U.S. successfully flight-tests Raytheon hypersonic weapon
reuters.com
reuters.com
Hypersonic air-breathing craft that generate lift just aren't a reasonable thing to make. Hypersonic "gliders" and other rocket lofted things that get up to speed outside of the atmosphere and then just briefly travel through it make sense. But all this 'research' towards lift generating air-breathing hypersonics is just a trap to get nation states to dump money and effort.
The world's militaries want a *homing* hypersonic missile, to avoid AEGIS missile defense and attack a US Carrier moving at 35MPH, trying to actively dodge out of the way.
That means steering and thrust on the way down, likely staying at hypersonic speeds until it impacts the moving target.
The world's militaries are trying to kill the US Carrier Strike Force.
If the goal is to avoid looking like an ICBM trajectory to avoid the other nation states thinking it's a nuclear attack then it makes sense. But it's still not achieveable for long periods of flight so the ICBM is required regardless.
I keep reading this comment on HN. It's like saying "What's the deal with Chuck Yaeger breaking the sound barrier, we've had supersonic bullets that do that for a long time". There is zero overlap between the two.
Maneuverable reentry vehicles can wobble around a bit while falling, whereas the point of hypersonic weapons is maneuverability for a significant part of the trajectory.
Unrelated but that's also why any talk of stealth with hypersonic is stupid; everything around the projectile is going to give off more of a signature than the projectile itself
For ICBMs these are called MARV warheads and they were first demonstrated in the early 1980s, and every major power has had them, though many don't have any operational now.
First, you need accurate, current location info on the carrier. That's not easy.
Second, you need something that can launch your cannonball. That's not easy, either, because if you're within cannonball range of a carrier, then you are within range of an enormous amount of return fire from the carrier strike group, and you're dead long before you get a chance to fire your cannonball.
The problem is getting current targeting information to a launcher that's 1000 miles away from the carrier, and then the carrier still moves enough to really matter during the time that your missile travels that 1000 miles.
Satellites are limited and impossible to hide. The carrier strike force knows exactly when they are in view of an adversary's reconnaissance satellite. In any future major conflict the satellites will be the first casualties. There is a very active arms race in anti-satellite weapons.
That swarm of drones will almost certainly be spotted by the AEGIS air defense network (the cruisers and destroyers that escort the carrier), and shot down. Cruisers and Destroyers serve as the "screening" role for the Carrier, you will always see the cruiser/destroyers first in the Carrier Strike Group no matter what angle you approach from (and vice versa, they will see you first before you get to the Carrier).
This gives the cruisers/destroyers a chance to shoot down the drone swarm (or whatever air platform you're using). If its too much for the sea-based air defense systems to handle, they'll radio for assistance from the Carrier and F18 / F35 jets will be dispatched, beyond the horizon, before the swarm even sees the Carrier or pinpoints its location.
That's the difficulty of fighting a Carrier. Not the Carrier itself per se, but the entire team that works together. AEGIS cruisers have the best radar systems the US Navy can offer, and their large power plants can make their RADAR systems more sensitive / higher power than anything you can possibly hope to put into a drone.
If it's traveling more-or-less in a straight line, you can predict where it will be to within a couple of miles. If not...
No it doesn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-Q8P049-2Q
The US Aircraft carriers are powered by two nuclear powerplants, with massive rudders/turbines that can propel, accelerate, and move the craft at surprising speeds.
In fact, one of the problems of the US Supercarriers is that at these high speeds / acceleration, an unprepared sailor can fall off the ship. Its legitimately one of the most common ways to die on a US Supercarrier.
They want a propaganda tool. As the other comment mentions, manoeuvrability is cheap. And projectile defenses’ vulnerability to swarming is well know.
But launching tens of thousands of explosive-laden drones sounds low tech, so we get Xi and Putin touting hypersonics and our military-industrial complex smelling money in the counter.
300 miles was the reported test distance.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-07-18
After release from an aircraft, the first stage boosted the vehicle to the expected scramjet ignition envelope. From there the missile’s Northrop Grumman scramjet engine fired up and propelled the cruiser to speeds greater than Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) for more than 300 nautical miles and reaching altitudes higher than 60,000 feet.
Why this assumption that aerospace engineers are just idiots and they didn’t think about designing it to last longer than thermal soak?
A rocket. I believe the those hypersonic gliders are ICBM warheads.
Fast forwards 50 years and other nation states are looking for ways to achieve ICBM-like performance without being mistaken for an ICBM. They foolishly fund these projects and then have to save face. The "hypersonics" are lauded as impressive "new" weapons for propaganda.
The US, seeing this propaganda, has researchers that realize they too could use the funding again even if the end goal is silly. They could get in on the propaganda too. I assume the decision makers re: funding just don't understand the physics.
Minutemen did 30+ g decades ago [1].
[1] https://minutemanmissile.com/documents/ReentryVehicleDesignA...
Also, it's important to distinguish the acceleration along the axis (much easier to handle) from the perpendicular acceleration which is caused by aggressive maneuvering.
Also, Iskander is a short range ballistic missile, it is not the equivalent of the Minuteman. I don't think there is anything anywhere else that's closely comparable in capabilities to the Iskander.
“Acceleration up to 10 g's,” with tolerance for “experiencing g forces more than an order of magnitude higher.”
The tough bit is guidance system survival. For Russia, reliant on Chinese solid state tech, 50g is an accomplishment. For China or the U.S., the task is more trivial. (There is a broader point of blinded sensors.)
> don't think there is anything anywhere else that's closely comparable in capabilities to the Iskander
Because there are better tactical tools for almost every mission. Russia can’t maintain that diversity of materiel, so they monobody onto the Iskander.
Question, since you probably know more than me: what would be NATO's way of defeating a single high value target that is under good air defense? First suppression/defeat of that air defense, then launch Tomahawks or whatever other missiles are available? That's something I'd imagine an Iskander is good at. (My example may not be very realistic).
Too many branches to give a meaningful answer. What kind of air defence? How high value? What’s the urgency? Need for deniability?
Iskander does okay for all those missions. But there are better tools for each branch. There is no mission profile I can think of (which, to be clear, isn’t worth much) in which Iskander opens novel tactical space. It’s compromises across the board.
Wild Weasel air force pilots, who fly into areas of high air defense and fights it head on.
> First suppression/defeat of that air defense, then launch Tomahawks or whatever other missiles are available
Probably the opposite. Pilots and F35 are more expensive than Tomahawks. USA opened Iraq 2003 with 700+ Tomahawk missiles and then flew in with Wild Weasel pilots afterwards.
Bonus points: as the enemy shoots down Tomahawk missiles, you learn where their strongest air defense systems are.
So a massive bombardment of Tomahawk cruise missiles aimed at the most important radar / air defense systems / enemy runways, followed up by specialist pilots who train for the role of flying inside the enemy's air defense system.
Maybe 2003 Iraq is a bad example because their air defense system was basically crippled before the Wild Weasel pilots even entered the battlefield. Nonetheless, a huge saturation attack like that is what the USA is capable of. There's something to be said about just masses of missiles attacking all roughly at the same time... its really hard for defense systems to react to such a large mass.
Hypersonics beat the defense by flying faster.
To defend against a hypersonic missile, you yourself need to build a hypersonic air defense missile.
--------
I still don't know if it's a practical weapon though. It seems like normal missiles / rockets are working vs Russia (Moskova and these ammo dumps this past week).
Maybe Chinas air defense is a worthy adversary. But it's clear we ain't building these for Russia...
ICBMs go hypersonic speeds. These "hypersonic" weapons don't fly a ballistic trajectory and are therefore:
- Easy to discriminate from ICBMs (e.g. potentially not start a nuclear war if you need a conventional "fast" weapons).
- Later/harder detectable, because they fly lower it can be more difficult to detect them.
- More manoeuvrable.
- Harder to intercept, an ICBM doesn't always fly at top speed, and travels in a predictable arc.
- Fancy / cool sounding, other countries have them, so none of the major players want to feel left out.Hypersonics are being made primarily to ensure MAD. The US is building a number of ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems, including Aegis BMD, THAAD, Patriot (to an extent), and GBI. There's enough of these to defend against a handful of missiles launched from North Korea or Iran, but not against all of Russia's fleet (assuming significant numbers of them still work of course). China has a significantly smaller nuclear arsenal, so they may be worried that the US could eventually have enough BMD to render their threat of MAD non-credible. Plus, they also want conventional hypersonics to better attack carrier strike groups
I'm not totally sure why the US wants to build nuclear hypersonics, since they have enough nukes in high enough readiness that nobody's going to be able to eliminate the threat of US MAD anytime soon. I think it's being done for simple research purposes so they have an idea what their enemies' hypersonics are like, and for prestige reasons
The main thing about hypersonic weapons seems to be that others have them and US don't so it better close the hypersonic weapons gap. I suppose you never know where the technology might lead. But for example, during the Cold War, Russia had weaponry specifically designed for destroying US carrier groups, which were thought to be a major threat. Whereas US didn't need such weapons, since Russia didn't have carrier groups. So there can be a bit of asymmetry built in from the get-go.
No- ICBMs at re entry are just as fast or faster than current hypersonic weapons. Upwards of Mach 20, depending on how you want to define the Mach number, whereas hypersonic are typically in the range of Mach 5-10.
The "hypersonic" term originally comes from describing the engine type of these weapons, not the vehicle speed. But the term has somewhat evolved over time to describe most any hypersonic (speed) vehicle that's maneuverable throughout its various flight regimes (that don't already fit an existing weapon category, like some air to air missiles).
Which means they don't follow a predictable flight trajectory like ICBM's.
The lack of a predictable flight path is what makes missile defense so much more difficult, not the speed.
Given all the ammo dumps on fire this past week, it is clear that the Russian air defense system fails at subsonic rockets, let alone supersonic or hypersonic.
We'll seriously discuss air defense the moment Russia can deal with cheap rockets / Missiles (HIMARS or Neptune).
But Moskova sank and now S300 /S400 systems are getting wrecked. The Russian systems have proven to be a complete joke to a degree no one expected.
Against the Russian adversary, it has become clear that hypersonics are not needed. Neptune (subsonic sea skimming cruise missiles) and HIMARS (ballistic semi-guided subsonic rockets) are all that's actually required.
Even Israel, with limited territory that it wants to protect isn't successful in 100% of times. Currently air defense of all military powerful countries is able to defend against limited attack of ballistic missiles, not against every single rocket that MRLS spews in a span of 20 seconds.
btw Iran rocked US bases in Iraq just fine with not terribly modern rockets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Martyr_Soleimani
12 missiles, zero deaths, some concussions, advance warning to the Iraqis, and targeting a lightly-defended base; "due to the lack of a missile defense system at the bases, no missiles were intercepted".
Wouldn't read too much into it. It was a tit-for-tat response to the US droning an Iranian commander.
Vice versa. I know this.
Which is why I'm arguing in favor of missile swarms, rather than hypersonic missiles. A missile swarm will accomplish the same thing as hypersonic, in that it will overwhelm the enemy's air defenses and allow you to prioritize specific targets with high chance of success.
HIMARS rockets, launched 6 at a time (or at least, 6 in a minute), seem impossible for the Russian army to stop. They may have some systems shooting down some of these missiles, but the Ukrainians are clearly hitting a lot of important targets with just 4 HIMARS systems.
Just saturating with 6+-HIMARS coordinating and massing fire would probably be cheaper than deploying hypersonic missiles (!!!). Don't get me wrong, HIMARS are expensive... but hypersonics are __REALLY__ expensive.
Future "Swarms" of missiles can enable missile-to-missile communications (who is still alive? Anyone sensing enemy RADAR signatures that we need to dodge? Etc. etc.) to improve overall missile performance.
Also, at the start of this, Ukraine had around 100 S-300s - which is one of the reason Russia has had a difficult time. Those are effective systems. And there's a reason the US made a big deal about Turkey purchasing S-400s.
The alternative is that S-X00 systems are too expensive for Russians to deploy to protect their command posts and ammo dumps. Which... seems unlikely?
I think its more likely that the Russian systems failed, rather than the Russian army being too cheap / incompetent to deploy them to important locations like that.
------
We also have the Moskova cruiser, which was using similar missile defense systems. Given that the Moskova sank vs a Ukrainian domestic cruise missile (the Neptune missile), we know its missile defense system was defeated by subsonic "normal" missiles.
-------
I really don't know why we'd ever invest into hypersonics, at least against Russia. Its abundantly clear to me that their missile defenses just can't handle normal missiles, let alone saturation attacks or hypersonics or whatnot.
edit: respecting the Turks' rebrand, minus the special "u" character.
Their targeting is such shit they can’t avoid shooting down their own materiel. Russia’s menace is more akin to the Taliban than the USSR or China. A pest due to proximity.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1642804/Russia-weapons-...
There have been signs Russia's struggling to organize air operations.
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defe...
This by Andrei Martyanov (who's a US citizen fwiw) is worth a watch:
HIMARS rockets are small, fast ... S300 was supposed to stop them, but we can't be sure how many are getting hit even then I don't think we can accept to get a volley of 6 rockets interceded.
That said, of course Russia's used of supposed 'hypersonics' is a pointless distraction.
There isn't an obvious gap anywhere here, other than it seems PAC/Patriot systems are so expensive there are few deployed, which is a bit scary.
Also, no matter how good your AA, where there is a ton of missiles and jets, some things get through.
I read somewhere the Ukrainians were mixing cheaper non guided missiles in with the guided ones to make it harder for the Russians to shoot them all down.
Literally getting S300 to go after HIMARS rockets will grind down Russia, they simply do not have the inventory.
Recently, Russia has been using S300 as 'ground attack' munitions, going after railway junctions etc..
Which is kind of neat actually, that's a pretty dynamic bit of kit!
But extremely desperate. Limited damage for enormous cost.
If you can't stop 6x $150,000 missiles, why would I ever shoot you with a $20,000,000 hypersonic missile?
> Also, no matter how good your AA, where there is a ton of missiles and jets, some things get through.
I think swarming missiles is a better idea to overwhelm missile defense systems, rather than Hypersonics.
You don't get a swarm just because you deploy multiple missiles at the same time.
What you are describing is a saturation attack.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/02/04/air-forces-golden...
> You don't get a swarm just because you deploy multiple missiles at the same time.
A missile swarm knows that Missile #5, and #10 were shot down, and that missile #5's target was more important than Missile #1's target. A "saturation attack" won't have this effect.
Simple intelligence, not even "AI level", but some basic communications between missiles, can lead to better mission success.
A "saturation attack" means hitting an area with maybe 30 missiles and hoping all the targets get blown up. A missile swarm on the other hand, has those 30 missiles communicate, prioritizes, and focuses upon target locations as they get intercepted, all automatically. If 25 missiles get shot down, the remaining 5 missiles still hit the top 5 most important targets. If 15 missiles get shot down, the 15 missiles spread out and hit lower priority targets (rather than redundantly making the craters bigger).
-------
A "Swarm" is just an incremental upgrade to the already well performing "saturation attack" strategy. But we have enough communication systems that coordination and prioritization should be in our next-generation missile systems.
This isn't a revolution, its just a natural evolution to the age-old saturation strategy. Put simple dumb computers to make the strategy even better in the future.
And yes, there's no point in 'hypersonic missile' obviously if you can just shoot $100K rockets, but the hypersonic cruise missiles have a much bigger payload and much longer range, and, likely cannot be used in 'saturation level activities' most times.
'hypersonic' are just cruise missiles that go a bit faster.
If Russia needs to use hypersonic weapons against Ukraine, that's frankly a bit embarassing. They're either having a harder time than they should be against Ukranian air defenses, or they're low on conventional missiles.
> Additionally, US air defense tech is severely lacking compared to Russia's multilayered systems.
The continued existence of the Ukranian Air Force (including drones taking out SAM sites) and the sinking of the Moskva seem to indicate the Russian air defense advantage may have been overstated.
Additionally, an active war is the perfect time to test out new weapons systems. Plus there's no signs that Russia is running out of conventional missiles or other munitions: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
And remember, Ukrainian air defense is mostly made up of upgraded Soviet (Russian) systems which just prove that the S-x00 and others are work well. And regarding the Moskva - it was a sitting duck, and an old duck with very outdated systems.
"The stockpile is unknown, they've already burned through half their likely inventory thus far, produce only a few dozen a year, and are using balistic missiles on weird targets" seems to point to the opposite conclusion they're going for.
They can't even make cars internally right now (https://www.drive.com.au/news/russias-biggest-carmaker-lada-...) after first dropping antilock brakes and airbags (https://www.politico.eu/article/war-and-sanctions-force-lada...).
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_Military_Suprema...
He also puts together frequent youtube videos. Despite is accent, his English is great:
The type of Hypersonic weapon mentioned in this thread is one that breaths air (either scram or ram jet, I forget)and so is an entirely different beast, one which Russia has no known capability of.
You seem to have a flawed interpretation of the events in Ukraine - if anything, this war seems to highlight just how utterly advanced NATO's weaponry is against an increasingly evident paper tiger. If Russia didn't have the nuclear card to play, the situation on the ground (and air, water) would be VERY different. I doubt Russia would exist in its current state by this stage, its military having been utterly routed. Sadly for Ukraine, they hold that card and threaten it often, like all decent states do... .
- https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
- https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2019/06/26/the-r...
- https://missilethreat.csis.org/system/russian-air-defense/
Russia having lots of artillery tubes and shells has never been in doubt; it's other logistical aspects they seem to have struggled with. The gains in the Donbas are small, incremental, and balanced fairly well by losses near Kherson and Kharkiv. For the main axis of an invasion by one of the world's largest militaries, it's not much to brag about thus far.
And you believe that is a failure?
Considering that Russia's top objective is to take the Donbas, that seems like a success. Ukraine is not Iraq 2.0; they are/were the largest military in Europe outside of Russia. And that is without considering all the western weapons and training support.
Yes, it's a clear failure thus far. Unexpectedly slow progress, unexpectedly high losses, and "we just want the Donbas" was clearly not the original goal. They're having to settle for that, and they'll have to hold it.
> Considering that Russia's top objective is to take the Donbas, that seems like a success.
Maybe you can borrow George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner?
According to whom? TV news people?
> unexpectedly high losses
According to whom? Reddit armchair generals?
> clearly not the original goal
According to whom? The Kremlin never stated goals outside the original 4 or so.
I mean, state media had a victory article ready to go (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60562240), and it's fairly clear they were hoping to capture or exile Zelensky and other officials in the first few days.
> According to whom? Reddit armchair generals?
As of May, they'd lost more troops than they lost in a decade of bloody war in Afghanistan.
On the geopolitical front, it appears Putin also managed an own-goal by driving Finland and Sweden towards NATO membership. Even the most tortured propaganda doesn't manage to portray that as a goal of his.
> According to whom? The Kremlin never stated goals outside the original 4 or so.
The same Kremlin that said they didn't plan to invade Ukraine? (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/russia-te...)
Even their stated goals included Ukraine's demilitarization and "denazification". Hard to do that if you stop at the Donbas.
Yeah, no. Do we consider western editorials as official government positions?
> As of May, they'd lost more troops than they lost in a decade of bloody war in Afghanistan.
Completely meaningless. We're talking a real (kinda) near-peer war vs playing in the sandbox vs guys in sandals with AKs. It's disingenuous to compare the two, and you know it. Iraq is not even a proper comparison. You'll need to compare what's going on now with WWII combined arms battles. Maybe some of the Korean battles.
> Even their stated goals included Ukraine's demilitarization and "denazification". Hard to do that if you stop at the Donbas.
Fair enough point. Guess we'll see.
Ukraine wasn't supposed to be a a “near peer” for Russia.
> You'll need to compare what's going on now with WWII combined arms battles.
The question, really, is whether domestic public (and elite) opinion sees the costs like an outside existential threat like WWII or an external intervention of choice like Afghanistan.
If they're in state media, sure. Even our independent media is permitted to call it a war, though, not just a "special military operation".
> We're talking a real near-peer war
Sure. That it's near-peer is a surprise.
I don't think anyone beyond the ever-optimistic has at any point disputed that Russia has huge stocks of weaponry to draw from - it just doesn't have a lot of particularly technological or, dare I say it, 'graceful' weaponry to deploy.
Anyway, point here being that Russia doesn't have hypersonic weaponry in the vein tested by America here.
They do appear to want to invest in Satan-class mega ICBMs and even a nuclear-powered [highly-polluting] cruise missile, or the submarine-based nuke which 'could wipe out the British Isles' which is Putin's wet dream. Subtle. Think of the outcry if anyone in the west even considered such ridiculousness in this day and age... .
ed - anti-speed edits
US military doctrine states that an invading force needs a 3:1 attacker:defender ratio. Russia went in with the inverse of that and is still winning.
> it just doesn't have a lot of particularly technological or, dare I say it, 'graceful' weaponry to deploy.
Russia is ahead of the US with electronic warfare, ballistics and air defense. And that's a fact well recognized by western experts.
> do appear to want to invest in Satan-class mega ICBM
They've already successfully tested Satan's and will be deploying it soon. Or it's all a fake production to scare the west. What do I know.
What do we define as winning here?, Ukraines tactic is to fall back to defensive positions when they are about to lose something so not to lose men. The gains Russia has made are very small and the amount of equipment and men it has taken to make them is huge.
Most of those games where made before long range heavy western weapons started being delivered too, I suspect their gains will slow down even further because of this.
Which one is it?
Hello from Kyiv.