Hypersonic HAWC missile flies, but details are kept hidden
airforcemag.com
airforcemag.com
Aerodynamics is a practice of which physical phenomena you can ignore. At low speeds you can pretend the speed of sound is infinite / air is incompressible (these are equivalent), as you get faster you have to start paying attention to compression, then shock waves, heating, ionization, and the mechanics of individual particles.
Mach 25 is approximately orbital velocity, but since Mach is actually related to air pressure, it's not a very meaningful comparison except to note that anything moving that fast isn't going to be in-atmosphere for very long.
In transonic flight, some parts of the airflow are starting to become supersonic, and compressibility starts to become a factor. Something called "wave drag" is important in this regime, as the compression wave is moving along with the aircraft.
In supersonic flow, compressibility of the air becomes the main thing and the flow is defined by the positions of the various shock waves. Ramjet engines work in this regime (the aircraft is moving fast enough that the forward movement is enough to compress the incoming air to the engine, without compressor blades). In a conventional ramjet engine, the flow within the engine is subsonic (the compressed air, being more dense, moves more slowly within the engine), so combustion works the usual way.
In hypersonic flow, temperatures are getting very high (air is heated by compression). Scramjet engines become a thing (the "SC" is for supersonic combustion: air flowing through the combustion stage at supersonic speed).
0 - The reasons are due to maximum allowable pressures, and barrel rifling. At max pressure for a 40gr bullet you’re going to get maybe Mach 1.1, maybe. If you want to go faster without increasing pressure above spec, the solution is a lighter bullet. But lighter bullets often like different rifling, and virtually all off the shelf 22lr barrels come with 1:16 rifling, unsuitable for extra light bullets. Also, lighter bullet get pushed around by the wind more; you’d often rather compensate for more drop than wind, since drop is more predictable.
Specifically CIP sets the maximum pressure of 22lr at 24,646 psi. An extremely high number considering, but pretty pedestrian compared to other cartridges. For example NATO sets a maximum pressure of 62,366 psi for its primary rifle caliber, 5.56x45mm. It’s genuinely amazing that rifle barrels don’t regularly explode, to be honest.
Water vapor content, not being a diatomic gas does very slightly change the speed of sound but usually to a degree which can be ignored.
(people generally don't believe that the speed of sound in air depends only on temperature when you tell them)
https://www.gao.gov/blog/faster-speed-sound-u.s.-efforts-dev...
These weapons represent an ability for both the US and China to conventionally intervene from their mainlands to any location within the Pacific.
> These weapons represent an ability for both the US and China to conventionally intervene from their mainlands to any location within the Pacific.
Is that the kind of range these have? Almost 9,000 miles from LA to the South Western most corner of the Pacific. If you meant the North Pacific then even the western edge of the US to the yellow sea is over 5,500 miles.
Ballistic missiles of course have these kind of ranges and can carry conventional payloads.
Just call while the missile is on the way to let the people it's going to kill know its not a nuclear bomb headed their way so they shouldn't fire a nuclear bomb back.
This would likely mean the weapon hits its non-mainland target prior to the other side taking notice for a retaliatory strike. In the event the other side did notice - it's likely they wouldn't treat it as a nuclear incursion unless the weapon was heading inland towards missile silos or other infrastructure that would motivate a nuclear retaliation.
To your point on stranded assets - these weapons make performing any large military action in the pacific much riskier with greater probability for missteps or stalemates. Assuming a cost of 20-100 million dollars per missile I wouldn't be surprised if they are cost competitive with high risk carrier based F-35 operations in a hypothetical Pacific conflict. It's probably cheaper to stock pile such missiles than maintain additional carrier strike groups for the sole task of participating in a great power conflict.
Why not? If it was carrying a nuclear payload and was destined for strategic sites on the mainland, it could be too late to retaliate if they waited to see where it is going, particularly if it was aimed inside the first island chain.
If China detected nuclear capable missiles heading toward their country then they would have to consider the possibility their second strike capability is not a sufficient deterrent (including being compromised in various ways such as their subs being all located) so there seems like a large incentive to retaliate before missiles land.
Would there be enough time for them to watch and wait it out and see if it approached their missile installations? If it was a very stealthy missile, could they be sure they had detected them all?
The concept of nuclear triad is that, yes, armies very strongly depend on their second-strike capability. So, the game is for the subs to not to become compromised.
> We are not in the 1960s when at times it was literally true.
You are claiming that not only China, but the US and Russia don't have the capability of launching strikes from 30 minutes? (i.e., well beyond the time to respond to ballistic missile launch detection)? Do you have a source for this?
This doesn't appear to agree with you:
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_0021...
Launch-On-Warning
One source of ambiguity in the implementation of China's no-first-use policy is the ongoing debate in China regarding the pursuit of a launch-on-warning posture. Recent doctrinal publications and Chinese interlocutors indicated that the debate has yet to be resolved. On one side, some members of China’s strategic community argued that a launch-on-warning posture would ensure the survivability of its nuclear deterrent if its opponent has robust targeting intelligence. The Science of Military Strategy states that a launch-on-warning posture "is in accordance with China's long-standing no-first-use policy, and may effectively protect China's nuclear forces from sustaining even greater losses, improving the survivable nuclear counterstrike capability of China’s nuclear missile forces." China's first priority should be to prevent its adversary from precisely locating its missile launch positions. If China is able to reliably ascertain that an adversary has already launched nuclear missiles at China, however, China could quickly launch its nuclear missiles for a counterstrike "before the enemy has been able to actually inflict nuclear destruction." Launch-on-warning would therefore provide China with an option for nuclear retaliation if a nuclear adversary were able to overcome Chinese efforts at concealment, deception, and mobility to ensure that its forces survived a first strike.
What you cited is sad, but firstly it is still an "ongoing debate", and secondly the road from declarations to the actual ability is long with this one. And may it never materialize again.
Do you have a source for that?
The sibling comment says Russia and USA have a prompt alert which can launch in under 15 minutes. Other articles say the US president could be contacted and approve in under 30 seconds, not sure how the Russian chain of command goes.
The decision process does not begin when nukes are detected of course, that's the end of the process. Pre agreed criteria have already been met. Quite likely there is no decision about entering a full scale nuclear war because they are already in one.
For this particular weapon, a somewhat similar weapon I can think of is the European Meteor [2], which is ramjet (rather than scramjet) powered, and reaches Mach 4, rather than over Mach 5 as this one is supposed to do. Meteor comes at a cool cost of EUR 2 MM per piece. Think about it, you fire one missile like that, and it's like destroying 10 Ferraris.
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/flight-international/8-key-hype...
But, like, really cool.
A ballistic missile is often quite supersonic. But cruise missiles being hypersonic is definitely a big shift.
Still kinda surprised there aren't fast missiles that use rocket engines. It works for ICBMs? I don't see a reason they couldn't maneuver as well. Maybe the hypersonic regime makes things novel not just for propulsion but control too.
Air-breathing engines are able to save all that mass by using atmospheric oxygen.
This matters, because it's the rocket equation in reverse: no onboard oxidizer = lighter vehicle = less fuel needed = even lighter vehicle = longer range / more payload
this device is almost certainly air breathing. there's simply too big an oxygen-breathing-demand at speed to do anything else for sustained high speed flight, where you need to be generating a lot of motive force.
People imagine how drones are going to change everything. Cruise missiles are already bomb shaped drones...
And existing bombs get "drone" capability...
All ballistic missiles are hypersonic. The V-2 was hypersonic. That's because range is directly dependent on speed and you wouldn't have basically any range if you had a mere supersonic speed.
For an unpowered flight, it is a rather meaningless term, but normally refers to maneuvering warheads on ballistic missiles
The oldest definition of hypersonic I have heard is those speeds where compression heating of the atmosphere ahead of the craft generates plasma. A space capsule on reentry hits such speeds, causing the classic radio blackout. So hypersonic aircraft are those that must deal with plasma-related issues that are irrelevant to slower supersonic aircraft.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a30346798/...
This distinction is important, because all of the difficulties associated with flying at hypersonic speeds are due to the problems associated with flying through the fluid. It's comparatively easy to accelerate to the high speeds of sub-orbital vehicles once outside a meaningful atmosphere.
Militarily this is an important distinction as well. An intercontinental ballistic missile needs to go significantly above the earth's atmosphere. During this phase, it's easily detectable, since the horizon is much further away. A vehicle flying much lower well within the earth's atmosphere at very high speeds gives much less early warning.
This specific vehicle strikes a sort of middle ground between these concepts. It's half sub-orbital ballistic missile (it's still required to go above a meaningful atmosphere), half hypersonic cruise missile. Although very critically it is not undergoing sustained flight at hypersonic speeds
Isn't velocity lowest at apogee?
China is more secretive but there is evidence there were at this stage 5+ years ago.
They probably think that their manoeuvrable ballistic missiles are already enough of a deterrent, being hypersonic already, and those are actually deployed and ready for combat, so much more of a deterrent.
There are dozens of other surprise attack weapons to knockout a superpower level enemy to select from. Hypersonic weapons are just few of them.
It's more of a psychological weapon as ICBMs are. As in most cases, a new wunderwaffe will lose out to oldschool war tricks.
No amount of surgical strikes will be enough to behead a well trained military of a superpower, unless somebody on the ground goes, and routes them after the initial strike, preventing the enemy chain of command from recovering.
Tanks, and troops on the ground will still be needed to capture enemy's capital, and surround, and immobilise major enemy concentrations.
The point of hypersonic missiles is to paralyze the force projection abilities of an exceptionally powerful military. For that striking only 30-40 very high value targets is enough.
> propelling the cruiser at a speed greater than Mach 5
I wonder if they are running a scramjet engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet
The Skylon / Sabre engine justa went "fuck it" and liquified the air at lower speeds, then transitioned to liquified oxidizer like a rocket when hypersonic time came around. If that sounds like some kind of miracle heat exchanger that's because it is. It's not been worked out.
Pulse Detonation is something I always wondered why we didn't see more of it, but apparently when you make a PDE big enough it hammers the plane apart like an infant with a frying pan. Who knew?
https://www.pprune.org/military-aviation/print-619462-reacti...
In this case, there's probably a conventional rocket engine to get it up to speed, which is then sustained by the (sc)ramjet engine.
Should a conflict in the South China sea break out, China could nuke US carrier groups assuming their satellites aren't taken out first. That spells game over for US projection of power if successful.
China could deploy air and submersible drones to get around downed satellites, but these have the potential of being jammed with EMP, other drones, etc. It could become a game of cat and mouse, and if the carriers get close enough, China's land-based missile defenses are toast.
Is the US developing hypersonics for close combat? How does this fit into a South China sea conflict, or does this assume the battle is closer to home? (If China goes blue water, is this meant to combat their carriers?)
If, when, and where will the theater be? What will the outcome be?
Would the conflict be limited to the coastal regions, or would it spill over into nuclear MAD?
Will either side back down?
I'm super curious about all of this, and I'm interested in more sources to follow. I don't know enough to understand military/navy Twitter.
I'm there more for the cyberwarfare takes, but from what I understand nobody is seriously worried about a power imbalance between China and America regarding missile speed since interceptors aren't accurate enough, but that's just me regurgitating what I see tweeted around and talked about.
Edit: And don't be intimidated by people reverse engineering sidewinders in the Slack. The community is very open to humble, curious newcomers. They'll teach you how to analyze satellite imagery for free, haha.
If China wants to start a nuclear exchange, sure. The US probably wouldn't go nuclear in response to an invasion of Taiwan, but it absolutely would in response to a nuclear attack on US forces.
Incorrect, the USA will probably just shrug, and call in the other 11 super-carriers and 9 amphibious assault ships.
At the same time they will invoke NATO article 5 and a few other Asian mutual-defence treaties. 2 UK, 1 Spanish, 1 French, and 2 Italian carriers will arrive soon afterwards.
As will 4 Japanese, 3 French, 2 Australian and 2 South Korean helicopter carriers.
The trick isn't to take out one aircraft carrier: its to to be able to take them all out.
For a missile going Mach 7 at 25km altitude, the carrier has no hope of moving enough in the 9 minutes it has to evade the missile.
So you only have to find the carrier once briefly, which is not so hard.
How is the final phase of flight and targeting going to work? How far away can on-board sensors detect the carrier, and does the missile have the maneuverability to steer towards the target in that timeframe?
US itself is likely to turn tail and run if attack in not nuclear. Nuclear attack might inject some spine into response.
Hypersonic missiles and nukes cost a lot less than a carrier. Assuming their surveillance doesn't get taken out, they can spam missiles.
China will have to have good signals intelligence for this to work, though.
Both game-theoretic calculus and political pressure at home would make nuclear retaliation unavoidable, and with the perspective of escalation China is firmly on the losing end.
If that's the case then I can't see how isolated tactical nukes against carriers makes sense for China. They might as well throw everything they have to begin with.
US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil. I would not dismiss trading tactical nukes on third party soil if things get desperate. PRC SCS islands, US indo-pac bases, carrier groups are no brainers. Up to US bases in Japan and Australia. I think we dismiss low level nuke engagement at peril, any competent war planner will keep it in the repertoire.
PRC SCS islands are sand piles with a couple of barracks and a landing strip, that would not be an equal trade for a carrier group.
> US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil.
I dunno what America was prepared for, but I was in USSR at the time and the public message was any nuclear confrontation will end up being a total one.
Otherwise, SCS bases are substantial forward deployment positions for PRC. Conventionally neutralizing SCS bases would require 100s of ordnance from naval platforms in a mostly secondary theatre - substantial amount of what US can concentrate in region. The bases serve missile sinks by design. So in a sense, taking them out via tactical nuke versus expending significant in theater munitions is an appropriate trade.
>public message
There's a lot of (declassified) literature on nonstrategic nuclear weapons and scenarios, war plans for theatre level use in Europe and Asia. Here's a report from this July.
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL32572.pdf
Public messaging is going to play up MAD, but nonstrategic nukes has never been off the table. PRC has no first use, but one never knows. Especially since the engagements are likely maritime over empty waters, which has different escalatory potential than scenarios of nuking NATO/USSR buffer countries during cold war. It's not that I think it's likely, just the chances are less non-zero than what's publically presented, i.e. the 2021 report exists in the first place because US wonks are at least discussing tactical nukes which are not subject to arms control agreements.
> China knows the dynamic, the likely escalation route
If China nukes several thousand U.S. servicemen, your family (and probably you) would be on the streets demanding blood.
But for one thing, I wouldn't say that an authority that authorizes the destruction of three buildings would authorize a nuclear strike. For another, destroying three buildings in some village in Afghanistan does not sound like and "escalation" in response to the half dozen or so buildings destroyed in New York on the date you specify, and the damage to the Pentagon, and the loss of four aircraft and all souls on board, and I don't know how many more on the ground.
You might look into Russian missile work. Of course, as a land power (and not as invested in trade as China), their answers are different.
As far as I know, with existing known technology and defenses, there's probably a number n, such that if you launch more than n simultaneous non-hypersonic cruise missiles, an aircraft carrier is going to be unable to deal with them all. This of course assumes you can launch that many missiles, in range of the carrier, simultaneously, without advanced warning.
Now, the navy also isn't dumb, so I'd venture to guess they avoid parking their carriers within that range when possible, and that they probably have some other defenses like C-130's and other ships mounted with directed energy weapons and other missile defense and whatnot. I imagine they also aggressively pursue and maintain intelligence on the location, number, and readiness state of those missiles. This starts to get complicated because there's a complicated interplay of strategy and tactics related to the off-ship capabilities, and defenses have counter-strategies (such as launching a bunch of Surface-to-air missiles at those C-130's immediately prior to launching the cruise missles) and those counter-strategies have counter-strategies, etc. etc.
I also have no idea what that number n is. It could be infeasibly high.
If the battle group has one Gerald R. Ford class carrier, two Ticonderoga class cruisers, and three Arleigh Burke class destroyers, then it has up to 2 * 8 + 122 * 4 + 96 * 4 = 888 RIM-162 ESSM missiles and 2 * 21 = 42 RIM-116 RAM missiles, for 930 missiles total.
The carrier also has Phalanx. Three guns, 1550 rounds each, maybe ~100 rounds per kill, effective range just under 1.5 km - a distance which a missile doing Mach 0.7 will cross in under seven seconds. My vague impression is that these can't be relied on to make much difference to the numbers.
Maybe there are lasers and whatnot around now. Not enough to make a significant difference.
Note that these numbers assume that the escorts' VLSs are loaded entirely with ESSM, and that all the carrier's weapons can be brought to bear on the incoming missiles, neither of which are realistic assumptions. But it's also assuming the carrier's air wing doesn't get to do any air defence, which is probably also not realistic.
Anyway, given all those assumptions, 1000 missiles and you have a very strong chance of a kill. 2000 and the carrier is toast.
If cruise missiles cost 1.5 million dollars each (roughly what Harpoon and Tomahawk cost, although what things cost in defence budgeting is a bit of a metaphysical question), the toast option is 3 billion in ammunition, plus there will be costs for launchers and various other sundries. The carrier alone is 10+ billion, so that looks like decent value.
Also, you don't need to sink the carrier. Just prevent it from launching aircraft. Once that's done it's defenceless.
Carrier Groups still have an important role to play in lower-intensity conflicts, but in a Pacific war with China they'll be about as useful as Battleships were in WWII.
CSGs are defended by the entire system operating in layers. During conflict conditions they'll have airborne early warning radar flying to see threats coming a long way out. There's usually at least 4 AEGIS equipped ships. The carrier air wing will be doing patrols and intercepting threats at great distance. The carrier itself will be practicing emissions control and hiding within the sizable perimeter created by all of the above. And there's a lot of sophisticated EW decoys and such, that we don't know much about from open sources other than they're taken very seriously.
There's plenty of room for debate about just how effective this all is against a nation like China that has a lot of satellite intelligence/surveillance assets, but the simplistic "carriers have no defense" articles are just empty clickbait. These articles usually assert that there's no defense whatsoever against ballistic missiles, which ignores that 2 of those 4 AEGIS ships will be specialized to do exactly that, and have demonstrated it in testing.
One interesting tidbit is a few years back the US Navy submitted a request to do an exercise where they'd demonstrate taking down an inbound salvo of several 100 missiles simultaneously. Congress declined to allocate the budget for it.
Military planners certainly aren't omniscient or infallible, but they're a lot more sophisticated than the content free contrarian takes you see thrown around on the internet a lot. It ends up being a doomsayer about military technology is a pretty easy grift as nationalists on various sides drink it up uncritically and people with authoritative knowledge on the topic are constrained from openly rebutting it. All that said you do see some pretty in depth open info from GAO reports, stuff from CSBA, etc.
Not since WW2.....but the US Navy built up a LOT of invaluable experience on damage control practices and ship design based on the pounding our carriers took fighting the Japanese. Our current Ford and Nimitz CVNs are the refined iterations of a design lineage going back to the very durable Essex class. That said, the recent destruction of the Bonhomme Richard amphibious assault ship, which sustained cost-prohibitive damage in port due to a single arsonist, is disturbing.
There are wargames where we lose carriers against China.....and there are wargames where we don't. They're not invulnerable, but they never have been against a true peer anyway. Often it boils down to the CSG Commander not being overly cocky in terms of how he maneuvers his force.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34832/veteran-sailor-o...
The Navy does do large scale wargaming exercises of course, though any of the interesting details aren't going to be public so that doesn't really help shed any light on it.
So, their plan in the event of war is to make space inaccessible for all of humanity, by filling it with debris from killed satellites?
War is hell. A peer level shooting war would suck hard in many painfull different ways to almost everyone. Let’s try to avoid it.
The absolute trump card though is that they are preparing hypersonic intelligence drones. If those work out, they're going to be impossible to stop and there's no hiding a carrier from a plane flying past with line of sight.
I wonder if the future will be just a cheap ship with a large number of single-use missile launchers.
So you have to use a higher frequency radar and make sure the temperature of the plasma is not too high in front of the radar. You don't have to put the radar on the nose.
For optical sensors you would be imaging off-axis. So you can put the sensors pointing, say, 30 degrees below forwards relatively far back and there will not be much plasma in front of the sensors as it comes from compression and not friction.
There's a NASA PDF floating around that cites ~7000 K as the temperature of a plasma in front of hypersonic aircraft and concludes that radar is feasible then.
[/] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
Problem was it needed many of these
[\] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program#/media/File:...
for support. (see caption)
https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/01/27/chinas-hypersonic-wea...
"Shut up, Y is bad."
Uh.
I think you are projecting the warlike tendencies of the US onto China.
No one is saying something like that is likely. We are discussing hypotheticals. There's no need to be so upset.
I believe that GP is trying to generalize that question to "what is the proper response to any hyper aggressive nation". And the fact that the answer to that question will have more profound effects on responses to the US than to China.
In fact, I think that the question is valid. Limiting the discussion to China is blatant anti-Chinese propaganda. Broadening the discussion to "hyper aggressive nations" is fair and legitimate.
I assume your reading list is approved in Langley
I'll also remind you Tiananmen was internal, whereas all of our wars are just that - wars. Directed against other nations.
edit: to clarify, I don't see how Tiananmen suggests China will go to war, but I do see how a sordid history of spurring violence across the globe suggests the US will go to war again.
Japan didn't have a nuclear second-strike capability with the range to hit the US. (Or, literally, any part of that taken independently.)
The US leadership can't even make a remotely plausible argument, after emerging from their bunkers after the exchange is done, to have “saved lives” by nuking China.
Not even close. It carries about 200 low yield warheads. Not even enough for 1 each for 1/3rd of the cities in China if you could spread them out that far. There have been over 500 atmospheric tests, many with vastly higher yield and fallout, the biggest tests had yields equivalent to all 200 warheads combined.
One could strike a huge blow to China's capability to carry on war by destroying many of its large ports.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41181/shocking-images-...
That link was more in response to the assertion "The modern one probably won't survive a drop less than 1 meter.", suggesting that warship-grade computer and electronic systems are vulnerable to mild shock damage.
And the Navy has, in fact, done a SINKEX on a carrier: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22639/this-is-the-only...
The results are classified. Considering how the flight deck and upper works look pretty much intact, they probably hit it with multiple torpedoes rather than anti-ship missiles.
In WW2 ships were built to remain operational after multiple direct strikes. Nowadays ships are built to not sink after a single direct strike at the most like carriers, or only mildly though against such a hit because actually dealing with it would make them orders of magnitude more expensive and so heavy they'd be useless.
While a WW2 battleship could survive multiple direct hits and still fulfill its mission, a modern carrier would be lucky not to sink, and definitely won't be launching and recovering aircraft.
If a carrier in a war against a major power can't launch any aircraft anymore it's as good as dead, once it's off the AA ships will be targeted and sunk as they won't have AWACS and fighters to defend them and the carrier itself will be destroyed by enemy air power.
But the commenter is absolutely correct, ships are not expected to remain operable after a direct strike anymore. Weapons have gotten so good that defending credibly against them is not practical, so it's not really worth it to protect them nearly as much as it used to be.
I was looking for MARV reentry velocities, couldn't find any numbers. A regular ballistic missile hits mach 20+ on reentry but I don't know if it maintains that speed all the way to the target.
The word "ballistic" means it doesn't maintain the speed. Etymologically and practically it's about throwing a stone, i.e. finding out what happens when you give it an initial velocity with approximately zero delta-V budget for the main part of the flight.
But everything gets complicated with time, so there are now depressed trajectories (i.e. not-entirely-ballistic flight paths) for the ballistic missiles. But these still do not carry dramatic delta-V.
It makes sense that the US would want to build similar, land-based defensive strategies as a deterrent.
These are offensive standoff weapons launched from air designed to hit time sensitive targets. The question is really what targets, like I said, spending the money on 3000 JASSMs is already enough to sink every major PLAN combatants with room to spare. Need to consider what these hypersonics can hit that traditional standoff weapons can't. Or just the politics behind aquisition between branches. I'm not saying this is bad/wasteful defense spending, but curious what it's exactly for.