The US has a lot of experience designing hypersonic missiles -- I remember when they were testing various material configurations in hypersonic guided missiles 30 years ago. Some of those platforms exist as operational systems today. Design of hypersonic missiles is largely limited by material physics and configurations thereof. The US ability to fabricate unique exotic materials allows them to search a much larger part of the performance and capability phase space before settling on a production design.
Historically, most of the bugs in new US hypersonic designs stem from an unwillingness to sacrifice terminal guidance performance for the sake of velocity. Sensor packages rapidly and unavoidably disintegrate due to atmospheric ablation in-flight, which makes terminal guidance very difficult (because your sensors barely work by the time they get to the target). Anyone can build a hypersonic missile if you are willing to forego high-quality terminal guidance, and most do. This is an extremely difficult engineering problem when operating at the fundamental limits of material physics but the US has been unwilling to field systems that don't address it.
The sensor stuff is a common but exaggerated discussion point in online discussions about this. There's a ton of previous work. Pershing II used terrain matching of SAR images for terminal guidance ages ago. The main technology for making this work is just electrically neutral ablative heat shields, which there are a variety of companies making commercially today. Other historical examples for say visual IR use quartz windows, etc. There's complications due to the heat and related plume, but the sweeping claims about this point are usually off the mark.
Quartz isn't durable enough for hypersonic IR windows in dense atmosphere. When tested decades ago, actively-cooled sapphire, diamond, and even more durable exotics ablated too quickly for that purpose. I don't know what they are using today but the inability to find an IR transparent material that could survive long enough was a central design problem. This can be seen in the odd compromises made to the seeker design of e.g. THAAD, which doesn't spend much time in the lower atmosphere.
@edenceover is probably referring mainly to the boost-glide vehicles that are moving at up to mach 20 ... through atmosphere. The air-breathing cruise missile type designs go slower (only mach 6-ish) but at that speed you can have a sane discussion about guidance. This rocket-guidance problem, by the way, is where the Black-Scholes model came from.
Correct. No one has "real" hypersonic missiles that travel in the atmosphere for extended periods(*1). The heating problems for shock impingment in non-"simple conicals" has *not* been overcome and won't be. "Hypersonic" missiles are mostly just ICBMs with a very brief passage through the dense lower atmosphere where there's enough lift. And if they try to go higher up to escape the heat flux there's not enough for lift. See, https://exrocketman.blogspot.com/2022/06/about-hypersonic-ve...
Tangential: the USA had a mach 5 phoenix missile back in the 1970s on the F-14 and now they're re-fitting them with new guidance/etc to make a hypersonic test bed.
*1: Of course, when you're going hypersonic you only need tens of minutes to travel to the other side of the Earth.
"Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 (12,300 km/h; 7,610 mph) in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,430 °C)"
You beat me to it! This timecoded link shows the launch sequence of the Sprint with a tracking shot of the vehicle itself. Pretty remarkable watching it start to glow white:
I think this is the first video on that channel where the subject can match the guy's cadence. It's a great overview of the development of the Sprint though, worth watching if it's of interest.
Mach 10 is almost too fast to be hypersonic! Hypersonic is the range around Mach 5-8.
There are various types of ballistic missiles that go faster than this (and have been doing for decades) but since they are old they aren't as sexy as "hypersonic missiles".
The new thing is trying to go hypersonic in the atmosphere for more than a couple minutes so you can use it for lift. But either there's too much heat or not enough lift.
No, this is in fact not categorically new. MaRV and related demonstrated 60 G pull up to horizontal glide maneuvers.
The technology of a HGV and a maneuverable re-entry vehicle are essentially the same. The main reason for talking about "hypersonics" as a separate category today is to emphasize flight profiles that would not be interpreted as nuclear strikes.
As I understand it, it's not about “not being interpreted as nuclear strike” — since almost every Russian missile (including anti-ship missiles like Kh22 and the likes) could potentially carry a nuclear warhead, they explicitly don't care about the ambiguity, while the Western doctrine is diametrically opposite, explicitly aiming for as little ambiguity as possible to keep the escalation risk low. And your interpretation basically goes against both doctrines. — But more about keeping a low trajectory so that the missile stays below the early-warning radar horizon for most of its flight, striking without warning, where a ballistic missile gets within the LOS of radars quite early due to its trajectory.
Yeah, ICBMs have slightly glidy, menuevering entry vehicles. But these don't fly. It's more like falling with style. And they certainly don't have shapes that aren't simple conicals. Otherwise the heat from compression and where the shockwaves impinge on the complex structure completely overcomes materials tech and any possible heat soak or re-radiation.
Low altitude air breathing hypersonics are unlikely to ever be practical. That speed at low altitude is just a fire ball.
Air breathing hypersonics at altitude are real though. The US has successfully tested scramjets in the past. And currently has the HAWC program which has successfully flown twice now.
the Standard Missile "SM-3" goes Mach 8 we have had hypersonic weapons since the 1930s. This is a goalpost shift to say they have to cruise AND be hypersonic which is impossible due to the curvature of the earth which is really the premise of the entire argument is that russiaboos think the earth is flat and Nato isnt like 100 years ahead of Russia in military technology.
I generally find that the US lags in weapons technology whose biggest utility lies in countering American superweapons - carriers and stealth fighters.
I think it's quite understandable why this is the case - imagine spending hundreds of billions on carrier procurement, and simultaneously developing a weapon that more or less renders them obsolete.
The situation has changed in that there's news that the Russians and Chinese have overtaken the US in this field, as well as the Chinese started fielding similarly high-end carriers of their own, creating a legitimate target for US hypersonics.
It seems more likely that Russia and China are still decades behind the US but considerably more willing to hype up technology they don't actually have. China has made some progress but they are a long ways behind. Russia, well, ... Ukraine is demonstrating how stagnant their military capability has become. I kinda wonder how many of their nukes would actually fly right now if they were crazy enough to push the button.
> Russia's failures in Ukraine mostly stemmed from failures in their logistics and doctrine rather than their technology
Russia’s reactive armour had egg cartons in place of explosive. The same oligarchs are delivering these weapons. Meanwhile, Moscow’s “smart” weapons missed entire airfields.
When developing advanced military capabilities, the US usually runs offensive and defensive programs in parallel. Beyond the "what if our enemy had this" aspect of the conversation, having a good model of what an advanced defensive system might look like informs design choices on the offensive side.
Too many people conflate the US deeming a weapons technology relatively ineffective given the (classified) capability matrix of their other systems with them not having the technology. Hypersonic endo-atmospheric guided missiles, for example, is an area where the US has deep design expertise going back several decades. They were designing and testing hypersonic guided missiles for battlefield(!) use in the 1980s.
This is entirely correct. A basic example is how the US doesn't prioritize SAM systems to the same degree as Russia. This doesn't mean the US isn't capable of producing similar or even superior systems at volume, it's just that it doesn't make sense given the overwhelming scale of the US Air Force. Likewise there's a similar relative de-emphasis on some forms of artillery.
Now after shaking off decades of counter insurgency warfare and pivoting to address a multipolar world instead it's not surprising they want to change up the mix. It doesn't mean there's some dire technology or capability gap fundamentally however.
Military stuff is entire operational systems vs other operational systems, yet nearly all these forum warrior conversations treat it as some sort of swipe left or swipe right pairwise comparison of two pieces of specific equipment.
Why would the someone develop anti-stealth fighter weapons when their opponents aren't flying stealth fighters? Same with carriers. Nobody else has a serious carrier fleet anymore.
You are simply mistaken on this topic, probably due to only reading click bait or nationalistic articles on the topic.
Carriers are by no means obsolete, and ballistic missile defense is one of the things the Navy prioritizes heavily, and has done, for ages. Even for the DF-21 a carrier strike group is a tough nut to crack.
China's carriers are still a couple generations away from being at parity to the US fleet.
Sensationalized bait headline articles are not a good source for learning about this stuff. https://twitter.com/RickJoe_PLA writes for the large media brands with some regularity, and is strict about sticking to a substantive factual basis for everything.
That's not the _new_ Chinese carrier, that's the Type 002 class carrier _Shandong_[0]. Their latest carrier, the Type 003 class Fujian[1], was launched last month and has a catapult system, just like American and French carriers.
Has nothing to do with offensive/defensive capabilities (which is really a straw man). They simply are proceeding with their carrier development in an incremental fashion, learning as they go.
Almost every weapon or weapon system can be described as defensive or offensive, depending on the motives of the person discussing said systems.
What’s would be the defensive purpose of a nuclear aircraft carrier? The offensive part is obvious - makes a whole lot of difference when you are invading someplace on the other side of the world, which is what US Navy is optimized for.
You can defend international sea lanes (so shipping can go through), you can defend your territorial waters, etc etc etc. Defense is in the eye of the beholder.
And how exactly is nuclear propulsion necessary for any of this? Because it it makes a whole lot of difference when there are no allied harbors nearby, ie you are on the other side of the world, ie you’re invading someone again.
Funny how those international sea lanes that are important for world trade just happen to be far away? Because it's foreign trade you're protecting. Oil, etc. If all the US was protecting was US shipping going from US port to US port, then yeah, we wouldn't need nuclear power, though it still might make sense depending on the threat.
Would a (the) global superpower want its rivals to believe its capabilities are ahead or behind of their current state?
This leads me to believe we're never going to get an accurate picture of the state of a weapon development program through the press. Is the F-35 program in trouble, or not? If it was why would you let your adversaries know this?
You want your enemy to overestimate your capabilities if you don't intend to fight them. If you want them to start a defensive war, you want them to underestimate you so you have a greater chance of successful provocation where you get to counterattack and destroy their unprepared forces.
- desperately needs a new self-propelled howitzer, as the M109 is a 60-year-old design that has been upgraded to its limit, and can no longer perform adequately in a modern near-peer engagement
- the AIM-120 AMRAAM is outclassed by other beyond visual range air-to-air missiles developed in the last 30 years
- the OH-58 Kiowa, based on the Bell JetRanger, was the Army's scout helicopter for decades -- but was retired in 2020 without a replacement
- the Ticonderoga-class cruiser, which was the first incarnation of the Aegis anti-air and anti-ballistic-missile system, is being retired without a replacement, forty years after it entered service -- its planned replacement, CG(X), was cancelled, and so more Arleigh-Burke class destroyers with larger Mark-41 VLS cells are being shoehorned in
- the Arleigh-Burke class destroyer, which also has the Aegis system, is still in production after 34 years because the Zumwalt-class that would've replaced it was a total flop due -- its eight-inch Advanced Gun System requiring bespoke ammunition on the order of $800,000 per round
These are all replacement programs that could have been (and in some cases were) started over a decade ago, but we are just now seeing the fruits of some of the very long development processes.
- the ERCA (Extended-Range Cannon Artillery) is not forecasted to enter service until 2025
- the AIM-260 is meant to enter production this year
- there is currently an ongoing competition between Sikorsky and Boeing to build the Army's next scout helicopter
- the DDG(X) program will replace both ship classes eventually, but is not even meant to begin construction until 2028
Meanwhile, one shining example of the successful replacements of older programs is the Virginia-class submarine. It remains one of the few examples of American military procurement that was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget, while still being a success.
Isn't that why we should invest in hypersonic missiles? It is a relatively cheap unmanned alternative to building aircraft carriers (and the obligatory fighters), and other large vulnerable systems.
