Posted on 03/06/2020 9:48:36 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It’s the punch you don’t see coming, goes the boxer’s adage, that knocks you out.
Hypersonic missiles are that latest military punch. Fast, yes. But more importantly, unpredictable, slipping past the digital eyes of military tech that watches for ballistic haymakers swinging out into space, not for glide vehicles skipping along the edge of the atmosphere.
Pentagon officials said on March 2 they are setting up a “hypersonic war room” to ensure that the U.S. industrial base is up to the task. The same day, the Secretary of the Army said they will test-fire two missiles this year as the Army accelerates to get hypersonics fielded by 2023.
They are the latest in a flurry of moves geared toward getting a variety of hypersonic weapons up and running within the next five years as the United States scrambles to catch up with Russia and China.
Hypersonics are the latest missile tech, able to evade early detection by current ground radar and satellite systems and maneuver with precision at speeds in excess of one mile per second.
The Trump administration wants hypersonics to help counter China and Russia’s long-range missiles and layers of defenses currently keeping aircraft and carriers at arm’s length.
Vladimir Putin wants them to bolster Russia’s nuclear posture.
And Beijing wants them to add to its nuclear options and the strategic headache for U.S. carrier commanders in the Pacific.
“The Chinese are very focused in this area,” said Timothy Walton, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“They are the world leaders in terms of intermediate-range ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons today,” he told the Epoch Times via telephone.
“They’ve fielded a significant number of very long-range intermediate weapons. They’ve also fielded a hypersonic weapon that they’ve demonstrated and paraded last year, the DF-17.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...
Please don’t have Ethnic Chinese scientists & engineers working on this technology.
I’m not sure if this is any better than ICBMs, and may be less effective. It does make me wonder if we are putting optical gyros on our ICBMs these days.
RE: Please don’t have Ethnic Chinese scientists & engineers working on this technology.
They probably already are. Many of them NATIVE born Americans.
bomber gap
then missile gap
now this? The MI complex must be fed, I suppose, but there are better things to spend our $$$ on.
Oh, and hyper sonic isn’t faster than LASER light...
Simple answer - there are no stealth ICBMs, they are instantly visible upon launch for miles around and are easily seen from orbit, even from satellites that do not have line of sight to the launch site. Launch an ICBM and everyone knows about it within a minute.
A hypersonic cruise missile in terrain following mode may not even be seen until it enters an air defense perimeter.
Seems “penetrating” would put a damper on “reusable”.
Kinda hard to recycle something that hit something else at Mach 5.
Nobody has an operational anti missile laser system at current.
Only if the missile itself crashes into it. A hypersonic carrier missile could instead act like a Durandal munition and launch submissiles/submunitions while sprinting through a target area, for example.
Sounds like this is where we need to spend some development as a deterrent to HSMs. Develop the laser as a defense weapon similar to the iron dome
maybe this is where we should spend some development dollars
You want to see it..... you want to see it again!
...as the United States scrambles to catch up with Russia and China.
US defense contractors have built working prototypes for decades. It's the Chinese and Russians who A) are scrambling B) won't catch us and C) don't need any such weapons.
We already cancelled the existing programs and scattered the researchers to the winds. Nautilus, THEL, M-THEL.
The thing about hypersonic missiles is that the growing private space industry may be able to come up with something. We are rather far behind in hypersonic missile tech among other things.
Ummmm... the Russians and Indians have already deployed operational hypersonic cruise missiles and anti shipping missiles. They are available on the world arms market. We have, uh, none.
They’re not having to ‘catch up’ with us if they have operational weapons and we don’t, dude.
Based on the composition of a recent US Math Olympiad team, my guess is that a good number of ethnic Chinese are involved in weapons development:
Excerpt from the website:
The 2018 U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad team is: Adam Ardeishar, Andrew Gu, Vincent Huang, James Lin, Michael Ren, and Mihir Singhal. Gu, Huang, and Lin are returning team members from 2017 and Lin earned a perfect score.
The problem with Laser based weapons is energy delivered to target is based on the variables of weapon energy source, weapon efficiency, atmospheric conditions ( mainly water vapor or dust in the beam path), and time on target of beam. Lasers aren’t very efficient, with the best being about 50% efficiency in short range cutting applications.
A better approach is that the hyper-sonic vehicle already has a nice high energy content, so provide it with an obstacle to encounter. some nice depleted uranium spheres or disks in it’s flight path will nicely affect it’s flight performance.
“my guess is that a good number of ethnic Chinese are involved in weapons development”
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And in continuous theft/transfer of technology, military secrets and other intellectual property to the Chinese government. Facts are facts.
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