Hypersonic missiles are misunderstood
medium.com
medium.com
The key missing information here seems to be how many of these satellites would be required to have constant coverage of likely trajectories. This depends on the distance at which the laser remains effective. There would be no atmospheric scattering, but beam collimation is never perfect. It also depends on how fast the satellite can fire a new shot, as any warhead will be surrounded by decoys and other penetration aids. If this requires a large number of satellites, I am very sceptical. While Starlink has shown the possibility of creating large constellations, these sats would surely be much larger and more expensive. Really, Starlink makes me think something like BRILLIANT PEBBLES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) would be a more reasonable alternative.
Also, could an adversary surround the warhead with absorbent chaff as a countermeasure? Or simply an ablative shield, the warhead needs one anyway to get through the atmosphere.
Still, a very interesting read from a very interesting CEO.
Sending up a space laser seems particilarly absurd when one could send up 100(?) drone interceptors for the same cost with less R&D, especially when a drone constellation is far more resilient against anti satellite weapons.
And one way to avoid this is the other part of the hypersonic renaissance, which is the ability to dip down into the atmosphere.
Let's say raw energy content is 32MJ/L, and we have gasoline=>electricity losses of 50% and laser efficiency of 30%, so we expect a little more than 5MJ per shot.
If you can hit a 2m target moving at 5Km/s through 1000Km of space and atmosphere with 5MJ, how much energy can you put on a 1m target moving at 7m/s at a range of 500Km?
The difficulty in killing people from space will be targeting, and the limited availability of fuel and oxidator in space.
And don’t forget—-you have to fly up Tory Bruno each time to fire it.
But as a platform for assassination, it doesn’t seem so far fetched. The two main things I can think of that would make it difficult would be the much higher attenuation and scattering from the atmosphere, and the need for a different (telescope based?) target acquisition method.
Your best bet is not interacting with the atmosphere in any way, and merely adjusting for refraction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-focusing
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
Now off to make some popcorn...
Kind of by definition if something is -sonic then it's in the atmosphere. There would be less scattering but there would definitely be some on the target end.
The gliders seem to spend the entirety of their trip in the upper atmosphere, though.
From a layman's perspective, it seems like maybe DEWs should be looking at disrupting the extraordinarily delicate aerodynamics/hydrodynamics/plasmadynamics(?) of maneuvering Mach 5+ targets in atmosphere. Why do I say that? Well, if these things get consistent asymmetry in any part of their forward shock they'll spin themselves into bits, that's one. You can't shield the air with ablatives, that's second. Also, third, the sheath might be part of the communication/guidance system, so disrupting that it is good. Finally - somewhat related to second - tuning DEWs to interact with a plasma has TONS of possibilities, which helps to mitigate DEW's many many weaknesses over longer ranges. For the most part, I think DEWs will be short range wunderwaffen - particularly on the defensive end - but there's going to be niche cases.
Elon needs to talk less about peace with Russia and more about deploying weapon systems. He can make enough money from it to retire on Mars.
If the appearance doesn't match a plausible civilian satellite mission then everyone will know within hours.
In fact it would very likely lead to literally every other country ganging up on the perceived villain, or at least staying on the sidelines.
So I don't see why any launch provider in the US would participate in the intentional destruction of the US?
After such an extreme violation of norms there likely won't be anyone providing support.
Norms are violated all the time to very little consequence, sure, this would be on a whole other level but what could you do… what could anyone do… and that’s the point. I think people are over optimistic about the potential for collective action. I’m not the person who needs convincing that it’s a bad idea, that decision maker, if they even exist, is in the US government somewhere.
This is bizarrely confused, in fact such a system has been studied since the 60s, and briefly partially implemented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...
It has too many downsides to make sense to deploy.
The only scenario where it can do anything meaningful is if it's immediately used, then MAD would apply just the same.
I can't parse the rest of the comment, so read up on the historical background if your as confused as it seems.
The easiest way for North Korea to nuke Tokyo is to just put the bomb on a legitimate seeming boat, and sail it over.
Maybe the boat will get through; maybe it won't. The ship might be intercepted before it reaches the target. Or security personnel with geiger counters can find it on the dock. And so on. From North Korea's perspective (or the USSR's during the Cold War, or Russia or China now), the uncertainty of the success of such an attack makes it very, very risky to actually deploy, except maybe in a situation where you're already losing the war (and in that scenario, the odds of a successful detection by the target are obviously that much higher).
A ballistic missile, by contrast, cannot be stopped except with great, great difficulty. That's why North Korea has built missiles for its nukes, and not a fleet of cargo ships and fishing boats.
Finding it at the dock is completely useless. You can set the nuke off while still at sea and still destroy half a city.
There is no mechanism for interception of such an attack at the moment.
You need a neutron detector, rather than a Geiger counter, for nuclear material detection by the way.
But the main thing you want nuke for is as a deterrent. Get in a fight with us and we press the button. It's hard to imagine the sneaky boat trick working when North Korea is under blockade by the entire US and Japanese navies. And even if they run the blockade they're going to have trouble getting close to Tokyo.
That would require a constant stream of chaff (it would get left behind pretty quickly without any thrust), and would need to be shot out in the opposite direction of travel (lowering the missile speed the entire time), and require the chaff and its launch mechanism to be part of the payload (increasing weight).
It's incredible that 40 years after Reagan and the "Star Wars" defense plan, we finally have entities doing what seemed obvious even to high-schoolers at the time: just make the missiles zig-zag.
This is the first time I've actually read somebody making that claim. Every other take on this topic has been that defenses against long range missiles are woefully inadequate and easily saturated by a low two digit number of missiles with MIRVs.
The North Korea case shows that the step from having one missile to having 100 is extremely short compared to going from having no missiles to having one missile.
We somewhat intentionally lack defences against MAD salvos. Our defenses will likely remain adequate for defending against the likes of Pyongyang.
- "The point is that North Korea is clearly aimed at overwhelming the US missile defense system in Alaska... At that cost, I am pretty sure North Korea can add warheads faster than we can add interceptors."
https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/13150050310751232...
The idea is if to have a credible threat to keep us from acting first, as well as giving many countries a vested interest in the stability of the regime: if the Kims go, North Korea goes, and so does somebody else.
Over 10,000 have been built. The R&D cost should have been amortized away by now.
https://veteransbreakfastclub.org/scuds-vs-patriots-desert-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Riyadh_missile_strike
"However, according to Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at CNS, the Saudis failed to intercept the missiles following a malfunction of the MIM-104 Patriot system.[3] One video appeared to show a Patriot missile launch on Sunday night go rapidly wrong, with the missile changing course midair, crashing into a neighborhood in Riyadh and exploding. Another appeared to detonate shortly after being launched in the Saudi capital. " Pretty much the same failure mode as 30 years ago I would say, so maybe those ancient documents are still relevant today.
That's 10% of all patriots manufactured in 1 year.
The Russians also arrested the scientists who helped develop the Kinzhal and charged them with treason due to the apparent failure during this attack.[3] Not something you usually do if your weapon system is successful.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-patriot-kinzha... [2]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-06/ukraine-s... [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-hypersonic-missile...
Arrests happened previously, and then 3 additional individuals were arrested after the most recent attack.
In total, there are currently 16 individuals related to the program who have been arrested. 3 of them are facing life in prison for treason.
The Ukrainian air force itself even denied that any Kinzhals had been shot down:
https://news.yahoo.com/ukrainian-air-force-denies-reports-13...
> On May 4, 2023, Ukraine used a U.S.-supplied Patriot battery to down a Russian Kinzhal missile, which Russian President Vladimir Putin had announced in 2018 was a “hypersonic” weapon that could overcome all existing air defense systems. Russia’s state news agency tried to maintain this claim by arguing that the shootdown was a fake report. Yet just 12 days afterward, Ukraine shot down six Kinzhals [1] that Russia fired in an assault on Kyiv. Both shootdowns have been verified by U.S. government sources.[2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/world/europe/ukraine-russ... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2023/05/23/u...
Additionally, an open letter from the Russian scientific community was published strongly denouncing these arrests this month. The "media" isn't being misleading - they are reporting the events as they are happening.
>Ukraine Says
Surely Ukraine, being in the middle of a war, would have no incentive to lie for propaganda purposes. As the other commenter pointed out they were arrested way earlier and the reason was because they sold secrets to China not because of any failure of the project.
The US has a variable capacity for Patriot missile manufacturing but its baseline far exceeds the 300 missiles per year that you quoted.
That said, it's not necessarily due to failure to intercept that this happened - we have video of 30 interceptors being launched in rapid succession, and it's likely all 32 interceptors in the battery had been launched and expended when the final strike and explosion happened. So it's more of a successful saturation attack than an interception failure.
Syrian civil war (2014–)
{...}
In July 2016, two Israeli Patriot missiles missed an incoming drone launched from Syria, according to Russian media. Israeli Air Defence Command fired two Patriot missiles, but they did not manage to destroy the target. Russia Today stated that the drone penetrated four kilometers into Israeli airspace, and then flew back into Syria. In June 2018, a single Israeli Patriot missile was fired toward a drone which was approaching Israel from Syria. The missile missed its target, and the drone turned back to Syria.
Service with Saudi Arabia
In March 2018, another missile, apparently fired from Yemen, was intercepted by a Patriot missile over Riyadh. Missile experts via news agencies cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Saudi Arabian Patriot defense. According to videos, one interceptor exploded just after launch and another did a "U turn" midair toward Riyadh.
In September 2019, the six battalions of Patriot missile defense systems owned by Saudi Arabia failed to protect its oil facilities from attacks by multiple drones and suspected cruise missiles during the Abqaiq–Khurais attack.
It could be completely different technology today, but still have the same lack of accurate reporting.
How would we know? "Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say"
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/node...
Thanks in major part to Israel, modern patriot systems have been rigorously tested via fire. To equate the current systems to the ones from 30 years ago is very disingenuous.
Patriot missile batteries in Ukraine have so far successfully intercepted all Khinzal Hyper-sonic Missiles launched by Russia. (At least, the ones that entered their Area of Operation)
[1] IIRC Ukrainians and US say there were 29 incoming missiles; Russians say there were 6 or may be 9 (unsure). Both numbers are probably made up, and truth is probably in the middle, 12 to 18 or so.
It also shot down Russian hypersonic missiles [1]. I don't know which variant [2] we sent Kyiv, but this is almost certainly an old PATRIOT battery taking out "cutting edge" Russian hypersonics.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/air-defence-systems-rep...
[2] https://www.armyrecognition.com/united_states_american_missi...
It is hypersonic, but it follows a very predictable high-altitude trajectory, so it's the easiest kind of hypersonic missile to intercept.
I read a good thread about the various kinds of hypersonics a while ago, but can't find it now. Broadly, there are three classes: hypersonic cruise missiles (like Tomahawk but much faster), hypersonic glide vehicles (basically ballistic missile warheads with wings), and classical ballistic missiles. It's the former two which are new and scary. This touches on it, but is rather one-sided: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2023/05/23/u...
You're absolutely correct, by the way. And that's the author's point. (Which I've been partial towards for a long time.) Hypersonic missiles are not the game changer they're claimed to be, and to the degree they open new tactical ground, the United States is well set to at the very least match adversaries' capabilities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_%27super_weapons%27
I've heard Avangard lacks propulsive glide. That means it's ballistic in space, and only maneuverable (at the expense of range and speed) at the terminal phase. This is solvable because it's old tech–basically MIRVs.
> rocket launched into orbital flight, which later re-entered the atmosphere and released a maneuverable glide vehicle travelling at hypersonic speeds
https://www.apln.network/analysis/policy-briefs/chinese-frac...
https://stateofthenation.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/FOBS-...
Furthermore, it can in principle come from any direction, which was relevant historically when it was expected that Soviet ICBMs would come over the North Pole.
I think the deal with the Avengard (and the US C-HGB as used on the soon-to-be-deployed LRHW) is bigger wings / lifting body giving it greater maneuvering capacity through a flatter flight phase trading more of its speed for lateral displacement than earlier maneuverable ballistic missile warheads.
There are zero such missiles. It's all marketing BS. They have air launched ballistic missiles. These are not "hypersonic missiles" by any accepted definition.
(If the Russian definition is valid, then the V2 was a "hypersonic missile").
https://www.raytheonmissilesanddefense.com/what-we-do/hypers...
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/hypersonic...
and apparently the Chinese:
https://theconversation.com/chinas-hypersonic-missiles-threa...
You forgot "Kiev says".
it's simply the bayesian prior at this point; the null hypothesis
The first day of war: Ukraine says that Russian warship killed with missiles all Ukranian border guards on the Zmeiniy island. Everyone is shocked by this senseless cruelty. Russian MoD says that guards are taken prisoners. Nobody believes.
Two weeks later: Ukrainian Defence Minister gives medals to the border guards safely returned to Kiev.
1. there is no such thing as "The Ukraine" anymore, only Ukraine, as in the independent country with internationally recognized borders [including Crimea]
2. given russia's long history of dishonesty in their claims (e.g. 'we won't attack Ukraine, that's just western propaganda', 'we are the victims and not the aggressors', 'we aren't raping children in Ukraine'), the truth is, by default, most likely to be the opposite of what russia says (but of course, subject to dispute if russia actually has reliable verified evidence of their claims)
again, it's simply the bayesian prior at this point; the null hypothesis
indeed, whataboutism itself is a form of dishonest debate which was invented, and is used to distract from russia's long history of dishonesty (here for example).
guess who invented it? russia, of course.
So you don't bother to google and check if the Ukraine has a habit of lying too, and prefer to believe anything coming from Kiev only because Russia says the opposite.
The word 'whataboutism' is a form of dishonest debate and used to distract from critique of double standards.
"guess who invented it? russia, of course."
I'd say it was invented during Cold War by some American in search of rhetorical device to distract from their double standards.
Same with the giant flashes in the sky.
Even the US says there was 'minimal damage'. [0]
There is no evidence to the number of Kinzhals launched and to the number of Kinzhals intercepted.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/16/politics/patriot-missile-...
Yes, minimal damage from flying debris from something, but it's clear from that satellite imagery nothing hit any part of an actual patriot.
> There is no evidence to the number of Kinzhals launched and to the number of Kinzhals intercepted.
Exactly, no evidence of anything but minimal damage to a patriot either. Kinda pathetic given the size of the attack that Russia cannot even take out one air defense system that they clear know where is.
Including the number of 'intercepted' Kinzhals which is exactly my point. I don't see what you are trying to argue about.
only the changing behavior of russia can change russia's history of behavior, and it can choose to change in a more honest direction anytime (but has not done so)
if russia says A, we can assume !A due to russia's history of dishonesty, literally with no other information necessary
someone else being dishonest, even if true, doesn't make russia more honest, so we can still assume !A
indeed, because russia's history of dishonesty is so long and strong, we can stop right there, unless russia proves its probable lies are actually truthful (such is the fate of a liar)
if they don't like it, they can start being honest and keep it up for a few decades to show they've changed
indeed, calling the world's totally normal reaction to russia's history of dishonesty "russophobia" seems a little defensive and russophilic
When two governments give mutually exclusive statements, you can't just pick one country and say this one is always lying because that would mean that you think that another habitual liar is always telling the truth. Or you can, but that just makes you a russophobe.
given such a false equivalence, and even more whataboutism, it is then good that that opinion is not the opinion of most countries in the world (by UN vote)
after all, fewer than 3% of countries, representing fewer than 3% of people in the world, were willing to go on record saying they trust russia's claims and excuses when they said the same thing
> When two governments give mutually exclusive statements, you can't just pick one country and say this one is always lying
I didn't say they're always lying, I pointed out that's simply the default state until russia PROVES its claims.
can we do that? it depends: is one of them russia, a country with a long history of lying more often than telling the truth on matters such as this?
if so, then you totally can treat it as the default, because again, and for the third time: X being dishonest doesn't make russia honest, only russia being honest makes russia honest
meanwhile, you can't just ignore russia's dishonesty by resorting to whataboutism and finger pointing and 'but america/Ukraine/the west...': you must address russia's dishonesty directly.
> that just makes you a russophobe
does it though? That doesn't seem to actually be the case.
indeed, calling the world's totally normal reaction to russia's history of dishonesty "russophobia" seems a little defensive and russophilic
Only two countries voted against the Russia-proposed resolution condemning rehabilitation of nazism. Can you guess which countries? Right. The Ukraine and the US.
51 in the most recent iteration of Russia’s annual hollow ritual, that has gotten extra hollow as it has become the main current implementor of exactly the things for which the Nazis are generally condemned, from aggressive war to genocide:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/11/09/w...
What exactly makes it hollow?
"to genocide"
Now this was hollow. Or do you call war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan by the US and its allies [0][1] a genocide too?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_Afghanistan#NATO...
to get back on topic: russian soldiers have been found by UN war crimes investigators to have raped, tortured, and murdered men, women, and children as young as 4, in areas of Ukraine russia controls[0]
(this child rape by russians is in addition to genociding Ukrainians in general -- and I'm not referring to russian deportation of Crimean Tatars [1], or russian killing of millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor [2])
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-troops-raped-tort...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tat...
This reminds me of something [0].
"In her testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, remove the incubators and leave the babies to die."
The fact that it is nonbinding resolution ritually offered every year, connected to no substantive action.
> Or do you call war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan by the US and its allies a genocide too?
No, because “genocide” has a definition, and its not synonymous with the broader category of “war crimes”. Attempts to destroy a people as a people, as Russia is fairly overtly doing in Ukraine (accompanied by propaganda, as such efforts often are, denying that the identity sought to be destroyed is legitimate) is genocide. Other war crimes – which Russia is also committing Ukraine – are, well, other war crimes.
That's a good starting point.
"Attempts to destroy a people as a people, as Russia is fairly overtly doing in Ukraine"
Here is the definition [0]. Now what Russian actions fit it?
All General Assembly resolutions are nonbinding. Including all of them that condemn the war in the Ukraine.
"ritually"
That's your perception.
"connected to no substantive action"
You might ask Ukraine why doesn't it follow the resolution and doesn't take any actions to stop rehabilitating Nazi collaborators. [0]
> Only two countries voted against the Russia-proposed resolution condemning rehabilitation of nazism. Can you guess which countries? Right. The Ukraine and the US.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/11/09/w...
>> Canada and the United States (the only country to have consistently voted against these resolutions for the past 10 years) justified their opposition to this draft resolution, believing that it aimed to "legitimize a discourse based on disinformation."
If you support with money and weapons a country which renamed dozens of streets to glorify Nazi collaborators, why would you vote for the resolution condemning rehabilitation of Nazism?
There are almost 20 streets named after Bandera, the leader of OUN-B, in the Ukraine [0], including a big one in the center of the Ukraine's capital. Ukraine's ambassador to Germany compared him to Robin Hood [1].
Here is what two countries that now support Ukraine used to say before the war[2][3].
"Last week, Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine, Joel Lion, and his Polish counterpart Bartosz Cichocki wrote officials an open letter condemning the government-sponsored honoring of Stepan Bandera and Andryi Melnyk, two collaborators with the Third Reich.
The two have written on the subject before. In 2018, Lion wrote that he was shocked at an earlier act of veneration for Bandera, saying: “I cannot understand how the glorification of those directly involved in horrible anti-Semitic crimes helps fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia.”
...
Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel has told Jerusalem to butt out of the debate about honoring of Nazi collaborators."
"Israel and Poland, which have clashed repeatedly in recent years over differing interpretations of the history of the Second World War, came together on Thursday to issue a rare joint condemnation of Ukraine over its efforts to rehabilitate nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis.
The criticism came one day after Ukrainians marked the 111th birthday of Stepan Bandera, the wartime leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a violently anti-Semitic organization that collaborated with the Nazis. Among Holocaust historians, the consensus is that the OUN and its military offshoot, known as the UPA, were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and up to 100,000 Poles during the war (estimates vary)."
[0] https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Категорія:Вулиці_Степана_Банде...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ukraine-hasbetter-he...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-tells-israel-to-stay-o...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gdy&next=35753394
> If you support with money and weapons a country which renamed dozens of streets to glorify Nazi collaborators, why would you vote for the resolution condemning rehabilitation of Nazism?
Because the is more about Russia using its place within these organisations to try and further its own goals and justify its brutal invasion of Ukraine more then trying to combat Nazism.
I mean, the irony isn't lost on me here that Russia, a country who's main PMC force in Ukraine and abroad is named after Hitlers favourite composer, and whose leader has SS lightning bolts tattooed on his lapel is pushing a UN resolution to "combat Nazism".
So that's why West is ok with rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators in the EU/NATO candidate country. Got it.
"the irony isn't lost on me"
So your line is that Russia has Nazis too so Nazis are fine? Or what?
speaking of UN votes:
fewer than 3% of countries, representing fewer than 3% of people in the world, were willing to go on record saying they trust russia's claims and excuses when they said the same thing
can you guess who they were?
hint: one was russia
[0] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Russophobia
Of course, the Russian story of "destroying" the Patriot battery is also clearly exaggerated. It's quite probable that the most visible and easily targeted radar module got destroyed, while the rest of the system is fully intact or got hit lightly by debris.
There's no reason to believe that the radar got destroyed at all. The explosions on the ground were confirmed to be hits on the airport terminal (aftermath pictures are available). Obviously, no part of a Patriot system likely to be inside a building.
Last I heard though, those hits were caused by normal Kalibr cruise missiles. It is a bit concerning that those got through, hopefully they learn from it. But not surprising, because it is challenging for a radar to search for objects both above it and at ground level around it simultaneously.
This phrasing suggests that the only objective that Patriot had was to defend itself, which it failed. However, Patriot system in question was also tasked with defending a lot of critical objects in Kiyv, all of which have not been hit.
Any system can be saturated and overrun. To make an honest assessment, we need to know exactly how many Patriot systems were on the ground, and how many targets were they tasked to protect.
- The Patriot system is modular, there are pictures of the different parts on Wikipedia[0]. When Russia says they've destroyed a Patriot, what exactly have they hit? The radar? A launcher? Hitting one component of the system is not exactly the same as destroying the whole thing.
- Decoys are used during these attacks. Both Russia[1] and Ukraine[2] use them. Even if no one lies, I assume that the number of targets seen by the defenders will always be higher than the number of missiles launched.
---
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/us/russia-ukraine-weapons...
You could also strike the ships, which Ukraine has, but Russia keeps them far enough from Ukraine-held. territory now that that is challenging.
The lack of adequate deep strike weapons (and possibly political constraints on the use of some of what they have that is externally sourced) is a real problem for Ukraine, to be sure. Given how badly Russia has been underperforming for its on-paper advantages other areas, I’m tempted to say that the deep strike asymmetry is the main reason Russia is able to continue the war at all.
Ukraine has been using what they have to hit Black Sea Fleet ships and fairly deep bomber bases, but their capacity to do either is limited.
> Any engagement I can imagine involving NATO would not be constrained to such ridiculous, sad, and unfair asymmetry.
That is... something of an understatement, yes.
A baseball analogy, an excellent, best in the world baseball batter will hit 4 out of every ten balls thrown at him. that is still an awful lot of balls that get through.
For real world numbers note how well Israel does against all the ballistic missiles thrown at them, also note that these are slow short range ballistic missiles.
They're artillery rockets [1][2]. Not maneuverable to my knowledge, but continuously (and noisily) accelerating.
> baseball batter will hit 4 out of every ten balls thrown at him
if you're talking about batting .400, that's 4 per 10 "at-bats", where each at-bat will on average consist of a multiple of balls thrown.
)
Its clearly a mostly unuseable trade chip of buying projected security for buying weapon exports. Which is okay, but for actual protection, look towards countries who actually use the equipment they have regularly in a warzone against a opponent similar to the expected opponent. Israel, turkey, other middle eastern countries, lots of african and some south american countries come to mind.
Everything else is.. a mixed bag
The US maintains a rather small inventory of interceptors because for the past few decades only small strikes by rogue nations or accidental launches by major powers have been considered likely threats, and a large number of interceptors jeopardizes mutually assured destruction, which has been a much more cost effective counter against large scale nuclear exchanges. But there's nothing saying the US needs to stick to the current number if the global geopolitical situation changes.
It is assumed right now that the threat from Russia and China is met by the concept of mutually assured destruction, as neither Russia or China have a vast quantity of missile interceptors that could be truly relied upon to destroy hundreds of incoming US missiles. And the fact that US missiles can come from almost anywhere via submarine launch platforms.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/ruaf-glide-bombs-u...
For example, using gliding bombs rather then missiles or dropping dumb bombs from overhead.
Except it costs many times more to make an anti-ballistic-missile interceptor then the original ballistic missile.
There's a fundamental asymmetry here, because interceptors have to be extremely high performance to be useful but the launching missiles can be as cheap as possible as long as it can throw enough penetration aids into the approximate trajectory.
So regardless of how much is spent on such a program, any country could spend a small fraction to fully defeat it, maybe as little as 10%.
Since they’re fools (read: potentially getting nuked) either way it could appear rational to invoke MAD with a preemptive strike.
That doesn't sound correct to me. They're both rockets, one is much larger than the other and has a payload (in the case where we're looking at a failure of deterrence) made out outrageously expensive material. I mean, you can construct an argument that one is already built and paid for, or that 70's/80's technology was cheaper inherently, etc...
But from first principles, no. An ICBM is more expensive than an ABM.
The launching missile can carry dozens of penetration aids, each one needing an interceptor warhead.
Plus, the physical structure and fuel are by far the cheapest parts, it's everything else, guidance systems, maneuvering systems, etc., that make up the majority of the cost. Which each interceptor warhead needs but which dumb penetration aids don't.
Good job though. Honestly the numbers are closer than I'd have expected. But ICBMs remain more expensive.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3180997/nor...
I'd say that it's exactly the fuel, the engine, and the whole chassis of an anti-ballistic missile what's so expensive. An ABM has very little time to do its job. It has to launch instantly, and accelerates at 100g or so, and then must also maneuver at this circumstances. It should also pack enough punch to destroy a warhead which is a relatively small metal needle, built to withstand the mechanical and thermal loads of an orbital reentry.
As a contrast, an ICBM can start with much more soft acceleration, can spend 10-20 seconds preparing for launch without loss of efficiency, and does not have to maneuver much during ascent and the orbital part.
It's literally sending up some of the most sophisticated vehicles ever made by mankind to defeat mostly chunks of metal. Hence why even the US can't afford it in any meaningful quantities.
Everything on an interceptor is much more expensive because of the much higher performance requirements. But the fuel and structure will still be a lot cheaper compared to the rest of system.
Hence why nobody really wants to weaponize space, spending money on military systems that have no survivability isn't very attractive.
And remember that acceleration is what costs, not speed. To shoot down an ICBM you need to hit it with a similar mass at a similar speed, and you need to do it in less time (because the ICBM launched first), so your interceptor needs to accelerate harder.
Why would it need to be a similar mass?
To intercept a missile you need to intercept it - that's it. You don't need to be traveling the same speed, or have the same mass, you just need to be physically where it is at the time it's there.
ICBMs aren't armored - and they can't be. They're spacecraft of a sort, and doing almost any amount of intentional damage will prevent them from functioning. Nuclear warheads are hard to detonate - the behavior if disrupted is the weapon likely goes inert because you've ruined the implosion mirror or timing circuitry.
The problem is that interception is hard because your engagement times are very short, and you're off-trajectory. Initial deviations in your aiming create larger and larger errors at the target, and any sort of maneuverability on the warhead's part means you're unlikely to be able to correct in time - hence the focus on trying to hit missiles in the boost phase, when they're by necessity more predictable.
Some subjects, like computer science, which is still a very young area of study are very open to learnings from first principles. Others, like the geopolitics of nuclear deterrence, are deeper than any one person can even begin to understand.
The objective of National Missile Defense isn't to stop all the warheads, it's to make the attacker's job harder. There's a bunch of ways it does that. One is that the defender gets to choose what it stops. So they can stop all the warheads going to one target. But the attacker doesn't know ahead of time, so they need to launch enough warheads at each target to destroy it regardless of whether it's actually defended or not. So 1550 warheads no longer hit 750 targets, but rather they hit 75 targets. It really sucks to be one of those 75 targets, because most of them get absolutely destroyed, but the other 90% of potential targets are much better off, because they didn't get hit at all.
Another way is that ballistic missile accuracy depends on how far away from the target it gets separated from the missile bus that has the guidance system. If they separate too late, the interceptor will hit the bus before separation. Which kills all the warheads. So they have to move it back, which makes it less accurate, which means it's more likely the warhead will miss the target.
A third way is that they may decide they need to carry penetration aids. But there's a bunch of really fancy tricks radars and IR sensors can do to see which is a real thing, and which isn't, which amount to: the penetration aid which is best at mimicking a warhead ends up being the same size and shape as a real warhead. So they might as well just use a real warhead.
That's ballistic warheads, add any maneuvering re-entry capability and ABM defences are complete joke. Luckily for the humanity, MAD is alive and well.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/disastrous-us-approach-stra...
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-missile-defense/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/30/15713966/ballistic-missil...
https://www.extremetech.com/defense/182175-the-united-states...
https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/05/28/pentagon-hit...
https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/08/21/dod-tanks-re...
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-10/news/pentagon-seeks-...
https://missilethreat.csis.org/a-new-generation-of-homeland-...
Attackers can choose where to attack. Defenders have to defend every city. For example, THAAD can protect about a 200km radius, so for every ICBM and SLBM, you need to add an additional missile to EVERY one of hundreds of sites.
They also need to all be kept ready at all times, replaced periodically etc.
The real goal is quite different. The math starts to look very different when the defender can choose where to defend.
Assume a first strike against the US. The US has ~400 siloed missiles and a handful of airbases that can launch bombers. A reasonable goal for a first strike is to destroy those, preventing or substantially limiting a counterattack. Assuming some failure rate, using 2 warheads per silo gives you some redundancy, so 800 warheads needed for this phase of the attack.
What good is 40 intercepters against 800 incoming warheads? The US can choose which of those 800 to target. 40 intercepters can protect 20 silos from two incoming each. And that means the US can counterattack. To guarantee killing every single silo, the attacker must now have 20+2 warheads targeted at every single silo. The attacker has to build far far more offensive weapons than the defender needs to build intercepters, if the attacker wishes to avoid a counterattack.
Protection of the population comes from MAD alone, not by interception. (this of course isn't a reassuring thought, so this case isn't really made to the public).
That is why maneuvering hypersonics are considered such a threat: it removes the predictability of which warheads are going to land where, preventing that kind of choice of where to defend.
That’s what SSBNs are for.
But there are other strategic targets in or near cities. And those, it goes from having 2 warheads each, to havine 20+2 warheads each. So for the cities that don't get defended, it really sucks. But now instead of 1550 warheads hitting ~750 targets, it's 1550 warheads hitting ~75 targets. Because the attacker doesn't know what's going to survive to the target and has to choose their top targets that must get plastered.
Except it's worse: AEGIS BMD ships can launch from pierside. They don't have the range to defend the entire US but do for about half the US. So that's another wrench in attacker's plans (exactly how many SM-3 can hit depends on how many missiles are available at that time, which is a much more difficult thing to determine than the number of GMD interceptors).
MAD isn't a military doctrine. You won't see it on any doctrine publication of any service. The problem is the "Mutual" part. We don't want to die for our country. We want the other poor bastards to die for there. It's merely "Assured Destruction".
But even if you did just have to build large numbers of short range interceptors, that's still perfectly acceptable. Likewise for upkeep and maintenance. You don't need to protect everything, you only need to protect the targets that justify the cost.
There's a lot more it to than that. These systems are not only absurdly expensive (Patriots [1] costs about $1 billion for the system, and $4 million for a missile - probably more nowadays on both accounts), but also entail extensive training, operational, repair, and general logistic issues. A single Patriot requires a skilled crew of ~90 to operate with a peak theoretic range of < 100 miles.
And the systems are not invincible. When Russia either damaged or destroyed one recently in Ukraine, it seems they did the most obvious strategy and simply drained its battery (which seemed to hold ~32 missiles) before going after the system itself. Finally I'd also add in manufacturing and other issues. The manufacturing of alot of these systems has major practical raw material constraints (to say nothing of the manufacturing itself) when you talk about doing things at truly large scale.
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That said, I agree this idea sounds more like a MIC money grab than anything else. You'd need a ridiculous number of these systems to provide sufficient coverage, it'd entail completely scrapping the Outer Space Treaty creating an overt weaponization race, and also create some really juicy targets for relatively cheap anti-satellite missile systems. The reality is that there is no such thing as a perfect defense because it's just so much easier, and cheaper, to create a +1 version of offense, in the scenario of a peer to peer battle.
Not that it means that what he says is necessarily untrue but you have to take it with a huge grain of salt. While definitely a subject expert, Tony Brunoula is approximately as far from a neutral party as one can be on this question.
But since I didn't know the author, it took me to the last paragraph and his signature to notice he's actually trying to sell us on the idea of putting actual Death Ray satellites in space.
That's kind of cool too, but I'm sure it's a very bad idea to combine worldwide surveillance and killer lasers in space.
p.s. there's a joke in there for Marjorie Taylor Greene...
This is also an essential component of a planetary asteroid defence system.
One could theoretically tune the power and wavelength of the beam such that it's highly destructive in space and the upper atmosphere, but mostly a nuisance on the ground.
More realistic proposals for planetary defense call for focusing on long range detection and then using a gravity tractor or a rocket motor landed on the asteroid to slowly nudge it off course.
Military solid state lasers are finally getting powerful enough to be useful. Below 100KW, they weren't effective enough, and it took decades to get the power up. Northrop-Grumman delivered a 150KW laser to the Navy in 2021. Lockheed-Martin delivered a 300KW demo unit last year.[1] These are ground or sea based. Israel's Iron Beam system tried lasers, but below 100KW, and only useful against small rockets and drones. Since that's what their opposition shoots at them, it's useful.
Space-based lasers have lots of problems, from cooling to being big targets themselves. But they're a much less silly idea than they were in the 1980s.
We may be seeing the biggest reversal in war since late WWI - defense may be stronger than offense again. Historically, this has gone back and forth. In the era of castles, defense was stronger. Then came artillery. WWI started out with defense being stronger - nobody could advance against machine guns. Then came tanks and the beginnings of air power. Offense has usually been stronger since then. Now we're entering an era where nobody has air superiority. There's a mostly empty sky. If it flies, it dies. On the ground, tanks are now very vulnerable to man-portable weapons.
When defense is stronger, wars lead to bloody stalemates, like Ukraine. Nobody can force a decision. Battles are long, bloody and destructive. The winning side gets to own the ruins.
[1] https://newatlas.com/military/lockheed-martin-delivers-recor...
The danger here is everyone filling space with satellites as a means of defense. When the war starts, Kessler Syndrome kicks in, and everyone loses their defenses in a few days.
Ground based lasers may have less range, etc, but they can be hardened, protected, even hidden.
Imho, we'll see a day where every major city on the planet has a set of anti missile lasers.
(Also the distance would be a problem for a variety of reasons)
No, these defenses would be in low orbit, and low orbits are rapidly self cleaning. Kessler Syndrome is only for high orbits.
There no reason for an attacking missile to go into a high orbit, they would stay pretty low.
Yes, some satellites can self-boost with ion drives giving them longer life in lower orbits, but they can't do that very often or for very long due to reaction mass limits. You're still talking about orbits where debris would last years.
Also, "the same orbit" is the best/worst case scenario, since after an impact any new orbit still passes through the point of impact, but if the new orbit is more elliptic than the original (which most likely was close to circular), then it has a lower perigee, where most of the drag occurs, and thus would get dragged down faster than in the original orbit.
If a satellite is in a low orbit that needs re-boosting every few years, then the debris from its destruction would get cleared out in weeks or months.
If you deploy defensively, you can keep sats working fine even Kessler Syndrom existed on some orbits. You can hide things in space as well.
Mainstream discussion so far limited to the tactic/operation layer in farflung battle fields. More pertinent is strategic layer where this desperate race for ABM is due to offensive rocketry / long range conventional strikes is increasingly openning up CONUS for attack. Which is the biggest reversal against US primacy since Revolutionary war. US homefront being ground to existential halt because ABM can't prevent adversaries from blowing up US refineries will place vast constraints on US willingness to defend interests abroad. When homelands are mutually vunerable - something US hasn't had to factor into calculations - it becomes much harder for US specifically to unilaterally force decisions, something it would otherwise do with relative impunity when adversaries could not disrupt CONUS.
Pretty sure once you’ve got that 300kW space laser up there someone is going to find an offensive use for it.
The article seems to talk about strategic hypersonic but I’ve mostly read about them for attacking ships and bases that are likely to have defenses. Ground point defenses might be cheaper than space constellation.
I think lasers have potential to change warfare. For example, naval warfare gets really weird if lasers can shoot down missiles and maybe even shells. Do they use torpedos?
See the movie "Real Genious" and have some popcorn.
It failed to reach orbit due to a faulty gimbal or gyroscope.
But speed at that level is basically irrelevant for interception etc.
Other people use Hypersonic to mean able to manoeuvre at those speeds. A normal ICBM, especially the old ones, cannot do that. They follow a simple, predictable, course to their targets. In theory that makes it easier to hit them. Only no one can do that. People have done a respectable job of shooting down non-ICBMs. But ICBMs are 10-100 times faster, further away, higher, etc. And no one will use 1, they will use 1000 and it is dooms day unless you intercept 990 of those.
So all of this is really just a mix of honest ignorance (and confusing terms) and dishonest sensationalism...
The point of a hypersonic missile is to NOT follow a simple parabolic curve to the target. That is what hypersonic really means: able to manoeuvre at speeds about the speed of sound. That makes it harder to intercept. Only no one can intercept an ICBM anyway.
Interestingly this is why the first Hypersonic missile was actually build in the 1930s...
Not saying its necessarily wrong now, but it was definitely very expensively wrong the last time.
Yes there are differences, but science and technology have moved on substantially. Just because it was wrong the last time does not mean it is going to be wrong this time.
Yeah, but (1) that’s orders of magnitude less than SDI, and (2) it actually did the thing.
If I built something like SDI, and I put it in HOE, the next thing I'd do is tell everyone else that it didn't work.
We still don't know the content of a few shuttle launches, as well as many ULA launches.
I think SDI was completed and functions.
(But yes, SDI had almost no chance of working at the time.)
For intercepting swarms of cheap drones? It's a great fit! Space-based lasers for intercepting ICBMs? Maybe? But true hypersonic weapons (which Kinzhal is not) fly only in air (after all, they use oxygen in it to fly), while being covered in a plasma shield which is really good at absorbing all kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
Meanwhile, with high enough laser power you get instabilities in air which act as a natural diverging lens for your beam, drastically reducing effective range of your system. Push power even further to compensate for it and you will get plasma, which does even better job at dispersing energy of your beam. So in the end, you get a very short range interception system with a minuscule time frame to perform interception of a hypersonic target.
> For this thesis, an atmospheric propagation code named ANCHOR (Atmospheric NPS Code for High Energy Laser Optical pRopagation) was developed and utilized to study the propagation of high energy lasers in various atmospheric conditions and for numerous laser configurations. The ANCHOR code accesses existing industry databases to obtain relevant optical properties for various atmospheres and then uses scaling laws to simulate laser propagation through the defined environments. ANCHOR accounts for the effects of atmospheric diffraction, turbulence, platform jitter and thermal blooming on the laser beam, and outputs on-target irradiance and power-in-the-bucket profiles for a wide range of laser wavelengths. Several known physical trends associated with laser propagation will be reproduced, and the results will be compared to the industry accepted propagation code Wavetrain. The results of ANCHOR studies will indicate that the 100 kW-class high energy laser can effectively engage slow-moving targets at ranges greater than five kilometers in clear weather by delivering enough energy to melt 0.1 liters of one millimeter-thick aluminum aircraft skin in five seconds. For hazy, turbulent, and rainy conditions, the laser can effectively engage targets from ranges closer than three kilometers, but reasonable dwell times are only achieved for ranges closer than two kilometers.
It addresses a lot of the same topics as this Medium article.
“Development of orbital weaponry was largely halted after the entry into force of the Outer Space Treaty and the SALT II treaty. These agreements prohibit weapons of mass destruction from being placed in space. As other weapons exist, notably those using kinetic bombardment, that would not violate these treaties, some private groups and government officials have proposed a Space Preservation Treaty which would ban the placement of any weaponry in outer space.”
Hence ULA CEO proposing giant space lasers™ which obviously will not be defense only in the long run. The same way the US "defense industry" has never defended.
And who is going to stop the Chinese from putting weapons into orbit? Heck they might've done it already and we'd be none the wiser.
A laser being able to destroy a low flying high speed missile hardend against those is probably also able to a lot more. Like destroy enemy planes. Or combatants. Or heads of states. Or pesky journalists/dissidents.
Allowing sth like this to be deployed, not sure if this can be allowed by eg other nation states. It certainly puts the status quo in disarray...
I assume we're talking about either battery+solar cell or nuclear power on those satellites?
Also even on land with the diesel generator, I assume the generator is charging up batteries or super capacitors and not hooked up directly to the laser. Estimating a ~30 second laser discharge, only the most gigantic diesel generators can convert a gallon of diesel to electricity in half a minute.
Sure, but surely there will be a maximum total power storage that a satellite will have, and if that totals, say, 50 missile zaps, them don't you have the same problem that the enemy could send 51?
When 51 missiles are on their way, you don't have time to recharge from the sun.
And unlike the diesel generator you can't quickly add more power storage the week before when you see what the enemy is about to do.
That's not how it would be in a war. Their usage would be exactly zero, and then basically continuous. Not bursty at all - more like off, and then full on.
Energy for the space weapon would be a large problem.
> only the most gigantic diesel generators can convert a gallon of diesel to electricity in half a minute.
That's what they use - the generator is the size of an 18 wheeler.
IDK, I see it quite likely that even close to single-shot capability would be good enough. For the kind of a war where you need defence from ICBMs or hypersonic missiles, the active phase of that war has always been expected to last something like half an hour, as both sides launch all the missiles due to the 'use-it-or-lose-it' mechanic where your launch platforms expect to be destroyed by incoming fire and have to spend all their munitions before enemy missiles arrive; and the active phase of a missile defence is even shorter - a few minutes, as most of the arsenal would be launched in a single wave to overwhelm any defences.
So if a satellite needs a month of charging to top up its batteries after some test firing, that's as good as if it needed just an hour; it should be optimized for peak performance of a single relatively short burst of shots, and one with a very fast reaction time - you don't get five minutes of warning to start and spin up a huge generator.
Does anyone know why this is the case? Do mirrored surfaces trigger some sort of internal reflection which ends up absorbing more energy?
I expect the counter will be more along the lines of having sufficient ablating material to block the laser - a small amount of extra armour probably has an outsize affect on survivability.
The SR71 was famously painted black as a mitigation for surface heating issues because the black paint conducted heat away from the areas the were really susceptible to ram-heating.
Perhaps reflective surfaces reflect some percentage of the incoming energy away, but thermally conductive surfaces conduct a larger percentage of that energy away and are able to safely sink it into some thermal mass.
My grandfather helped design several missile systems and held patents on radar interferometry, he claimed repeatedly that laser systems would never work practically because all the enemy had to do was wait for a rainy or misty day.
He claimed the power requirements for DE skyrocketed to unrealistic levels almost immediately once you had to pierce water vapor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1sSy39CuU
Now it is not misunderstood anymore, in fact, it understands you more than you know.
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
The author is otherwise correct: you can almost pinpoint the target soon after launch of a ballistic missile because of the way trajectories work. Ballistic missles go through three phases: launch, flight and re-entry. Modern ICBMs have a re-entry velocity as high as 7km/s (Mach ~20). Intercepts at that speed have, to my knowledge, an extremely poor record.
Another factor is that ICBMs can (and do) carry multiple warheads. These will separate at different points in the flight phase or re-entry phase to hit different targets. Detecting multiple warheads isn't necessarily easy either because they're unlikely to have the visible plume of a full-blown rocket engine and it's at such a distance that radar signature probably isn't sufficient to detect the warhead let alone plot the target sufficiently accurately for a kill vehicle to hit it.
The author is otherwise correct in that the real advantage of hypersonic missiles is targeting. The speed (Mach 5-10) makes intercept difficult and you won't know the target until it hits it really so good luck intercepting that.
Maybe top secret THAAD development has improved to the point where it can reliabily intercept ICBM warheads at scale but I'll believe it when I see it. Most ICBM defense relies on hitting the launch vehicle in the boost phase because that's when it's the slowest.
Would be cool if we get to the point where we can ionise a very narrow column of air and then use it to deliver an electrical arc as directed artificial lightning! A la Loki's LIP-C: "Brian Gragg kicked his chair away and stood up from the gaming workstation. As the blinded strike team members writhed on the floor, crying out, Gragg moved calmly toward the burly team leader who had shouted at him. Gragg aimed a silver-capped index finger at the man—a lens at its very tip. Black fiber optic and electrical cables ran down the back of Gragg’s hand like veins, disappearing beneath his shirt. “The name is Loki, asshole.” A ruler-straight bolt of electricity cracked like a bullwhip from his fingertip into the man’s body armor, followed by a flickering series of bolts in quick succession—three a second. The team leader’s muscles jerked with each thunderclap. The smell of ozone filled the air." (Daniel Suarez)
But wouldn't an attacker then first take out the DE satellite, and only after launch the missile?
The threat is very simple: I can hit any target you care about and there's nothing you can do about it. The flip side is that you only have a limited amount of these missiles and once they run out, the threat goes away. So the trick is to use enough of them to make the threat credible but keep around the remaining rockets to keep the threat credible to minimize loss of resources. That makes them more effective as a defensive weapon than as an offensive weapon.
A lot of modern wars are asymmetric where a technically advanced party with superior resources is worn down by a relatively unsophisticated enemy over time. Consider for example the British, Russian and US attempts to conquer Afghanistan. They each failed. The fallacy here is that committing a lot of resources is expensive and not long term sustainable economically. Once the will to continue fighting evaporates, you basically lose the fight. All the other side has to do is keep on fighting.
I think this article has somewhat fallen into the imagined capabilities trap that US arms manufacturers were constantly in during the Cold War. They would see Soviet propaganda about their new invincible weapons system and do some math on what it would take to make it work and then try to design systems to counter that paper exercise. Then they get a sample of the real thing and it turns out the Soviets were outright lying about the capabilities and the counter they developed is ridiculous overkill.
Ukraine downs Russian hypersonic missile with US Patriot
Thirty missiles were fired, twenty nine intercepted [1]. Sustaining minor, i.e. quickly repaired, damage after a 97% interception rate against a supposedly technologically advanced adversary is pretty damn good.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/falling-debris-causes-fires-tw....
Site a source for that please.
Do you think that when you "down" a hypersonic missile the debris fall harmlessly to the ground or do they continue moving?
It’s been corroborated by the U.S. and allies [1]. The Kremlin hasn’t disputed the charge.
(The U.S. also said a PATRIOT battery was damaged while Kyiv claimed no such thing. As others have speculated, this was probably a radar unit that was targeted and damaged.)
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/patriot-kill-shot-impressive...
If the US would have still had smart strategists in positions of power we wouldn't have had to deal with all this hysteria about Russian hypersonic wunderwaffen.
After all, how much damage can the Russians inflict with 10 or 20 or, let's say, with 50 such missiles? Not much, maybe they'll damage a building or two, maybe there will be some casualties on US soil, but not enough, and by a large margin, to win a war. Or, to put it another way, if the US were to militarily fold as a result of 50 such missiles hitting them on their home turf then they wouldn't have stood a chance anyway, hypersonic missiles or not.
But this guy (otherwise pretty smart when it comes to tech) is not in the business of ensuring a strategic win for the US in a possible confrontation against Russia or China, he's in the business of selling his new tech (apparently some new laser gun?) and of making money for himself and for his investors.
If it hadn't been clear, I'm ignoring the nuclear component in all this, as a Russian/Chinese nuclear hit on US soil, no matter the "transport" procedure (via "hypersonic" thingie or not) will very soon be matched by the US hitting Russian/Chinese soil in return. But, again, that's a totally different discussion to have, having "hypersonic missile" capabilities or not is quite orthogonal to it.
Yeah, I'm aware of that, I also think that the US response was a huge strategic blunder, 20 years of Afghanistan and Iraq proved it.
50 nuclear or thermonuclear warheads? Quite a lot, actually.
You (and the article, frankly) are pointing them at the wrong targets: the best application of hypersonics is to shoot them at the US's blue water navy. The combination of perfect, real-time information via synthetic aperture radar and highly maneuverable hypersonics turns an aircraft carrier into an extremely expensive floating coffin.
For that you need a synthetic aperture radar and a highly maneuverable hypersonic missile. Aircraft carriers are surrounded by other ships and have air wings flying air patrols. If you paint an aircraft carrier with SAR you're likely to eat a couple AAMRAMs or SM-3s.
With a hypersonic missile it needs an explosion big enough to disable a carrier within its CEP radius. The most likely warhead capable of that would be nuclear. So you've just started a nuclear war with the United States.
I actually started thinking about the carriers a couple of hours after I had made my comment, which is to say I think that you're of course pretty on point.
Hopefully that danger that you hint to will make the smart people still left in the US Military think twice or thrice when it comes to continuing the aircraft carriers policy, as they've become too big of a target and if the US will need space-based laser guns (or whatever it is that this article proposes) in order to defend them then something is most certainly amiss.
E: over post limit
IMO RU has been relatively restrained in attacking power infra, mostly lower level nodes (substations) on the grid that's repairable vs what happened to Baghdad during first gulf war, worsened by western sanctions that prevented repair. UKR resilience mostly largely due to having access to spare parts from global producers. It hasn't been a "hands off" situation. Replacing transformers is very different from rebuilding power plants. Severely grading infra is closer to "call it quits' ' total war which war hasn't yet devolve to.
> it couldn't have won the war anyway
This is more or less the point. Critical infra vulnerability on CONUS opens up the “let's not have unwinnable war condition” - it's essentially an escalation rung that US hasn't had to deal with, and will circumscribe the ability for the US to respond. It's function more useful in context deterrence via conventional MAD in peer scenarios (i.e. US vs PRC over TW). There's a reason Biden specifically communicated to PRC and RU that even cyber attacks on US critical infra will be interpreted no different than kinetic war. The value of global precision strike hypersonics is predominantly to shape/limit US behaviour in the same way US carrier groups or strategic bombers projected off adversaries' shores shape/limit theirs. And so far the US has near unilateral monopoly over such deterrence/coercion/persuasion.
As for the refineries, I agree, it would most definitely suck to have some of them taken off-line, but the discussion comes back to the point I was mentioning, meaning if the US is ready to call it quits because it will have to introduce some gasoline rationing as a result of a World War (because at that point we would be in the middle of WW3) then, honestly, it couldn't have won the war anyway. You need some resilience built in, both at the technical level (maybe have more refineries that would be more spread out, for example) and at the national psyche level, for lack of a better term.
The speed of light isn't infinite. Between a satellite seeing the latest maneuver, sending data to a ground station, and a laser burst reaching its target, you've got at least 20 ms and quite likely as much as 100 ms. For a 1 G maneuver that's still going to get you within 10 cm of your target, which is just fine; but a 10 G maneuver could make you miss entirely.
A larger advantage of lasers is probably the opportunity for multiple shots: If you miss with a kinetic interceptor, it's too late to launch another, but if your laser misses you'll know in a matter of seconds and you can try again as soon as your capacitors are recharged.
Constantly maneuvering seems incredibly energy-intensive.
I do think that some of the Russian upper echelon actually believed what they were touting, but in a military environment where being a "yes man" serves you better (both for your career and possibly to avoid jail/punishment), you often exaggerate capabilities to get ahead, or just lie about current status which we're seeing play out in Ukraine.
The US also just avoided such tech in the past because it's so expensive, and stealth has just been better. That might change soon, but overwhelming with hundreds of missiles (and decoys) is currently much cheaper and more effective than using what the US would actually define as a "hypersonic missile." You could fire 50-100 missiles for the price of one true "hypersonic" one, and what if that missile fails? You just wasted $80M-$100M for nothing. Meanwhile a cruise/normal missile costs $1.5-5M. The US will eventually have them in their arsenal, but they will mostly never be used.
"If you think hypersonic is fast, that’s nothing compared to the speed of light."
Why is this? Definitely counterintuitive.
The author is with ULA, and is competing with Elon Musk's Starshield-- which if you read the various leaks (see Michael D. Griffin) it's pretty clear will be some sort of Brilliant Pebbles system. Biden has been snubbing Elon on this. I suspect it's one reason he has turned starkly political and we are now seeing Reagan Republicans announce there candidacy on Twitter.
Why ignore all of the article? If a hypersonic missile can be intercepted by a Patriot, then it stands to reason it wasn't truly maneuverable, i.e. it was ballistic!
It’s a good article. But the reality is that the Russian missiles making headlines don’t meet the specs of the article. Ukraine is shooting them down just fine using decades old technology.
It is not publicly known whether this is true.
The Ukrainians claim they shot down 6 of 6 Kinzhal missiles over Kiev in one night with a Patriot battery. In the available videos of the event, all that can be seen is that a few dozen air defense missiles were fired, and that something got through and struck the general location where the air defense battery was.
A very healthy dose of skepticism is warranted about claims made in wartime by interested parties.
Note also that they purposefully forbid videos of air defenses to avoid showing where air defenses are.
At least one Kinzhal was confirmed shot down earlier before the wave of 6 or so.
> Note also that they purposefully forbid videos of air defenses to avoid showing where air defenses are.
This has not prevented videos from leaking, as in this case.
> At least one Kinzhal was confirmed shot down earlier before the wave of 6 or so.
Independently confirmed, or claimed? This gets to my initial point, that one should be extremely skeptical about unverifiable claims made by both sides.
The best case you can make for Russia is that the Kinzhal developers actually did commit treason but in a way that was unrelated to the Kinzhal missiles not being effective which is… laughable
The governments of both countries are being "selective" about the truth and imposing censorship by force. Which makes sense at times of war!
Nobody here should take anything released by the involved parties (and their sponsors) as gospel. It's war. War is about deception.
What is the purpose of arresting your missile scientists for treason? What’s your best case interpretation?
The problem is both, and Ukraine is arresting people who film them. It's martial law, both countries are at war and truth suffers (understandably).
> What is the purpose of arresting your missile scientists for treason? What’s your best case interpretation?
I don't know, I would guess:
- They said something about the Khinzal that downplays the importance of the weapon.
- They said something that would help Ukraine better counter them.
- They said something against Putin or the military invasion.
What they very likely didn't say is that the Khinzal is a hypersonic maneuverable weapon, which is the point of TFA you're commenting about.
They’re getting arrested because they promised Putin an unstoppable weapon and now he looks like a dumbass.
It's part of the reason why the initial invasion went so terribly; Putin's analysts told him Kyiv would bend over immediately, and that the public would welcome them as liberators.
Putin smells so much of his own farts that he bought it completely. The analysts were then shocked when Putin said "Okay, invasion today"
"Article 353. Planning, Preparing, Initiating, or Waging War of Aggression
1. Planning, preparing, or initiating a war of aggression - is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term of seven to fifteen years.
2. Waging a war of aggression - is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term of ten to twenty years."
When in modern times has an aggressor ever framed the aggression in terms different from a righteous defense?
As things are, if he's still alive by the time regime in Russia changes, that will probably be (one of) the law he will be prosecuted under.
You are jumping to wildly unsupported conclusions.
Any of my guesses is more likely.
"This enables the missile to penetrate through all existing and projected air defense systems and deliver a nuclear or conventional warhead over a distance in excess of two thousand kilometers" - [1]
Either he overhyped it, or he was misled.
[1] - https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2018-03-02/p...
This doesn't conclusively demonstrate that; an intercepted missile or drone can still easily go kaboom when the pieces hit the ground. The footage has a building between the explosion and the camera.
> Independently confirmed, or claimed?
There's at least photos of an apparently-downed Khinzal. There are no photos yet of a destroyed Patriot.
Doesn't look much like anything one of us could recognize though. We are not experts.
More importantly, even if it is a downed Khinzal, it doesn't matter for the article, which is about hypersonic maneuverable weapons, which the Khinzal is not. So the initial post in this thread is wrong.
Articles about it cite said experts analyzing the photos.
It pays for Ukraine to claim they are easily downing Khinzals and minimizing their own casualties/hits. I don't blame them for this, misinformation and demoralizing the enemy is key. The Russians are doing the same on their side. Both apply military secrecy and censorship on their own camps.
"Expert" opinion shouldn't be taken as non-biased here, either.
Yes, fog of war exists. Yes, both sides are going to misdirect and misinform for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. We won't know quite a few facts until after the war when the history books are written, and we won't know some of them ever.
Anyone inclined to see the air defense video as proof of a Patriot being taken out is exercising motivated thinking. Anyone inclined to take Ukrainian claims to having downed everything is doing the same thing. Right now, what we can safely conclude is a) Ukrainian air defense seems thus far to be fairly effective and b) Russian Khinzals don't appear to be a game-changer at this time.
I didn't ask for experts, I said no-one here is one. I also said who knows what the wreckage is? If you ask pro Ukraine experts, they'll say it's a Khinzal. If you ask pro Russians, it's a bomb fragment or whatever.
More importantly, this doesn't tell us anything about hypersonic maneuverable weapons. We already know the Khinzal isn't one. Yes, the Kremlin is making a fuss about their hypersonic weapons capability, part of their infowar campaign. TFA explains that hypersonics are nothing new and that they can be countered.
> a) Ukrainian air defense seems thus far to be fairly effective and b) Russian Khinzals don't appear to be a game-changer at this time.
No, I cannot "safely" conclude anything about either, and neither can you. Both seem likely, but "likely" and "true" are so hard to say in this war were everyone is lying through their teeth.
It can be very difficult for radars to track objects coming in from a high angle of attack and low angle of attack simultaneously, so IMO the failure to intercept makes more sense from that perspective as well.
The article explicitly states, one paragraph later than the beginning, that "about half of that is just plain wrong".
The author also explains the hypersonic missiles are nothing new, that they are old tech, and that the real threat would be maneuverable hypersonic missiles, which the Khinzal is not. The Khinzal is ballistic.
So when the author writes of the threat of maneuverable hypersonics, and you say "The non-ballistic variety that Russia claimed was unstoppable [...]", you are both speaking of different kinds of weapons with different capabilities. The Khinzal is old tech for which there are counters. The author is speaking of newer tech for which there are fewer counters.
> These are specifically designed for ballistic threats, which are common, and their extreme effectiveness is precisely why Russia and China have invested in something else.
And
> Russia used hypersonic missiles against Ukraine” — alarming! The average member of the public, as well as many policymakers, now understand that these things are dangerous because they are just too fast to shoot down. Clearly something needs to be done… (sarcastic)
It really ought to make clear explicitly in the article that the missiles it referred to in the beginning are NOT what it spends the rest of the article discussing.
It confused me at least. Because, without doing further research, I assumed the Kinzhals must not be ballistic because they’re indirectly referenced in an article about maneuverable missiles!
It doesn't mention the Khinzal by name, true.
But whatever. Semantics at this point.
People without clearances, working on a domain that is tangential but not the domain itself are probably more reliable, as they don't know truths that cannot be told, but they know enough to make informed guesses.
I take this article as informative but only for the general idea. The part about which country has what capabilities, I give absolutely no credence.
No, hypersonics are a legitimate new development, Russia just deceptively brands some of its low-tech arsenal.
The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (in Russian: Х-47М2 Кинжал, "Dagger", NATO reporting name Killjoy) is a Russian hypersonic air-launched ballistic missile
And just some rando with the closest to the original raw video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjxX2gqdlkQ
Objectively as possible it looks like ~30 Patriot missiles were fired (plausibly the whole 32 missile battery). The production rate of these by Lockheed Martin is 500 missiles, annual. Up to 550/year starting this year. They're apparently attempting to intercept somewhere between 2-6 Kinzhals fired, and it appears 1-2 of those Kinzhals (i.e. between 15-100%) got through and struck the Patriot battery and at least damaged it. That's around 3 weeks total annual production of Patriot missiles fired in 2 minutes at a handful of targets with at best partial success.
So it's both correct that Kinzhal is really just an air-launched SRBM not a hypersonic glide weapon, and that our existing missile defense looks at best barely capable of partially defending against very limited numbers of conventional SRBM.
How many Kinzhals can Russia make a month? I can only find motivated sources, but those say ~10/month, and that's after a push to increase production.
* Is the Patriot the only available system? (No. THAAD, SM3.)
* Is monthly production likely to matter in a US vs. China war? (Probably not.)
* Can China's hypersonics hit moving targets like carriers? (Much harder, at the very least.)
China also has to ask the "what if our R&D, procurement, and training system is as corrupt/ineffective as Russia's turned out to be?" question.
And difference of how many China “can” make in a month and how many Patriot missiles Lockheed “is” making in a month are very different questions. How many missiles could Lockheed make in a month given 3 months lead time in a conflict with China? I bet it’s significantly more than we are currently making now.
Powerful countries have been surprised at how much ammo is required since firearms became the dominant way to wage war.
This isn't really a surprise, either - this isn't any different from any other major modern war where the sides are roughly on par. The original surprise was that Ukraine managed to hold up against the initial invasion such that positional warfare became more prominent, and with it the traditional dominant role of artillery.
Artillery became dominant quite early on, since the initial Russian attempt at blitzkrieg failed last spring, and things changed into something more closely resembling trench warfare. Since then, its extensive use has caused supplies to dwindle. Wagner troops under Bakhmut specifically were high-priority as far as Russian logistics is concerned due to the political importance of the battle, which is why it didn't take them until this past winter to run out - this is when Prigozhin started posting photos with piles of corpses of his own troops and complaining about insufficient supplies. At the time, people from various other units noted that they have been having those problems for much longer, and the unofficial term "meat assault" (мясной штурм) was already in widespread use among Russian troops to describe the way they were fighting by the end of 2022.
Its a total success; the purpose of a defensive system is prevent something else from being hit. And, there’s pretty good reason to believe that the reason there aren’t more than about 6 Kinzhals in Russia every-one-to-two-week mass missile attacks is that they simply aren’t producing enough to fire more. Also, there were 18 missiles in the barrage, including other SRBMs (the ground launched Iskander), S-300s used in surface-to-surface mode, and cruise missiles, not just the 6 Kinzhals.
> So it's both correct that Kinzhal is really just an air-launched SRBM not a hypersonic glide weapon, and that our existing missile defense looks at best barely capable of partially defending against very limited numbers of conventional SRBM.
Patriot isn’t the whole (or even the most capable system) of our existing ballistic missile defense, even if it is the most notable system of ours deployed, as of today, in Ukraine. THAAD exists, and is more capable than Patriot.
We don’t need to take the Ukrainian claims as totally accurate, but it’s worth at least including that the battery of patriots were fired at more than just the 2-6 Kinzhal missiles that you tallied (at least when we want to look at annual production rates).
The Russian’s haven’t been able to sustain a launch rate of once a month with smaller attacks. This attack was an unusually high density. Expending three weeks production capacity to fend off an attack that can be launched at most every 2-3 months seems… manageable.
In terms of this conflict, also worth considering that Patriot isn’t the only system in Ukraine, so if production of Patriot missiles becomes a constraint, they can shift more AD burden to IRIS-T and other European systems.
When considering the broader implications to the US, I think it’s not exactly right to describe Patriot as our “existing missile defense”. We have a number of other missile defense systems such as NASAMs and THAAD that occupy complimentary roles to the Patriot systems. If anything based on the performance of Patriot in Ukraine I have more confidence than I previously did in our missile defense systems. Performance in real world conditions has seemed pretty good to me.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=patriot+Suchomi...
There are numerous types of missile systems (SAMs) protecting Kyiv including IRIS-T, S300, and others. Looking at the various videos of the attack on Kyiv, the missiles had a very different physical appearance from each other, lending credence to the supposition that different SAMs were active. This would make a lot of sense considering there were different types of Russian missiles active (Kinzal, Iskander, etc.).
> They're apparently attempting to intercept somewhere between 2-6 Kinzhals fired, and it appears 1-2 of those Kinzhals (i.e. between 15-100%) got through and struck the Patriot battery and at least damaged it.
Although information is limited, there is no evidence of any Kinzhals making it through and striking anything of note. It seems that one Patriot Battery was lightly damaged, but all Patriot Batteries of them were fully operational before and after the strike. The one Patriot battery was lightly damaged and repaired in the field within a few days. This strongly suggests that the Patriot battery was hit by debris of some kind (perhaps from shot down missiles) [1], and not a direct strike as the clowns at the Russian MOD laughably claims (they've also claimed to have destroyed every single HIMARs launcher and the Ukrainian Air Force three times over).
All we have in the footage to go on is a flash. No indication of what kind or how much damage was done in it.
*have been stopped
Everyone else however can see them just fine.
So they might be able to maneuver (normal ballistic missiles can usually do last minute maneuvering too!), but without data it’s blind.
Maybe useful if already programmed with a decent random walk, but it doesn’t help it actively avoid something coming for it, and it doesn’t let it aim for moving targets that can adjust course.
Slower stuff doesn’t have this issue, but is of course slower.
This is the same reason why supercavitating torpedos seem really cool on paper, but are not actually all that useful or scary (unless nuclear tipped). Unless the blast radius is huge or the target is fundamentally fixed (a large building), you can just… move out of the way.
> Could platforms defend themselves? What if the warhead or missile was spinning, etc.? All those questions were answered. The only real barrier at the time was generating very high laser power levels in a way that was logistically practical in the field.
"When we were developing this technology in earnest for missile defense 15 years ago, there were many theories about how it could be defeated. People thought that mirrored surfaces might just reflect the beam. It turned out that reflective surfaces are actually more vulnerable. Would the range be far enough? Maybe the atmosphere would scatter the beam too much? Could platforms defend themselves? What if the warhead or missile was spinning, etc.? All those questions were answered. The only real barrier at the time was generating very high laser power levels in a way that was logistically practical in the field."