, and no defenses, you can hit 1000 targets (not actually true, because you have a certain amount of failure rate, but anyway). If you're facing 10 interceptors, and some of your targets must be destroyed, then you have to launch enough warheads at each target that must be destroyed to still go through even if all of them are intercepted. So now you have ~90 must destroy targets you can actually hit with your 1000 warheads, even though you're only facing 10 interceptors. Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.
What's the source for this? Because I've also heard the opposite. Also, given that interceptors have to travel faster and more accurate than warhead ICBMs, you'd think they're more expensive to develop and have a higher unit cost.
>Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.
* The calculation you presented only really makes sense for very high intercept success rates. If the intercept rate is (conservatively) 80%, if the enemy sends 10 missiles, and you use all 10 interceptors on each, there's still a 91% chance of at least one missile coming through (1-0.8^10). The odds get better if you have double the number of interceptors (34%), but it's still unacceptably high. You'd need overwhelmingly more interceptors.
* I doubt there's 90 "must destroy" targets. If you spend all your interceptors protecting one target, even if that survives, your country is still utterly devastated that there's 0 hope of a counter attack. Does it really matter that washington, DC survived but the rest of the us is reduced to rubble?
But you exclaim "The warheads are different!" It's hard to find the price, but an EKV is somewhere on the order of $20 million each. The W87-1 will cost somewhere between $8.6 and $14 billion for the entire program... not including the fissile pits that are being reused. This is still more per warhead than the EKV.
Yes, the interceptors have to be more accurate, but they also use entirely different guidance systems. They don't actually have to travel faster, because they just have to be in the same place at the same time as the target, and the target can't really do anything to stop them.
The problem with your statistical approach is that there's a chance that the target survives. And these are defined as must destroy targets. Places like launch control centers for ICBMs, Cheyenne Mountain for command control. Places you need to destroy to avoid them turning your own cities into self-lit parking lots. Because you aren't going to start a nuclear war to have a Pyrrhic victory.
Because the point of the US nuclear deterrent is to turn you into a self-lit parking lot, on demand, in thirty minutes or less. And by making sure we can do that, we keep other countries from thinking that they can start using WMDs. Does it really matter that you destroyed Washington DC if you no longer have a country? The biggest advantage of interceptors is not that you saved a city that was targeted. Rather, you made the opposition make a choice on what would actually get targeted. A city blown up by 3 nukes isn't much different from one blown up by 1, but it's significantly different from a city blown up by zero.
Example: back when the UK used V-bombers, they had 200 warheads targeted across the USSR. As Soviet defenses got better, the number of targets being hit was reduced. By the end of the Polaris program, all of the UK's warheads were targeted on Moscow.
And I'd be surprised if there's only 90 must destroy targets in the US. Not that Russia has 1000 warheads, but the US also doesn't have 10 interceptors, because it was example numbers to make the math easy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle
radar arrays and space or ground lasers, etc. but essentially lasers.
but a new age of war will be upon us. When all of the weapons get used up and the factories making them destroyed, and the radar installations and satellites fried with EMP's, then again it will be up to 17 year-olds fighting the fat man's war.
Missile interceptions with lasers isn't easy, and if you have two working lasers for interception, the adversary can always try firing four missiles at once.
At some point, any missile defense system is going to have to estimate damage and pick some targets, but leave others. When there are multiple vehicles,.you're pretty much fucked.
The idea that a missile defense system can prevent full-on nuclear warfare is false. It's meant for one-off strike deterence, not for full on war.
If you don't stop a nuclear launch vehicle when it's on the ground or very shortly after launch, your chances at stopping it are slim.
And as it happened someone already did shoot the Pentagon for a little warning message. That's the most likely explanation. But most likely not Russia, just one of their hypersonic nuclear missiles probably from the Kursk, without the warhead.
The issue with hypersonic weapons is that they can fly low enough to be undetectable, and fast enough to reach their target before anyone knows what happened. That's enough to make any nation feel insecure and vulnerable and trigger happy.
Rather, show us what the world specifically needs.
I wonder what happens to mutually assured destruction when the world is guaranteed a number of huge wars over resources?
Maybe some rich people will make it out alive by moving to mars for a while.
There exists a metastable isotope of hafnium which is able to undergo stimulated emission, producing gamma ray laser light. There was some controversy of wheter x-rays could also stimulate this emission but that isn't a prerequisite for light amplificafion in this case.
Gamma ray optics is difficult because of the short wavelengths but refraction has been demonstrated at very oblique angles. Fiber optics also has very oblique angles for its total internal reflection. Doped fiber lasers is a well-know field with lots of industrial application.
Producing metastable hafnium can be done with e.g. a cyclotron. It is not very efficient, but for an extreme existential threat it is probably not insurmountable. Hafnium produced in this way could be used a nuclear bomb which isn't actually regulated by treaties, so there is even more controversy to navigate than just that from academia. There is no neutron flux between nuclei. All the energy is stored in the metastable structure inside the nuclei.
Unlike regular fiber lasers there would be no pumping once the fiber is installed. Instead it would come pre-charged and be single-use. Its shelf-life isn't indefinite.