An ‘Arms Race in Speed’: Hypersonic Weapons and the Changing Calculus of Battle
Levan Ramishvili
An ‘Arms Race in Speed’: Hypersonic Weapons and the Changing Calculus of Battle
Speed. Since nations first went to war, speed has been a key factor in combat, particularly at the very onset of battle. The rapid concentration and employment of force can help a belligerent overpower an opponent and avoid a costly war of attrition, an approach that underlaid Germany’s blitzkrieg (lightning war) strategy during World War II and America's “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq in 2003.
Speed is also a significant factor in the nuclear attack and deterrence equation. Following the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the late 1950s, which reduced to mere minutes the time between a launch decision and catastrophic destruction on the other side of the planet, nuclear-armed states have labored to deploy early-warning and command-and-control systems capable of detecting a missile launch and initiating a retaliatory strike before their own missiles could be destroyed. Preventing the accidental or inadvertent onset of nuclear war thus requires enough time for decision-makers to ascertain the accuracy of reported missile launches and choose appropriate responses. This is an imperative reinforced by several Cold War incidents in which launch detection systems provided false indications of such action but human operators intervened to prevent unintended retaliation.
Today, speed will alter the calculus of combat and deterrence even further with the imminent deployment of hypersonic weapons—maneuverable vehicles that fly at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5 and higher). China, Russia, and the United States are testing hypersonic weapons of various types to enhance strategic nuclear deterrence and strengthen front-line combat units. Existing ICBM reentry vehicles also travel at those superfast speeds, but the hypersonic glide vehicles now in development are far more maneuverable, making their tracking and interception nearly impossible. Such dual-use vehicles, capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads, are also being fitted on missiles intended for use in a regional context, say, in a battle erupting in the Baltic region or the South China Sea. With the time between launch and arrival on target dwindling to 10 minutes or less, the introduction of these weapons will introduce new and potent threats to global nuclear stability.
Hypersonic weapons are said by proponents to be especially useful at the onset of battle, when they can attack an opponent’s high-value targets, including air defense radars, fighter bases, missile batteries, and command-and-control facilities. The incapacitation of those facilities at an early stage in the conflict could help smooth the way for follow-on attacks by regular air, sea, and ground forces. Yet, as the same facilities are often tied into a nuclear-armed country’s nuclear warning and command systems, attacks against them could be interpreted by the target state as the prelude to a disarming first strike and trigger the early use of its own nuclear weapons.
From an arms control perspective, the deployment of hypersonic weapons raises a host of additional concerns, beginning with the possible violation by some of the proposed missiles of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty’s prospects are bad enough with the U.S. announcement last February that it will withdraw from the treaty in August, but deployment of treaty-prohibited hypersonic weapons would certainly torpedo any chance of preserving the pact. More complications arise from some countries’ plans to place hypersonic delivery vehicles on ICBMs, which would indirectly bring any such U.S. or Russian systems under the limits set by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), even if the hypersonic components contained conventional warheads. Any negotiation of a successor to New START, which is due to expire in 2021 unless extended, would likely involve discussion of accounting for hypersonic munitions.
The rush to develop and deploy hypersonic weapons without fully considering their intended uses and strategic impacts is yet another aspect of the speed associated with these munitions. Given the escalatory dangers of deploying hypersonic weapons, it is essential that they receive closer attention from policymakers, arms control analysts, and the general public.
Hypersonic Developments
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union conducted research into mounting maneuverable reentry vehicles on long-range ballistic missiles, but militaries began to explore a variety of hypersonic weapons types in the 21st century. Multiple programs are now approaching the test and deployment stage. In this process, the major powers have largely focused on two types of weapons: hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles.
Hypersonic glide vehicles, also called boost-glide weapons, employ a booster rocket to carry the glide vehicle into the outer atmosphere. Once reaching that altitude, between 40 and 100 miles above the earth’s surface, the vehicle separates from the booster and, propelled solely by its momentum and kept aloft by its aerodynamic shape, skims along the atmosphere’s outer boundary for great distances. Although unpowered, the vehicle can maneuver in flight, using satellite guidance to strike with high precision.
The U.S. Department of Defense, as part of its prompt global-strike program, initially considered launching conventionally armed hypersonic glide vehicles from repurposed Minuteman ICBMs and placing conventional warheads on a small number of intercontinental Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Later, the Pentagon largely abandoned that approach, worried that such systems could be confused for nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and unintentionally trigger a nuclear response. More recently, the Pentagon has pursued medium-range systems employing assorted rockets to boost the glide vehicle into space. Russia and China, however, are continuing to test and deploy ICBM-launched hypersonic glide vehicles, notably the Russian Avangard and Chinese DF-ZF.
Hypersonic cruise missiles, unlike glide vehicles, fly within the atmosphere and can be launched by ships or planes or from land. To attain Mach 5 and above, they employ advanced, air-breathing jet engines, such as scramjets (supersonic combustion ramjets). Because the missiles must carry their fuel, they have less range than glide vehicles and must be launched from sites closer to their target. The U.S. Air Force is pursuing an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile, and Russia has been testing the Tsirkon, will which be launched from ships and submarines.
All three countries are also working on variants of these models and the necessary supporting technologies. The U.S. Air Force, alongside its hypersonic cruise missile program, is financing a separate effort to develop a hypersonic projectile it calls the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon. The U.S. Army is proceeding with development of its Alternative Re-Entry System, a maneuverable hypersonic delivery vehicle that could be launched by a number of proposed missile booster systems. Not to be outdone, the U.S. Navy is developing a booster rocket that could be fired from submarines or surface ships to carry hypersonic vehicles. The Defense Department asked for $2.6 billion for these and related initiatives in its fiscal year 2020 budget request, with far larger amounts expected in future budgets.
Strategic Rationales
All three major powers have explored similar applications of hypersonic technologies, but their strategic calculations in doing so appear to vary, with the United States primarily seeking weapons for use in a regional, non-nuclear conflict and Russia emphasizing the use of hypersonic weapons for both conventional and nuclear applications. Whatever the case, the speed of attack largely accounts for the growing pursuit of hypersonic weaponry, along with their extensive maneuverability and perceived invulnerability to existing defensive systems.
The United States first looked at hypersonic weapons as part of a desired capacity to attack an enemy’s high-value targets, including command-and-control systems and mobile missile batteries, without using nuclear warheads or relying on forward-based forces. This was the original premise of the prompt global-strike mission, first announced in 2003. Over time, however, the U.S. pursuit of hypersonic weaponry has focused more on conventionally armed, intermediate-range weapons that might be used in a regional context to degrade an enemy’s defenses at the onset of battle, thereby easing the way for follow-on air, sea, and ground forces. Despite this shift, speed of attack has remained a consistent aim of the Pentagon’s hypersonic endeavors. As noted by the Congressional Research Service in a January 2019 review of these efforts, “Analysts have identified a number of potential targets that the United States might need to strike promptly.” These could include “air defense or anti-satellite weapons that could disrupt the U.S. ability to sustain an attack,” an enemy’s command and control facilities, or “caches of weapons of mass destruction.”3
Such a capacity would be particularly useful, U.S. strategists believe, in any future engagement with Chinese forces in the Asia-Pacific region, such as in the South China Sea or around Taiwan. Since President Barack Obama announced a “pivot to the Pacific” in 2011, U.S. military planners have sought advanced weaponry to counter what are viewed as enhanced Chinese defensive military capabilities. China, it is claimed, has deployed many intermediate-range ballistic missiles to target U.S. warships and bases in the region; a U.S. preemptive strike on those capabilities using hypersonic weapons at the onset of a conflict would help safeguard key U.S. assets and pave the way for follow-on attacks.4 China also appears to be focusing its hypersonic efforts on a regional context, with its DF-ZF glide vehicle apparently aimed at U.S. bases, warships, and missile batteries in the Asia-Pacific theater.5
Russia seems to have been driven by somewhat different intentions. After the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Russian officials worried that unconstrained U.S. missile defenses could someday threaten Russia’s strategic deterrent. To overcome that risk, Russia says it will soon deploy a nuclear-armed, maneuverable hypersonic delivery system, the Avangard, on some of its ICBMs.6 With its speed and maneuverability, the Avangard is designed to evade any existing or future U.S. anti-missile systems, thereby ensuring the integrity of Russia’s strategic deterrent. “This is a major event in the life of the armed forces and, perhaps, in the life of the country,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told government officials last December. “Russia now has a new kind of strategic weapon.”7
Although Russia has placed its primary emphasis on the development of hypersonic warheads for some of its strategic ICBMs, it has also pursued dual-use weapons intended for theater use, presumably against NATO forces in Europe and the Atlantic. That is the apparent intent of its air-launched, anti-ship missile, called Kinzhal, said to have a range of 1,200 miles while flying at speeds approaching Mach 10, evading any defenses.8
Arms Racing Behavior
Each of these countries initiated its pursuit of hypersonic weapons for unique strategic purposes, but all seem to have recently accelerated their efforts partly to overtake progress made by their rivals—behavior that has all the earmarks of a classic arms race.
“China’s hypersonic weapons development outpaces ours,” Admiral Harry Harris, then commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and now ambassador to South Korea, told Congress last year in a bid for higher U.S. spending on such munitions. Another top official, Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said the United States must pump more money into hypersonic development if it is to regain its technological edge. “The United States is not yet doing all that we need to do to respond to hypersonic missile threats,” he said last year. “I did not take this job to reach parity with adversaries. I want to make them worry about catching up with us again.”9
Whether China or Russia has overtaken the United States in hypersonic weaponry is a matter of debate. Both assert they are ready to deploy hypersonic weapons, but it is unclear if those munitions are truly as capable as claimed. Furthermore, with each of these countries driven by their specific goals, the United States likely enjoys significant technological advantages in those types of hypersonic weapons it seeks for its own arsenal. It would be misleading, therefore, to claim that the United States is behind in a hypersonic arms race.10
Nevertheless, the need to ensure a U.S. technological advantage in hypersonic weapons has been underscored by the nation’s top defense contractors, many of which expect to benefit from higher spending in this area. “From a pure business perspective, there is a significant opportunity in the hypersonic domain,” said Raytheon Vice President Thomas Bussing at a December 2018 meeting of military contractors. Indeed, the hypersonic weapons market could be worth “many billions of dollars,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst who works with Lockheed Martin and other big firms. “We’re talking about an entirely new class of weapons and the operating concepts to go with it.”11
These comments, along with others by senior military officials in China, Russia, and the United States, highlight another way in which hypersonic weapons and speed are closely related: there is a rush to move these weapons from the design stage to mass production and deployment. “This is not primarily a research effort,” Griffin said at the December meeting of military contractors. “It is an effort to get these systems into the field in the thousands.…We are going to have to create a new industrial base for these systems.” Unfortunately, this rush to “industrialize” the production of hypersonic weapons is occurring in the absence of sufficient discussion of the escalatory and arms control implications of fielding these munitions.
Escalation Risks and ‘Entanglement’
Many weapons can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes, but hypersonic weapons, especially those designed for use in a regional context, are primarily intended to be used offensively, to destroy high-value enemy assets, including command-and-control facilities. This raises two major concerns: the risk of rapid escalation from a minor crisis to a full-blown war and the unintended escalation from conventional to nuclear warfare.
That hypersonic weapons are being designed for offensive use at an early stage in a conflict has been evident in U.S. strategic policy from the beginning. Claiming that a major adversary might try to hide or move critical assets at the outbreak of a crisis to protect them from U.S. air and missile strikes, the Pentagon hoped the prompt global-strike program would enable U.S. forces to attack those targets with minimal warning. As this program got under way, hypersonic weapons became the technology of choice for its implementation. “Systems that operate at hypersonic speeds…offer the potential for military operations from longer ranges with shorter response times and enhanced effectiveness compared to current military systems,” states the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Such munitions, it adds, “could provide significant payoff for future U.S. offensive strike operations, particularly as adversaries’ capabilities advance.”12 Most of the hypersonic weapons being developed by the U.S. military, including the Air Force cruise missile and the Navy’s sea-launched system, are intended for strikes against key enemy assets at an early stage of conflict, when speed confers a significant advantage. Certain Russian weapons, such as the Kinzhal, also seem intended for this purpose.
Some analysts fear that the mere possession of such weapons might induce leaders to escalate a military clash at the very outbreak of a crisis—believing their early use will confer a significant advantage in any major engagement that follows—while reducing the chances of keeping the fighting limited. It is easy to imagine, for example, how a clash between U.S. and Chinese naval vessels in the South China Sea, accompanied by signs of an air and naval mobilization on either or both sides, might prompt one combatant to launch a barrage of hypersonic weapons at all those ships and planes and their command-and-control systems, hoping to prevent their use in any full-scale encounter. This might make sense from a military perspective, but would undoubtedly prompt a fierce counterreaction from the injured side and restrict efforts to halt the fighting at a lower level of violence.
The introduction of hypersonic weapons also raises concerns over the escalation from conventional to nuclear warfare. The United States has focused primarily on the development of hypersonic weapons carrying conventional warheads, but there is no fundamental reason why they could not be nuclear armed. Indeed, Russia’s Avangard missile is intended to deliver a nuclear warhead, and it is assumed that China’s DF-ZF is also designed with this in mind.
This leads to what is called “warhead ambiguity”: the risk that a defending nation, aware of an enemy’s hypersonic launch and having no time to assess the warhead type, will assume the worst and launch its own nuclear weapons.13 Concern over this risk has led the U.S. Congress to bar funding for the development of ICBM-launched hypersonic glide vehicles, thereby helping to propel the Pentagon’s shift away from such systems and toward the development of medium-range weapons more suitable for use in a regional context. Nevertheless, warhead ambiguity will remain a feature of any future landscape involving the deployment of multiple hypersonic weapons, as a defender will never be certain that an enemy’s assault is entirely non-nuclear. With as little as five minutes to assess an attack—the time it would take a hypersonic glide vehicle to traverse 2,000 miles—a defender would be understandably hard pressed to avoid worst-case assumptions.
Equally worrisome is the danger of “target ambiguity”: the possibility that a hypersonic attack, even if conducted with missiles known to be armed only with conventional warheads, would endanger the early-warning and command-and-control systems a defender uses for its nuclear and conventional forces, leading it to fear the onset of a nuclear attack. This is especially dangerous in light of what James Acton, a security analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls the “entanglement” problem. Although almost everything involving nuclear decision-making is secret, the nuclear and conventional command-and-control systems of the major powers are widely assumed to be interconnected, or entangled, making it difficult to clearly distinguish one from another. Therefore, any attack on command-and-control facilities at the onset of crisis, however intended, could be interpreted by the defender as a prelude to a nuclear rather than a conventional attack and prompt the defender to launch its own nuclear weapons before they are destroyed by an anticipated barrage of enemy bombs and missiles.14
All this points to yet another concern related to the impact of emerging technologies on the future battlefield: the risk that nuclear-armed nations, fearing scenarios of just this sort, will entrust more and more of their critical decision-making to machines, fearing that humans will not be able to make reasoned judgments under such enormous time pressures. With hypersonic weapons in the arsenals of the major powers, military leaders may conclude that sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) systems should be empowered to determine the nature of future missile attacks and select the appropriate response. This is a temptation that can only increase as hypersonic weapons are themselves equipped with AI systems, a capability being developed at Sandia National Laboratories, enabling them to select and navigate to an array of potential targets.15 This convergence of advanced technologies is one of the greatest concerns of analysts who fear the loss of human control over the pace of combat. Paul Scharre, a program director at the Center for a New American Security, has warned of a “flash war” erupting when machines misinterpret radar signals and initiate catastrophic, possibly nuclear responses. “Competitive pressures in fast-paced environments threaten to push humans further and further out of the loop,” he wrote. “With this arms race in speed come grave risks,” including “a war that spirals out of control in mere seconds.”16
Inserting Speed Bumps
Given the risks posed by hypersonic weapons, especially when their deployment is paired with other technological developments, it is essential to consider measures for minimizing the dangers they pose to nuclear stability and the war-and-peace equation. This will take time: the technologies involved in these systems remain largely unproven, and the strategic rationale for their deployment has yet to be fully demonstrated. Meanwhile, military and government officials should slow the process of hypersonic weapons acquisition to provide strategists and policymakers adequate time to assess their potential utility and escalatory risks.
One approach for slowing things down would be an international moratorium on flight tests of hypersonic weapons.17 Such an arrangement might seem out of reach, but all major powers have reason to fear the early deployment of hypersonic weapons by their rivals. Therefore, a moratorium on testing, to allow time for other control measures to be considered, is well worth pursuing.
If leaders of the major powers are prepared to discuss constraints on developing and deploying hypersonic weapons, they could adopt a number of approaches. One would be to establish strict limits on deployable numbers of such weapons or prohibit their deployment altogether, moves that would eliminate most or all of the risks posed by these weapons. Again, although no doubt seeming a remote possibility, such measures would help shield all the major powers from an acute threat against which they possess few if any defenses. A possible venue for discussing such measures would be the strategic stability talks that were once held by U.S. and Russian officials. The first round of these talks convened in September 2017 in Helsinki, and a second round was scheduled for March 2018 in Vienna, but Moscow cancelled in light of growing bilateral tensions. Russia has recently expressed interest in resuming these talks, and it is reasonable to assume that hypersonic weapons limitations would be on the agenda.
Constraints on hypersonic weapons could also feature in any future U.S.-Russian discussion of strategic arms limitations. Under an ideal scenario, the two sides would agree to extend New START before it expires and then commence discussions on a successor agreement, one that would allow for advances in technology, such as the introduction of hypersonic weapons. Presumably, such talks would begin on a bilateral basis, but ideally China would be invited and would agree to join.
Achieving an outright ban on hypersonic weapons may not be a realistic outcome of such discussions, but it might be possible to consider limitations on how hypersonic weapons can be armed, positioned, and employed. The intent here would not be to proscribe the deployment of hypersonic weapons, but rather to prevent their use in ways that would facilitate the rapid escalation of conflict or the early use of nuclear weapons. The need for such measures has already been voiced by congressional refusal to fund conventionally armed strategic missiles.18 This has reduced some of the hypersonic risks, but not all. Still worrisome is the risk of ambiguity about the intent of attack and the entanglement problem. To address these concerns, other measures are needed.
One solution would be to preserve the INF Treaty or, if this is a lost cause, commence Chinese-Russian-U.S. negotiations on a new agreement to cover intermediate-range weapons of the sort now being developed by all three countries. Such an agreement could, like the soon-to-expire INF Treaty, prohibit all weapons of a certain type and range or set limits on the numbers and capabilities of any weapons that are deployed. One approach would be to set a limit on all deployed hypersonic weapons, whether air, sea, or ground launched. Another would be to limit their deployed numbers below a certain threshold, which would eliminate fears of a disarming first strike. Until such negotiations can be undertaken or while they are under way, the three powers should consider confidence-building measures aimed at reducing the risk of unintended escalation. Such measures could include information-sharing on the range and capabilities of proposed weapons and protocols intended to differentiate conventionally armed hypersonic weapons from nuclear-armed ones, so as to reduce the risk of warhead ambiguity.19
Admittedly, such negotiations seem distant, so Congress should intervene and impose its own speed bumps on the rush to deploy hypersonic weapons. In contrast to the measured pace of hypersonics development in the past, the Pentagon is rushing ahead with the design and testing of these weapons without careful thought to their strategic implications or escalation consequences.
“The development of hypersonic weapons in the United States,” argues Acton, “has been largely motivated by technology, not by strategy. In other words, technologists have decided to try and develop hypersonic weapons because it seems like they should be useful for something, not because there is a clearly defined mission need for them to fulfill.”
Before Congress approves the funds the Pentagon is seeking for hypersonic weaponry, it should ask, What are these munitions needed for? Do they pose an unnecessary risk of escalation? Are there better alternatives?
The Defense Department will argue that it needs to ensure U.S. leadership in the burgeoning hypersonic arms race with China and Russia, but higher spending on predominantly offensive weapons does nothing to protect the United States from similar advances by its competitors. In fact, such spending might put the United States at greater risk by inducing adversaries to accelerate their own offensive programs. It is very difficult to defend against hypersonic weapons. The only sure way to protect the United States and its forces abroad from hypersonic weapons is to restrain them through arms control agreements.
ENDNOTES
1. On the arms control implications of hypersonics, see Amy F. Woolf, “Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues,” CRS Report, R41464, January 8, 2019.
2. For background on hypersonic weapons and their characteristics, see Richard H. Speier et al., “Hypersonic Missile Proliferation: Hindering the Spread of a New Class of Weapons,” RAND Corp., 2017, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2100/RR2137/RAND_RR2137.pdf.
4. See Paul McLeary, “PACOM Harris: U.S. Needs to Develop Hypersonic Weapons,” USNI News, February 14, 2018, https://news.usni.org/2018/02/14/pacom-harris-u-s-needs-develop-hypersonic-weapons-criticizes-self-limiting-missile-treaties.
6. For background on the Avangard system, see Michael Kofman, “Russia’s Avangard Hypersonic Boost-Glide System,” Russia Military Analysis, January 11, 2019, https://russianmilitaryanalysis.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/russias-avangard-hypersonic-boost-glide-system/.
7. Anton Troianovski and Paul Sonne, “Russia Is Poised to Add a New Hypersonic Warhead to Its Arsenal,” The Washington Post, December 26, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-is-poised-to-add-a-new-hypersonic-nuclear-warhead-to-its-arsenal/2018/12/26/e9b89374-0934-11e9-8942-0ef442e59094_story.html.
8. See David Axe, “Is Kinzhal, Russia’s New Hypersonic Missile, a Game Changer?” Daily Beast, March 15, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-kinzhal-russias-new-hypersonic-missile-a-game-changer.
9. Corey Dickstein, “Military Services to Work Together to Speed Hypersonic Weapon Development,” Stars and Stripes, July 25, 2018, https://www.stripes.com/news/military-services-to-work-together-to-speed-hypersonic-weapon-development-1.539431.
10. See James M. Acton, “Hypersonic Weapons Explainer,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), April 2, 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/04/02/hypersonic-weapons-explainer-pub-75957.
11. Aaron Gregg, “Military-Industrial Complex Finds a Growth Market in Hypersonic Weaponry,” The Washington Post, December 31, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/21/military-industrial-complex-finds-growth-market-hypersonic-weaponry/.
12. Peter Erbland, “Tactical Boost Glide (TBG),” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, n.d., https://www.darpa.mil/program/tactical-boost-glide.
13. James M. Acton, “Silver Bullet? Asking the Right Questions About Conventional Prompt Global Strike,” CEIP, 2014, pp. 113–119, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/cpgs.pdf.
15. See Troy Rummler, “Future Hypersonics Could Be Artificially Intelligent,” Sandia Lab News, April 25, 2019, https://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/labnews/articles/2019/04-26/hypersonics.html.
16. Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), p. 229.
17. Mark Gubrud, “Test Ban for Hypersonic Missiles?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 6, 2015, https://thebulletin.org/roundtable/test-ban-for-hypersonic-missiles/.
18. For a history of congressional action on hypersonics, see Woolf, “Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Long-Range Ballistic Missiles,” pp. 22–32.
Levan Ramishvili
Hypersonic flight is not new. The V-2 rocket and the vast majority of the ballistic missiles that it inspired achieved hypersonic speeds (i.e., speeds faster than the speed of sound or Mach 5+) as they fell from the sky, as did crewed aircraft like the rocket-powered X-15. Rather than speed, today’s renewed attention to hypersonic weapons owes to developments that enable controlled flight. These new systems have two sub-varieties: hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles. Glide vehicles are the cousins of ballistic warheads: they are lofted on high velocity boosters, separate, then use momentum and control surfaces to skip and glide through the upper atmosphere before crashing onto their targets. The cruise missiles use an advanced propulsion system (a SCRAMJET) for powered flight. While the descriptions are straightforward, the engineering needed to accomplish the guidance and maneuvering (not to mention survivability) of these weapons is far from clear.
Are these weapons and their employment simply an evolution of existing missiles? Or a revolution that threatens to upset the balance of power? The answer still depends on decisions yet to be made. Russia appears closest to fielding hypersonic missiles, as it aspires to deploy the Avangard glide vehicle before the year is out. The United States has ambitious goals for accuracy and precision, but its most viable programs are not expected to reach operational capability until 2022. Meanwhile, China has been characteristically vague on their hypersonic weapons while still letting it be known that they are firmly committed to their development.
For now, it seems hypersonic weapons’ predominant value is to give user countries a Clausewitzian capability (i.e., reaching a limited culminating point of victory quickly and decisively) in support of a Sun Tzu-inspired strategy (i.e., to win without fighting).
A trio of questions needs to be considered: What audience can hypersonic weapons be leveraged against, what tactical utility do they provide, and what strategic objectives can be advanced by using them or threatening to use them? Framing the discussion in this way is useful for delving deeper into why nations are pursuing hypersonic weapons as well as making initial assessments on how they may be operationalized. The propositions below are not exhaustive; they are meant to provoke discussion. They pair a particular application with a particular country, but there is nothing stopping Russia, China, or the United States from taking advantage of any application discussed below.
Russia: Imposing Costs to Discredit NATO
Russian hypersonic weapon capabilities are addressed principally to two audiences: the West (especially NATO) and Russia’s peripheral nations like Finland, the Baltics, Ukraine, and Georgia. Living under the hypersonic gun makes locations in western Europe as vulnerable to strikes initiated from within Russian territory as the Baltics, Ukraine, and Georgia have been in the sub-sonic age. Consider that Russia’s sub-sonic Kalibr cruise missile, if launched from the Gulf of Finland, could range any country on Russia’s western border and would take about two hours to hit Sofia, Bulgaria, 1,200 miles to the south. An air-launched Kinzhal hypersonic glide vehicle traveling Mach 10 could hit Sofia in 11 minutes from the same location. Re-orienting the firing line to Russia’s western borders, a Kinzhal could reach London, Paris, or Rome equally quickly. To put it another way, hypersonic weapons mean that a hypothetical target 1,200 miles away has the same opportunity for warning as those within roughly 100 miles of a subsonic cruise missile. The Mach 20 Avangard expands the threat umbrella to cover ranges reportedly in excess of 3,700 miles with a flight time of around 20 minutes.
Up until now, the West has been fairly confident that their collective intelligence capabilities would alert them to limited Russian aggression. Even if insufficient to fully interdict a Russian move, it was understood that distance equates to time and thus warning. Russian hypersonic weapons offer a novel way to overcome the tactical depth — the idea of where one’s vulnerabilities lie, where those vulnerabilities can be exploited from, and how quickly effects can be inflicted — implicit in European defense thinking. Countries in the Russian periphery feel the loss of depth in a different way: they are now quickly reachable from a vastly increased number of firing locations. For example, sub-sonic munitions would take about 15 minutes to hit Donetsk from the Russian border. Hypersonic weapons with the same flight time could now reach Donetsk from as far away as central (Kinzhal) or eastern (Avangard) Russia.
This makes hypersonic weapons a helpful tool for a fait accompli, a move so decisive (perhaps unexpected) that it instantly achieves the Clausewitzian “culminating point of victory” against opposition that is either unable or unwilling to fight back. A robust hypersonic weapons capability would help Russia quickly seize the initiative in escalating from rhetoric to kinetic action, quickly inflicting damage using units that are well-dispersed and may appear unrelated to each other or to the conflict. Alternatively, the same capabilities can be used to strike targets meant to deter Western leaders from a forceful intervention. A single hypersonic weapon targeting an outlying military airfield may be enough of a “pressure point” to warn without provoking, or without cornering political leaders to respond in kind.
However, combat is not the Kremlin’s immediate application for hypersonic weapons in Europe. It is to reinforce the most salient message that Russia hopes to send: NATO cannot protect you. This message preys on the fears of countries who rely on NATO as the guarantor of sovereignty and security norms within the Russian shadow. By showcasing capabilities — as it did in Syria with the use of a Kalibr cruise missile in 2015 — Moscow seeks to simultaneously discredit NATO’s security guarantees and coerce deference from its periphery. By emphasizing NATO’s physical and psychological vulnerability, Moscow hopes to deter the alliance from confronting Russian aggression. These threats are magnified by the added prospect of nuclear capability, supported by Russian doctrine for the use of low-yield weapons in a regional conflict, which further emboldens Russian aggression. It’s worth noting that there is real debate on the credibility of Russia’s so-called “escalate to de-escalate” strategy — a misnomer that should be corrected to “escalate to win” or “escalation control.” It does, however, illustrate Moscow’s willingness to wager a great deal while leaving its adversaries to call the bluff. Real or imagined, Russian hypersonic weapons increase the cost to NATO in organizing a combat response to Russian grey zone aggression.
China: Ambiguous Capabilities, Clear Objectives
The state of China’s hypersonic missile program is unclear. What’s obvious is that the audience for China’s hypersonic weapons is first and foremost the United States, who Beijing seeks to deter from interfering in portions of the Western Pacific that it sees as a privileged sphere of influence. Second are nearby nations and targets of periodic Chinese intimidation — specifically Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Given the maritime nature of China’s near abroad, synchronizing kinetic strikes becomes especially relevant and obviates a key reason that militaries historically seized terrain — to ensure that firepower could be leveraged en masse against priority targets.
A hypersonic capability affords Beijing more options for simultaneously striking ships at sea, forces ashore, and command functions using a force posture that appears deceivingly routine. Distance-wise, Chinese weapons can already reach the ranges in question. However, to achieve simultaneous effects with existing subsonic capabilities, China must either forward deploy its missile systems or stagger launches. Either approach would complicate the achievement of a fait accompli by increasing Chinese forces’ vulnerable to enemy counterbattery strikes or affording unstruck targets greater opportunity to defend or disperse.
If launched concurrently, a Chinese YJ-83 cruise missile traveling 0.9 Mach would hit its target 100 miles away at the same time a DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle going Mach 15 hit its target at 1,500 miles. That flight time is just under nine minutes. This means that Chinese forces can position their launchers to impose near-instantaneous strikes anywhere within the first island chain that stretches from Japan through the South China Sea before hooking into Vietnam, as well as much of the second island chain reaching out toward Guam and the Marianas. Weapons launched from Chinese warships and shore batteries could be synchronized to simultaneously cripple U.S. naval assets in the South China Sea, air and amphibious forces on Okinawa, and 7th Fleet Headquarters in Sasebo. While the threat of hypersonic weapons to high value targets like aircraft carriers is concerning, the deeper problem is an improved Chinese ability to hit those high value targets as well as other units simultaneously and with very little warning.
China is probably not preparing this kind of surprise attack — for now. Similar to Russia, China would rather use these weapons to demonstrate backyard dominance without resorting to war. They want the United States to conclude that the benefits to maintaining its regional interests are not worth the costs of armed confrontation. Countries near China are unlikely to conclude that their individual cost-benefit calculations are any better. Indeed, they are much worse given Beijing’s added economic leverage.
The possibility of China developing intercontinental hypersonic weapons with nuclear warheads hints at a further strategic use: to impose mutual vulnerability on the United States. Chinese defense planners may see their relatively small nuclear stockpile as vulnerable to a catastrophic first strike. In their nightmares, whatever does survive a first strike could plausibly be intercepted by U.S. ballistic missile defenses, if not now then in the future as defense systems mature. A Chinese nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon thus guarantees mutual vulnerability as a de facto state of affairs between Washington and Beijing. They accept that the United States could deliver overwhelming nuclear force through its strategic triad, and Washington would have no choice but to concede to the practical inability to defend against nuclear-armed hypersonic weapons. Beijing may see this as stabilizing to American-Chinese relations, and certainly would view it as enhancing the credibility of their nuclear deterrent. In doing so, China may perceive further freedom of action versus a United States unwilling to jeopardize nuclear stability over Chinese sovereignty assertions.
United States: Deter Adversaries and Reassure Allies
The majority of defense messaging from Washington can be put in one of two categories: deterring adversaries (especially China and Russia), or reassuring allies (especially the ones confronted by China or Russia). The discussion of hypersonic weapons is no different as the US seeks to navigate competitive great power ties and safeguard the regional allies and partners who provide a key competitive advantage.
To begin with, hypersonic combat capabilities like those already mentioned would also accrue to the United States. A Mach 8 weapon fired from the North Sea could strike military bases 700 miles away in the Kaliningrad oblast within nine minutes. Likewise, hypersonic weapons can enable synchronized fires against Chinese forces from allied platforms deployed in the first and second island chains. The characteristics that make these weapons useful to U.S. adversaries for seizing the initiative in an offensive action are also useful to the United States and its allies for stalling their momentum with equally rapid and injurious counterattacks.
But the United States has an added opportunity: deploying hypersonic missiles overseas to signal interest and resolve. The U.S. systems that media reports portray as closest to being operational — like the Air Force’s Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon or the Army’s Advanced Hypersonics Weapon — have theater-level ranges, meaning they will have to be sent to the region beforehand. Since the number of weapons initially available will likely be limited, it makes them all the more potent in illustrating U.S. priorities on interests and redlines. That also makes them useful for diplomatic leverage; a stick for our adversaries and a carrot for our allies. There is of course concern that allies may be unwilling to host these weapons for fear of inviting unwanted attention domestically and from Russia or China. It stands to reason then that low-visibility deployments to existing bases may be beneficial, as well as developing systems that are easily surged and recovered such as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) or ship-based weapons. If developed wisely, these weapons offer a new coin to be used for conventional deterrence and assurance.
Second, a hypersonic weapons program can be used as leverage in pursuing arms control agreements beneficial to the security of the United States and its allies. This would be broadly analogous to the Pershing II missiles which played a central role in the negotiations that led to the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Hypersonic weapons could serve a similar purpose today in tamping the threats posed by Russian and Chinese weapons or in trade for other strategic interests. It is important to note that to negotiate from a position of strength, the United States would be best served by successfully developing and deploying the same capabilities that it would like to limit; only then will adversaries be forced to consider the negotiations seriously.
Third, hypersonic weapons may provide new response options in the face of adversary counterspace actions. It is near-common knowledge that the United States is disproportionately reliant on space-based assets to enable functions like surveillance, communication, and precision navigation. Accordingly, the United States is especially wary of adversary capabilities that jeopardize those assets. First, a rapid strike capability may allow U.S. forces to disable command uplinks to the anti-satellite weapon before it achieves its effect, especially those targeting higher orbits or designed for co-orbital rendezvous/collision. Second, given the prospect of losing some space-based capability, the short flight times of hypersonic weapons give the United States an option to inflict damage before its own space-based enabler is lost. Both options support a plausible response to anti-space attacks which, if signaled to the adversary, can deter anti-satellite launches in the first place.
An alternative contribution may be ascent-phase ballistic missile defense. The need to put an interceptor in close proximity to the launch site is a recurring challenge with ascent-phase targeting. However, because hypersonic weapons compress the time/speed/distance relationships while also flying at high altitudes, they may be well-suited to this role. Hypersonic cruise missiles would be particularly useful since their powered flight would facilitate maneuvering and are easier to deploy on high mobility platforms like ships and aircraft. Hypersonic weapons may still not be responsive enough for completely unexpected launches, but launch cueing and robust detection capabilities could provide enough of an edge.
Broader Implications
Whether evolution or revolution, and whether used to make or deter war, hypersonic weapons will bring change. Skeptics could reasonably cite historical revolutions in the speed and reach of war like the advent of military aviation in 1909 or subsonic missiles in the 1950s which also reduced tactical depth and were eventually overcome. The difference is that aircraft and subsonic cruise missiles still traveled for hours to reach distant targets. The vulnerability they imposed was contingent on poor detection capabilities that eventually improved and restored a sense of depth. There is nothing that makes hypersonic weapons inherently undetectable or un-interceptable; yet, even when that becomes technologically possible, the speed of hypersonic weapons increases the distances for which detection is largely moot. Consider a response that requires at least five minutes to implement or launch. For a subsonic weapon to beat that reaction time, it has to be fired from roughly 60 miles away. For a hypersonic weapon flying at Mach 10 to beat that same reaction, it can be fired from around 570 miles. What hope such systems offer would rely on a perfect sequence of instantaneous detection, flawless communication, and immediate response.
Advancements in hypersonic weapons will also motivate developments in other technologies. Space-based defenses may take better advantage of limited flight time, but the formal weaponization of space (despite decades of avoidance) may invite a proliferation of counter-space weapons that jeopardize other interests. The short warning times may eventually incentivize automated interceptor systems to a degree not previously acceptable, up to and including firing without human approval. Confronted with exceptionally challenging post-launch problems, these weapons may increase the attractiveness of pre-emptive attacks to make sure they are neutralized prior to larger hostilities. Finally, Russia or China could line their own pockets by selling export versions of these systems to current customers like India, Iran, Syria, or Turkey and gain the added benefit of complicating the United States’ strategic landscape. Perhaps most concerning would be the sale (real or apparent) of a limited quantity of hypersonic weapons to a Western Hemisphere nation like Venezuela or Cuba. While it may not seem economically feasible at first, Russia or China may one day find strategic value in making whatever arrangements necessary to put their weapons on America’s doorstep.
Hypersonic Weapons Alone Are Not the Challenge
Hypersonic weapons may lead to a revolution in warfighting if countries produce them at scale. Mass production and deployment of reliable designs would mean that these weapons are no longer a niche capability targeted against a limited number of valuable targets. Rather, inflicting near-instantaneous effects over a multitude of primary and secondary targets could help realize current fears of increased crisis pressures and faster escalation dynamics. In fewer numbers, there may be evolutionary changes at the tactical and operational levels of war without drastically threatening the strategic balance of peer adversaries. In this case, they may herald another iteration of stability-instability dynamics, where states take advantage of high-end warfighting capabilities to enable grey zone aggression. Whether revolution or evolution, hypersonic weapons alone are not the challenge. They will contribute to a 21st-century combined arms dilemma that includes other new technology like cyber activities, advanced anti-submarine warfare, and space operations as well as traditional, but indispensable, maneuver forces like infantry battalions, warships, and air superiority fighters.
Alan Cummings is a Master’s candidate at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy focusing on nuclear strategy and emerging technology. He served over 10 years on active duty with the U.S. Navy before transitioning to the Navy Reserve, and was recently a research assistant with the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The views expressed here are his own and in no way represent any institution with which he is affiliated.
(This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. LLNL-JRNL-786217.)
Levan Ramishvili
Coming to a War Near You: Hypersonic Weapons
There are a lot of questions when it comes to hypersonic weapons. We have the answers.
There is a great deal of talk about hypersonic weapons and their possible impact on the battlefield. Some consider them the ultimate weapon of war, others feel they are merely an evolutionary development along a predictable track.
So just how dangerous could these weapons become in the future? Who is developing them? Would America be able to defend against them? To get some answers, I put these questions to Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments senior fellows Bryan Clark and Mark Gunzinger.
Kazianis: Hypersonic weapons are all the rage in defense circles these days—a recent article in Politico seems to suggest as much. Which country would you say at this point is furthest along in its research on deploying an actual usable hypersonic weapon? What are the potential bottlenecks in such advanced R&D?
Clark & Gunzinger: The United States, China and Russia are all aggressively developing hypersonic weapons. In terms of operationalizing a usable weapon, I believe the United States and Russia are very close. China has hypersonic technology, but is mostly working on boost-glide weapons that are essentially ballistic missiles with a hypersonic missile as the warhead. These will be too large and costly to be an operationally useful weapon system that is used in significant numbers. The United States and Russia are also working on air-launched hypersonic weapons that are smaller, less expensive and more operationally relevant.
There are few real technical bottlenecks at this point. The biggest technical challenge is the fact you essentially need two different motors to power the missile: one to get the missile up to supersonic speeds (> Mach 1, or about 750 mph), and another to then take the missile up to hypersonic speeds (> Mach 5, or about 3,750 mph). The kinds of motors that work at lower speeds, such as turbojets and turbofans, will not work at higher speeds, which require scramjet or ramjet motors. Conversely, the higher-speed motors don't work at lower speeds. This can increase the cost of the weapon significantly, because you need to boost the missile to high speed and then use a scramjet or ramjet to attain and maintain hypersonic speeds.
There are essentially two ways to get a missile up to the speed where a scramjet or ramjet will work. One is a "boost-glide" weapon in which a large rocket boosts the missile to high altitudes and speeds before its ramjet or scramjet ignites and powers the missile at hypersonic speed to a target. The other is an air-launched weapon that uses the launch aircraft to get the missile to a high altitude and speed; after launch, a small booster rocket takes the missile to high enough speeds for the ramjet or scramjet to take over.
The latter weapon could be far less expensive than a surface-launched weapon. Some U.S. manufacturers are looking at reducing the cost of air-launched hypersonic weapons by using inexpensive rocket boosters (see below) to accelerate it to high speeds, and using additive manufacturing ("3-D printing") to build the hypersonic ramjet/scramjet motor. Additive manufacturing enables them to produce the motor less expensively because it eliminates the need for extensive machining to create the motor’s combustion chambers and fuel systems.
Kazianis: How likely is it in your view that hypersonics will be used in the delivery systems of nuclear weapons? Do you think they will change U.S. or other nations’ nuclear weapons strategies in the years ahead?
Clark & Gunzinger: A nuclear hypersonic "boost-glide" weapon is probably not going to be more effective than a nuclear ballistic missile with maneuvering, multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRV), which use technologies that have been around for decades. The U.S. Pershing II theater ballistic missile from the Cold War had a maneuvering warhead, and MIRVs date from around the same time.
Similar to hypersonic conventional cruise missiles, an air-launched hypersonic missile could be a more effective delivery system for a nuclear warhead. One concern with contemporary cruise missiles is their survivability. A hypersonic weapon would have much higher survivability than a subsonic nuclear cruise missile such as a CALCM or Tomahawk.
Kazianis: How difficult would it be to defend against an attack by hypersonic weapons? Do you see our current missile-defense platforms being effective against such weapons? Could they be used as part of combined saturation strikes along with cruise and ballistic missiles to multiply their impact?
Clark & Gunzinger: It is very difficult to defend against hypersonic weapons using our traditional "layered" approach. Since they are going very fast, it will be hard for area air-defense interceptors such as the Navy SM-6 or Army PAC-2 / PAC-3 to catch them unless they are launched from the target's location. Because they travel so fast, an electronic warfare effect may not cause them to fail or go off-course soon enough for the missile to miss its target. The best defenses against them will likely be high-capacity point defenses such as Rolling Airframe Missile, CIWS and possibly rail guns that are co-located with a target.
Hypersonic weapons could be used in conjunction with less-expensive weapons in a "tunneling" attack to increase the survivability of all the attacking weapons. Highly survivable hypersonic weapons could be used to help know-out sensors and defensive weapons that threaten a U.S. PGM salvo. Less-expensive munitions, such as SDBs or MALD decoys, could consume a defender's attention and compel him to waste his interceptors, creating a window in time and space for other PGMs to get a clean shot at defended targets.
Kazianis: In what ways do you see China using or not using hypersonic weapons in their much-discussed anti-access/area-denial strategies?
Clark & Gunzinger: China will likely employ hypersonic weapons as part of their A2/AD strategies, but in limited ways. While "boost-glide" weapons will have long ranges and be highly survivable, but they will also be very expensive. China could use them as a "silver bullet" weapon to hit high-value targets, or do so in conjunction with less-expensive weapons that reduce the defender's capacity first.
When they develop them, China will likely also employ air-launched hypersonic weapons to attack U.S. and allied bases with a high probability of being able to circumvent U.S. defenses. U.S. forces will have to think about how they will use point defenses to protect high-value targets.
Kazianis: Finally, looking out ten to twenty years into the future, do you see hypersonic weapons being a truly game-changing weapon? Or just the normal evolution of precision strike weapons?
Clark & Gunzinger: We think hypersonics are an evolutionary improvement, rather than a revolutionary one. They are faster, and more survivable, but have limited payload, less maneuverability and less-sophisticated sensors and logic (because of their speed).
Many people have talked about the quicker time on target achievable with hypersonic weapons. This may be useful in some very limited situations, such as attacking a missile launcher after it launches but before it relocates. This still requires surveillance to provide a target and a launch platform close enough to support the engagement. With regard to a high-value target (like a terrorist leader) it is unlikely our command and control cycle will be able to exploit their speed to hit the target before it moves on.
Levan Ramishvili
Mach 20 or Bust
Weapons research may yet produce a true spaceplane.
THE HYPERSONIC REALM is out there, just beyond our reach, above Mach 5. And so it has remained for decades. We’ve touched it briefly, even built vehicles—notably the X-15 and the space shuttle—capable of traveling at hypersonic speeds for short periods as they dive down from the edge of space. Yet we always seem “10 years away” from a true aerospace plane that can cruise long distances through the atmosphere at many times the speed of sound without burning up.
The vision of hypersonic flight has seduced aviators, warriors, engineers, and presidents. It was Ronald Reagan who in 1986 pitched the National Aero-Space Plane, the most ambitious hypersonic flight program ever conceived, a vehicle that was supposed to, “by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours….”
It never even came close. And it took the field of hypersonic research years to recover from the letdown. After Reagan’s State of the Union speech, the media immediately branded the National Aero-Space Plane “the Orient Express.” The program was canceled in 1994, never having emerged from the research phase.
“Many post-morta have been done on the NASP program,” says Mark Lewis, a professor of aeronautics at the University of Maryland and currently chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force. “I think most people will agree…that they oversold the program. They bit off much more than we could chew. They were looking to get to Mach 25 with a single-stage-to-orbit the first time out of the hangar!”
Looking back on NASP and the other flameouts, former Air Force historian Richard Hallion sees more than a string of failures, however. “Hypersonics has had this image that it has been nothing but a huge rat hole for money,” he says. “But when you look at it, you can see the value of the research.” In fact, Hallion believes the many less-publicized successes since NASP have put hypersonic research on the verge of a real breakthrough. “To make an historical analogy, this is like 1937 with the jet engine, which appeared in ’39,” he says. “Or it’s like 1944 in supersonic [flight], which we achieved in 1947. We’re right there. We’re starting to close theory and practice. We’re starting to see the reality of what we can achieve in terms of performance prediction and construction and materials.”
In 2000, Hallion participated in a study for the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, which concluded in its report, “Hypersonics could be the next great step forward in the transformation of the Air Force into a completely integrated aerospace force.” Partly as a result of the study, the Pentagon took the lead in U.S. hypersonic research, though NASA is still involved. “My suspicion is that this is a technology that first and foremost is going to be a military technology, then a space access technology,” Lewis says. “Then maybe down the line it will have some civilian applications.”
So forget about the Orient Express for now. Think hypersonic weapons—Mach 6 missiles, more than six times as fast as today’s cruise missiles. Launched from a distance, such weapons could destroy hardened targets with their high-speed impact alone. The Pentagon wants the capability to reach any place on Earth—say a terrorist’s temporary hideout—within two hours. And unlike an intercontinental ballistic missile, a hypersonic missile could change course in flight or even abort its mission.
That vision has spawned a mini-boom in hypersonic research—this time without the hype. Dozens of projects are under way worldwide, several of which will lead to test flights within the next few years. A trio of inter-related U.S. military projects—HiFire, X-51A, and FALCON—are intended to solve different pieces of the hypersonic puzzle, from propulsion to aerodynamics to the peculiar physics of hypersonic flight.
THE CURRENT BOOM began in the summer of 2002, with researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia launching a small hypersonic test vehicle on top of a sounding rocket. For the first time, the experiment, called HyShot, proved that a key component of hypersonic propulsion, the scramjet, or supersonic combustion ramjet, could work in the atmosphere and not just in wind tunnels (see “Outback Scramjet,” Oct./Nov. 2002). By scooping oxygen from the atmosphere as they fly, scramjets liberate hypersonic vehicles from the need to carry heavy tanks of oxidizer for combustion. Since HyShot’s 2002 launch, international researchers have successfully flown air-breathing engines three times, reaching speeds just short of Mach 10.
In 2004, NASA took the next step by flying a scramjet engine that accelerated a 14-foot-long, surfboard-shaped unmanned vehicle called the X-43A to an astounding Mach 9.8 before the craft made a planned plunge into the Pacific Ocean (see “Debrief: Hyper-X,” June/July 2005). The X-43 was a turning point, says Jim Pittman, principal investigator for hypersonics at NASA. “We learned two things: Scramjets really do work—you really can get positive thrust out of a scramjet—and you really can integrate a scramjet with a vehicle that you can fly and control. And both of those things are huge.”
As a hypersonics engineer at NASA for 30 years, Pittman has been through flush times and lean times. “Living through it is frustrating,” he says. “It’s a cycle, and you just have to tough it out.” Pittman worked on the NASP as well as the X-43, which was part of a larger NASA program called Hyper-X. Ironically, around the time the X-43 succeeded, the agency’s aeronautics budget got slashed, one reason NASA now finds itself playing a supporting role to the Pentagon.
Which is not to say the space agency’s contributions are insignificant. This fall NASA will launch a small experiment on a commercial sounding rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, off Virginia’s eastern shore. Called HyBoLT, for Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition, the wedge-shaped payload should provide valuable data on the fundamental physics of high-Mach flight.
“When you hear the term ‘hypersonics,’ you should always think heat transfer,” Pittman says. “The single most important distinguishing feature of hypersonics is heat—the heat caused by the frictional forces of the air passing over the surfaces. In hypersonic flight the heat transfer is extremely large, and the higher the Mach number, the higher the heat transfer.”
These problems are especially tricky in what’s called the boundary layer, the air that washes over the vehicle’s skin. Though the boundary layer has been studied in wind tunnels and with computer modeling, how it behaves in actual hypersonic flight is still poorly understood. What is known is that as speed increases, the layer goes through a transition, eventually becoming fully turbulent. As that happens, temperatures double or triple. And as the heat ratchets up, so does drag, which can radically affect flight characteristics. “We need to better understand it,” says Pittman. “It’s the most critical thing in hypersonics.”
The HyBoLT test article, which looks like the flat tip of a screwdriver, will be launched on its suborbital rocket to an altitude of 250 miles, while instruments record temperatures and pressures on different parts of the surface. It’s a modest experiment—the kind of basic data collection that supports the sexier test flight programs.
Not far from Pittman’s office at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, testing is under way for one of those high-profile programs—the X-51A scramjet demonstrator, a $240 million collaboration between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force. A scramjet engine for the vehicle has been fired dozens of times at Langley’s 8-Foot High Temperature Tunnel.
With four test flights over the Pacific Ocean slated to begin in 2009, the X-51A will ultimately attempt record-breaking engine burns lasting five minutes, which should propel the craft to about Mach 7. Like the X-43, the X-51A is a wave rider. After being boosted to high altitude, the vehicle will light its engine and surf its own shock wave, compressing the air in front of it and lowering drag. Though the immediate goal is to flight test a propulsion system for a superfast missile, the project received the X-plane designation in recognition of its potential to advance the field of hypersonics generally.
For Mark Lewis, the X-51A is all about the scramjet. “We want to see a scramjet engine work for more than 10 or 11 seconds,” he says, referring to the burn times of the two Hyper-X flights. Engine burns of several minutes would demonstrate to skeptics that long-duration scramjet-propelled flight is feasible.
Skeptics might be forgiven their doubts. Achieving combustion in an air-breathing engine moving at thousands of miles per hour has been compared to keeping a match lit in a hurricane. Hyper-X protected the precious flame in its combustion chamber behind carefully focused shock waves, but only for seconds. The X-51A engine will have to run at least 30 times longer.
To cover their bets, DARPA and the Air Force have two companies, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and ATK, developing two kinds of hypersonic engines. One major difference from Hyper-X is that the X-51A will burn conventional jet fuel instead of the liquid hydrogen that very-high-performance rocket and scramjet engines normally use. It won’t be the first scramjet to do so: In December 2005, a DARPA-Navy project called HyFly launched a missile perched on a booster rocket from Wallops Island in Virginia. The missile’s air-breathing engine, which ran on JP-10 aviation fuel, flew for more than 15 seconds under scramjet power.
Pratt & Whitney’s engine is called the X-1. When flying at hypersonic speeds, JP-7 aviation fuel rushes into the X-1’s three-foot-long combustion chamber at 3,300 feet per second. A closed-loop system cycles the fuel around the engine, using it as coolant to draw heat and pressure off the combustion chamber. In the process, the extreme heat—more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit—“cracks” the fuel’s molecular structure. The cracking shortens the molecules and allows the fuel to burn more quickly, which is imperative. If the fuel doesn’t ignite in the microsecond in which it flows through the chamber, it will spew out uselessly, producing zero thrust—and a very fast falling object.
Over the past year, the X-1 engine has worked as advertised in Langley’s test chamber, culminating in a 50-second-plus, simulated X-51A flight at more than Mach 5 last April.
In less than two years, the X-51A will have a chance to prove itself in the atmosphere. Each test flight will begin with a B-52 taking off from Point Mugu, California. The airplane will carry the 14-foot vehicle up to 49,500 feet over the Pacific, where it will be released attached to a booster derived from an Army missile. The booster will get the demonstrator to over Mach 4, whereupon the scramjet engine will fire to propel it to full speed.
With the X-51A attempting to prove that hydrocarbon scramjets can propel hypersonic missiles, it’s up to other projects to sort out how to achieve higher Mach numbers. For some of those answers, Lewis and the Air Force made a long flight down under to work with the Australians who came up with HyShot.
EVEN AT 500 MPH, it takes a long, long time to reach Australia. “Just eight movies and you’re there,” Australians joke. The country’s remoteness may account for its fascination with hypersonic flight; someday the travel time from London to Sydney may come down to one movie.
The Australian hypersonics program has been making steady progress for a decade, but it really took off in 2002, when HyShot fired the world’s first scramjet engine in flight. Building on that accomplishment, the Australian Department of Defense joined its U.S. counterpart, along with NASA, Boeing, and other partners, in an innovative international project called HiFire, for Hypersonic Flight International Research Experimentation. Funded with $54 million, HiFire includes a series of experiments and at least 10 test flights to be conducted over the next six years. Mark Lewis, who signed the agreement for the United States last November, says that the project complements the X-51A and other U.S. hypersonics efforts. “In HiFire, we’re looking at very fundamental science: all the problems we think we would anticipate in hypersonic flight.”
Next year the HyShot team will test a new free-flying vehicle as part of the HiFire program (earlier HyShots stayed attached to their booster rockets). One research goal is to try different shapes for scramjet engines in the search for greater efficiency, starting with the air inlet. Instead of a simple rectangular slot, shaped like the front of a Dustbuster vacuum cleaner, the inlet for the REST (rectangular-to-elliptical shape transition) engine is three-dimensional and more complex. The opening is still generally rectangular, but it includes faces that slant in toward the combustion chamber. Michael Smart, an associate professor in the HyShot group at the University of Queensland, explains: “The reason these 3-D inlets are more efficient is that the air is compressed by all surfaces of the inlet. A 2-D inlet only compresses the air in one plane: The side walls create drag, but don’t do any compression.”
The outer rectangular shape of the inlet offers an advantage: Stacking engines side by side is easier. But inside the vehicle, the inlet connects to an elliptical combustion chamber. Joined together, the pieces look like the different sections of a car’s exhaust system. This is a departure from the X-43A, which had a rectangular combustion chamber. Elliptical combustors are better, says Smart, because “round shapes are inherently stronger than rectangles. This leads to thinner walls and less weight. They have less surface area for the same amount of air flow through the engine. Less surface means less drag, less heating, and less weight.” And since energy tends to ebb in rectangular combustors’ corners, getting rid of the corners can increase overall thrust.
HiFire flights will launch from southern Australia’s Woomera test range, the largest testing grounds in the world. The size of the range, its isolation, and the chance to fly frequently are real benefits, says Lewis. “The costs are low enough that if the things break, if they don’t work, if they crash into the Australian Outback, we’ll keep the program going. We’re not going to give up because of one failure.” It’s a small-is-beautiful approach. “When you go to really, really expensive demonstrators, suddenly you’re so terrified of things not working or not flying that you paralyze your flight test program,” he says. “And that’s one of the things we’re trying to avoid.”
Of the three major hypersonic programs under way, the most ambitious is FALCON. HiFire’s short, up-and-down flights will reach Mach 10 or so. FALCON aims to fly up to Mach 20 over a distance of thousands of miles.
Led by DARPA, FALCON is short for Force Application and Launch from CONUS (continental United States). As the name implies, FALCON was conceived as both a potential weapons system with global reach and a capability to launch military space payloads as a quick response. The distant goal of the program is to develop, by 2025, an unmanned, reusable Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV) approximately the size and weight of a B-52. Taking off and landing like an airplane, the HCV would be able to deliver a 12,000-pound payload 9,000 miles from the continental United States within two hours. It’s the Orient Express turned into a bomber, without the pilot or passengers.
“HCV is the vision vehicle,” says Steven Walker, who manages DARPA projects related to hypersonic flight, including FALCON. A four-year veteran of the agency with degrees in aerospace engineering, he knows he’s working against physics as well as skepticism in the military ranks. Many Pentagon strategists would rather extend the capability of conventional missiles like Tridents than pursue a notoriously elusive and costly technology. “We need to fly some hypersonic vehicles—first the expendables, then the reusables—in order to prove to decision makers that this isn’t just a dream,” he says. “We won’t overcome the skepticism until we see some hypersonic vehicles flying.”
Walker and DARPA, working with the Air Force, NASA, and Lockheed Martin, hope to commence the airshow in December 2008, launching a series of small, expendable Hypersonic Test Vehicles (HTVs) to demonstrate sustained flight between Mach 10 and 20. One long-standing problem FALCON hopes to solve is how to build an aeroshell that won’t self-destruct in long-duration, high-temperature flight. Easier said than done. Before it had even been assembled, let alone flown, the first test vehicle, the HTV-1, hit a rough patch—literally a bunch of bubbles. The subcontractor for FALCON’s aeroshell was laying up the carbon-carbon prototype material in small sections to provide samples for aerodynamic and thermal testing. Each piece was made of six or seven layers, and as the technicians applied each layer, the material would stretch and pull the layer beneath it, creating voids and air pockets, particularly around curves. It was a potential showstopper. In flight, intense heat would cause the bubbles to burst, destroying the airframe.
With advice from experts, Walker and the team made a tough decision: abandon the highly curved HTV-1 design and go straight to HTV-2. That meant the first vehicle would not fly as planned this fall. “When you’re dealing on the edge of what’s been done before, it’s never going to be perfect the first time,” says Walker, trying to make the best of the schedule slip. “Dash-2” is now being assembled by Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works in Palmdale, California. Like Dash-1, HTV-2 is an expendable vehicle, but with a narrower delta shape, a dagger tip, and sharper leading edges for sleeker aerodynamics. With fewer curves, it should be easier to construct.
In December 2008, the 10-foot-long HTV-2 will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. As a boost/glide vehicle, it carries no power of its own, but will be accelerated to over Mach 10 on top of a rocket booster. On the downslope, the vehicle will glide at Mach 20 over the 4,800-mile stretch between California and Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, home to the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.
As it pushes up through the upper atmosphere and begins its glide path down, Dash-2 will generate more than 3,000 degrees of heat, burning off, or ablating, layers of carbon-carbon from its aeroshell. FALCON engineers will study the test data carefully to see how the shape changes affect the aircraft’s aerodynamics. The second flight, in June 2009, will be a more circuitous course, with the craft attempting a sharper angle of attack while performing pitch and yaw maneuvers.
The last of the proposed FALCON test vehicles is HTV-3, which would add vertical and horizontal stabilizers for maneuvers at lower, but more sustained, speeds of around Mach 10. Originally scheduled to fly in 2010 as a recoverable boost/glide vehicle, Dash-3 may instead fly two years later in a different mode—taking off and landing like an airplane, under its own power, using an engine developed by DARPA under another project, called FaCET, for FALCON Combined-cycle Engine Technology. The FaCET engine combines a turbojet (to get up to around Mach 4) with a hydrogen-fueled scramjet (to reach Mach 10). The turbojet is itself a challenge; the fastest turbojet yet flown, the J58 used on the SR-71 Blackbird, could only manage Mach 3.2. Like the Australian engine, FaCET has a fancy 3-D air inlet—a good example of how the different hypersonic research programs feed one another. If successful, the flights would prove by 2012 that a reusable thermal protection system works in actual hypersonic flight. And that would be a big step toward building Walker’s hypersonic-cruise “vision vehicle.”
“If the country wants to put a real operational system together, we’ll be in a position to do that in 2020,” he says. “If we don’t do these demonstrations now, then we’ll never get there.”
While there’s less hype associated with the current hypersonic boom, there’s still plenty of hypothetical. One wild card is politics—how this technology will play in the policy arena. Richard Hallion is certain that missiles capable of flying at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 7 will transform global warfare. “I would not be surprised at all to see somebody in the next decade unveil a hypersonic weapon that they are able to put into service,” he says. Though he declines to say which somebody he has in mind, many nations other than the United States—allies, foes, and neutrals—are known to be working on the problem. The first weapons, Hallion says, are likely to be small missiles, like the X-51A, fitted with efficient scramjets, able to be fired from mobile transports on land, sea, or air. He further predicts that hypersonic technology will become “common currency,” like the jet engine. Everyone will have it.
Levan Ramishvili
The “allure of battle,” writes Cathal Nolan, is a powerful one. The compelling idea that the first mover wins has drawn many to start wars; as such, it can be deeply destabilizing. Technological developments amplify these tendencies, especially when emerging technologies seem to favor the offense. This is the case for fear-filled discussions about hypersonic weapons, for which no defensive measures currently exist.
Currently, the United States is struggling to adjust to new technological developments as it enters an era of near-peer competition. But it is critical for U.S. policymakers to take the long view of technological change. Recalling the frequent shifts in the historical relationship between offense and defense, it becomes evident that the standard cycle of offensive and defensive weapons development will continue and that defensive solutions to the hypersonic challenge will soon be developed. When that happens, Chinese and Russian acquisition of hypersonic weapons will actually help to stabilize relations — not unlike a conventional form of mutually assured destruction. Such a development would mark a departure from a period when the United States had precision capabilities and others did not, which amplified Russian fear of the United States.
Historical perspective helps to temper the fear of destabilizing innovations in the hypersonic weapons space by U.S. rivals. During the interwar period, airpower advocates from Giulio Douhet to Billy Mitchell insisted that the bomber could not be stopped. The devastation that bombers could bring to cities would be so horrific that war simply could not last more than a few days. Airpower, they insisted, should be used as part of a “relentless” offensive. The development of radar before the outbreak of World War II, however, helped reset the balance between offense and defense.
As legendary airman Claire Chennault insisted even before radar was developed, the bomber would not be “the first exception to the ancient principle that for every weapon there is a new and effective counter weapon.” We can point to numerous other examples of this rebalancing between new offensive and defensive capabilities, such as between armor and anti-tank missiles. More recently, anxiety about the destabilizing effects of drones has receded to some extent with the development of anti-drone technology.
Today, experts worry about airpower’s limitations in light of drastic improvements in defensive capabilities, especially advanced surface-to-air missiles. Hypersonic weapons, however, offer the possibility of resetting that balance just as improvements in bombers did prior to the advent of radar. A recent War on the Rocks article described how hypersonic missiles, “which travel at speeds greater than Mach 5, shorten John Boyd’s famous observe-orient-decide-act loop, making it nearly impossible for human minds and teams to even comprehend the information, let alone defend against a short-range attack.” The article paints a compelling picture of the kind of threat the United States faces as its peer competitors diligently pursue weapons that pose a seemingly intractable problem.
Hypersonic weapons have many in the U.S. military on edge. Due to their speed, they significantly reduce reaction time, have sufficient kinetic power to cause significant destruction even without a payload, and are difficult to intercept. As a result, hypersonics can bypass a country’s defense systems and strike areas within that country with little to no resistance. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency told Congress in its Worldwide Threat Assessment that hypersonics will “revolutionize” warfare by enabling targets to be struck faster, harder, and from farther away. Note, however, that such characteristics are far more evolutionary in nature than revolutionary.
It is important to acknowledge the limitations of hypersonics, which do, in fact, permit the development of defensive countermeasures. While hypersonic weapons travel at an extremely fast rate of approximately 2 miles per second, the speed of the Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile, they still pale in comparison to the speed of directed energy weapons (which travel at the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second). Directed energy weapons such as lasers and high-power microwaves are gaining traction because they address the threat of hypersonics with an unconventional approach. Throughout history, militaries have tried to defeat weapons by creating the next most advanced version of those weapons. If one country created a missile capable of traveling 10 miles, another country would create a missile capable of traveling 20. However, with directed energy weapons, the approach is to defeat the technology that makes these advanced weapons so threatening. Lasers are capable of destroying targets using a focused beam of energy, while high-power microwaves are an invisible wave of electromagnetic energy capable of frying microprocessors.
Hypersonic weapons are fast, but they are not instantaneous. Thus, when used against moving targets beyond certain distances, the weapons lose effectiveness as the target’s speed increases and its size decreases. Such limitations require most hypersonic weapons to have some form of onboard guidance, which in turn necessitates electronic circuits to do computations and make guidance adjustments. These circuits are highly susceptible to high-power microwave damage. Additionally, the beam width of high-power microwaves is significantly wider than that of a weaponized laser, which requires less time to be used for targeting. Although lasers are extremely effective, when it comes to countering hypersonic weapons, they are limited by line of sight, limited range, and power requirements. For this reason, when talking about defending against hypersonic weapons, high-power microwaves are the more logical choice.
Additionally, because hypersonic weapons are so fast, they struggle with maneuvers in the final seconds against small fast-moving targets. This is due to maneuverability limitations at high speeds. Hypersonic weapons, therefore, are most effective for large and slow-moving or stationary targets, such as an aircraft carrier. Areas outfitted with high-power microwaves could provide area denial capabilities for high-value target areas against hypersonic weapons. Using the equations provided in a University of Maryland study of high-power microwave technology, a source power of 9.5 megawatts could deliver the power density required to damage a hypersonic weapon at a target 25 miles away. This would be about 12.5 seconds prior to the missile reaching the transmission site, assuming the hypersonic weapon is traveling directly toward it. This may not seem like a long time, but the slightest change in trajectory in anything traveling at those speeds would result in a drastically different termination point. For example, an angular change of half a degree would result in a miss distance of 1,150 feet. Additionally, depending on the fusing method, high-power microwaves may also be able to prevent the weapon from fusing and, ultimately, deny detonation.
China is one of many countries attempting to develop such directed-energy technology. Richard Fisher, an expert on Chinese and Asian security at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, stated in testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission:
Some Chinese military experts expect that energy weapons will become more prevalent in 10 to 20 years and will dominate the battlefield in 30 years. As such, it is imperative that the United States redouble its focus to achieve technology breakthroughs needed to realize decisive energy weapon capabilities and be ready to cooperate with critical allies to accelerate co-developments. The U.S. should also retain the flexibility to deploy energy weapons from diverse platforms, including space platforms, to meet what could be rapidly emerging new Chinese energy weapon threats.
Lockheed Martin is now also discussing integrating the technology into UAVs for the Army, but this integration is at a tactical level while high-power microwave technology has strategic uses. Although Boeing initially led the high-power microwave field in 2012 with its development of the Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, its use and integration has been limited to the B-52. Other countries are advancing the field. China is developing high-power microwaves not only for the purpose of deployable munitions but also for area denial for high-value targets. More integration is necessary if the United States is to remain effective in an evolving battlespace.
High-power microwave technology, however, is not without its own weaknesses. Its effective range is based on the power density present at the target, a number of factors that can affect this figure, such as transmitter power, feeder loss, antenna gain, range, path loss, and the effective isotropic radiated power. These factors really boil down to two design elements: environment and range. These limitations can be used to create a versatile weapon that can defeat hypersonic weapons in most cases. As technology moves forward, someone will inevitably determine how to artificially increase the path loss to a point where the microwave drastically loses effectiveness. It is important to acknowledge each technological leap not as a permanent solution but as part of an ongoing cycle, just as has been the case for other weapons, such as the tanks discussed earlier. Many in the Army believed them to be obsolete in the 1970s until innovators stumbled upon a lightweight protective material that provided them with an important offensive advantage once again.
Whether it is hypersonic weapons or high-power microwave technology, no one method or technology can exist for long without a countermeasure. Still, hypersonics and other weapons will continue to entice nations with the promise of easy answers that can reduce the fog and friction of war. For now, U.S, policymakers should invest in directed-energy technology while bearing in mind that it is not a silver bullet.
Amid the return to great power conflict, it is understandable that the United States fears the rapidly increasing capabilities of its rising peer competitors. But it is worthwhile to consider whether the U.S. investment in hypersonics needs to be rebalanced more toward developing defensive capabilities. It is also helpful to consider those fears in historical perspective and in light of constant shifts in the technological and military balance. The United States needs offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities for deterrence. Yet ironically, China and Russia’s acquisition of these capabilities can help to stabilize tensions because it helps them fear the United States less, and vice versa. So keep calm and innovate on.
Dr. Heather Venable is an Assistant Professor of Military and Security Studies at the Air Command and Staff College, where she teaches classes on airpower and the historical experience of combat. She has written a forthcoming book entitled How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918.
Clarence Abercrombie is a Captain on Active Duty in the United States Air Force. He is an F-15E Strike Eagle Weapons Systems Officer and Instructor Combat Systems Officer at NAS Pensacola. He is an advocate for HPM technology, Chairman of the National League of Female Veterans, Marketing Staff member for Legacy Flight Academy, and a 2019-2020 Regional Finalist for the White House Fellows Program.
Levan Ramishvili
Pentagon Reexamining Space-Based Interceptors
Twenty-five years after the demise of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the Pentagon is once again taking a close look at the possibility of basing missile interceptors in space. Such a project would be technologically feasible, but would strain military budgets and potentially ignite an arms race, analysts say.
The Trump administration’s 2019 Missile Defense Review, released in January, said the Pentagon will “undertake a new and near-term examination of the concepts and technology for space-based defenses” to assess their potential in the evolving security environment.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans and Capabilities James Anderson said the analysis, which is expected to be completed later this year, will be comprehensive.
“That will certainly take into account a variety of different factors — the type of different architectures, the potential number of space-based interceptors,” he said during remarks at the Brookings Institution. “It will look at cost, feasibility, practicality, timelines, everything that you would expect from a robust study.”
Having a constellation of space-based interceptors, or SBIs, rather than relying on ground- and sea-based systems, could offer several advantages, defense officials have said.
“As rogue state missile arsenals develop, the space-basing of interceptors may provide the opportunity to engage offensive missiles in their most vulnerable initial boost phase of flight, before they can deploy various countermeasures,” the missile defense review said.
“Space-basing may increase the overall likelihood of successfully intercepting offensive missiles … and potentially destroy offensive missiles over the attacker’s territory rather than the targeted state,” it added.
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood said systems on orbit could provide “persistent, continuous coverage” and engage missiles “launched by any adversary anywhere on Earth.”
Boost phase intercept in particular is “very attractive” because it “begins to thin out the missile threat before your midcourse and terminal defenses have to deal with it,” he added during a roundtable on Capitol Hill in September, hosted by the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.
Intercepting enemy missiles from space would require a number of steps, said Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project and defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Sensors such as infrared satellites and terrestrial radars would need to detect the launch and provide precise tracking and trajectory information to a command-and-control apparatus. The architecture would have to automatically calculate which interceptor is going to be in the best position to intercept the missile, and then calculate how it needs to fire its thrusters to divert its trajectory for a successful kill, he explained.
“It would fire, it would start to de-orbit and maneuver towards the missile as the missile is still coming up in flight,” he continued. “Then as that interceptor … gets closer, it’s going to turn on its own sensors and acquire the target missile and then make any final adjustments in its trajectory to make sure that it intercepts.”
All of this would have to be done in a very short timeframe — two to three minutes — to shoot down a missile in boost phase, noted Thomas Roberts, a missile defense expert and program manager at CSIS.
Analysts say developing such a system is technologically feasible.
Harrison noted that the Pentagon already has developed exoatmospheric kill vehicles that ground-launched interceptors can deploy in space.
“We’ve already been working on that for a long time, and every now and then there’s a successful intercept” during testing, he said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of being too technically hard.”
Rebeccah Heinrichs, a missile defense analyst and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said a space-based capability is not beyond reach if the political will exists to move forward with it.
“I have received briefings [from defense officials saying] that it is technologically possible,” she said. “Most of the criticisms of it come from the fear that it will be destabilizing or that it will be too expensive, but the technology is not something that is the biggest hurdle here.”
The greatest challenge of creating such a system is the scale required to provide robust coverage of threat areas, analysts say.
“If you invest enough money, you can probably get the kinetic interceptor technology to work, but you’re going to need large numbers … and the costs are going to be very, very high,” said Frank Rose, a senior fellow for security and strategy at the Brookings Institution.
The need for large quantities partly stems from the fact that the weapons would need to be stationed in low-Earth orbit to have enough time to reach enemy missiles before they pass by.
To ensure seamless coverage of a threat area, at least one interceptor must be within range at all times. However, unlike satellites in geostationary orbit, systems in LEO pass over different parts of the Earth as they circle the planet.
“They’re going to move in and out of range pretty quickly for boost phase intercept,” Harrison said.
Roberts noted that each SBI would have a high “absentee ratio.”
“For a satellite in LEO … the vast majority of the time it’s not where it should be” to shoot down a missile from an adversary nation, he noted.
And because the Earth rotates, multiple orbits would be needed to ensure a given region is always covered. To defend against a North Korean missile launch, the United States would need 300 to 400 interceptors in space spread among seven or eight orbits, according to a policy paper by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Covering a larger territory would require even more, it said.
Roberts developed a model showing that a “small” constellation of 98 satellites at a 45 degree inclination could not guarantee boost phase intercept for any region on Earth. A “medium” constellation of 496 systems would ensure at least three to four interceptors would always be within range of North Korea, one to three within range of Iran and zero to four within range of Russia and China.
A “large” constellation of 1,012 systems would ensure at least seven to eight SBIs would be within range of North Korea, two to eight for Iran, and zero to eight for China and Russia. A “mega” constellation of 2,013 satellites would ensure at least 14 to 18 would be within range of North Korea, seven to 16 for Iran, and zero to 18 for China and Russia, according to the model.
The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that gaps would open up in the architecture once SBIs are fired, and they would have to be replaced by backup systems already in orbit or new platforms launched into space, Roberts noted.
Adversaries could also overwhelm a system by firing thicker salvos of missiles, analysts say.
“What it would provoke them to do is have a shot doctrine that says, ‘If you’ve got a satellite constellation that can intercept some [X] number of missiles at once, I am going to fire X plus one,’” Harrison said.
Additionally, the platforms would be vulnerable to anti-satellite weapons, according to experts.
Some analysts question the cost effectiveness of acquiring a robust space-based interceptor layer.
“Such a system would easily become one of the most expensive military projects of all time,” the Union of Concerned Scientists’ policy paper said.
Roberts said the scaling for ground- or ship-based interceptors is linear as the number of missiles that must be intercepted increases, but for the space-based model it’s essentially exponential.
Harrison explained: “If they fire two at the same time, now you’re going to need twice as many [interceptors in the constellation] to always have two within range. What if they fire four? What if they fire 10? … The biggest hurdle is that a boost phase intercept system from space does not scale in a favorable way with the threat.”
Independent cost estimates for notional systems vary widely depending on the scope of the architecture envisioned and other assumptions.
The Institute for Defense Analyses in 2011 estimated a 24-satellite constellation would cost $26 billion over 20 years, while a global constellation of 960 satellites would cost $282 billion.
A 2012 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine estimated a system designed to counter North Korean missiles would cost at least $300 billion.
A 2017 report by CSIS put the price tag at $67 billion to $109 billion.
Analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies recently estimated the cost of protecting against an attack from North Korea would exceed $100 billion. A more ambitious architecture that provides defense against ballistic missiles launched from anywhere on the globe would be prohibitively expensive, they concluded.
Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin has pushed back against the higher estimates.
“I get tired of hearing how it would cost $100-or-more billion to put up a space-based interceptor layer,” he said during a roundtable on Capitol Hill. The entire cost of a system with 1,000 SBIs could come in at about $20 billion, he said. “We’ve paid a lot more [for other technologies] and gotten a lot less in the Defense Department over the years,” he added.
Harrison said it’s tough to come up with even a rough estimate of how much a new space-based interceptor program would cost because it would depend on a number of variables including operational requirements.
“Are we just trying to cover North Korea? Are we trying to cover North Korea and Iran? Or are we trying to do something that’s more global?” he asked.
The specifics of the interceptor design, including thruster size and the amount of propellant they would need to carry is another factor, he said.
“All of that goes into figuring out how many satellites you need in the constellation and how much mass you’re going to have to launch into orbit,” Harrison said. “All of those are big cost drivers and you can vary this quite a bit.”
Whether the weapons are intended for boost phase or midcourse intercept would also change the calculus, he noted. “You’ve got to get some parameters on exactly what kind of system are we talking about building, otherwise the costs could be anywhere.”
Heinrichs, who favors developing and deploying this type of technology, noted that a system could be rolled out over time to mitigate some of the affordability challenges.
“We do not have to have a space-based interceptive layer that … right out of the gate has to provide this global defense,” she said. “We can have an initial capability, … adapt it and learn from it and provide just a qualitatively different kind of boost phase [defense] capability … in some parts of the globe. That is a completely cost-effective way to do that.”
However, new space-based weapons could compete for funding with other high priority Pentagon programs. The Defense Department is moving to modernize all three legs of its nuclear triad. Meanwhile, the Air Force is pursuing new fighters, bombers, tankers and trainers; the Army is looking for funding for a new generation of long-range fires, combat vehicles, helicopters, networks and soldier systems; and the Navy is trying to grow to a 355-ship fleet.
“Adding one more new major weapons acquisition program to the mix would just not be fiscally sustainable at this point,” Harrison said.
Within the missile defense portfolio, the Pentagon could get more bang for its buck by investing in ground- and sea-based systems and space-based sensors, he said.
Rose said pursuing space-based interceptors is not a good idea, not only because of the investment required but also the potentially destabilizing effects it could have with regard to the United States’ strategic relationships with China and Russia, which would likely view the technology as a threat.
What conclusions will be drawn from the study and what policy impact it will have remains to be seen. Rose said some powerbrokers appear to be leaning toward building new systems.
“If you look at statements from senior officials in this administration … there seems to be a desire to move toward at least research and development of space-based interceptors,” he said.
For fiscal year 2020, the newly established Space Development Agency requested $15 million to develop and demonstrate a proliferated low-Earth orbit communications and data transport layer and its sub-constellations. The effort is focused on developing a “government reference architecture” for a space-based kinetic interceptor layer for boost phase defense, according to budget documents.
After the Pentagon study is completed, Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves said there will be discussion and debate within the Defense Department, the Trump administration and Congress about what happens next.
If the military’s R&D community is given the green light to build a new system, the focus will be on “ensuring that we have the technology we need to pursue whatever the requirement is, that we adequately work with industry to develop it, we test it, demonstrate it in the lab, demonstrate it on the ground and demonstrate it wherever it needs to be” deployed, he said during a Q&A session at CSIS.
Heinrichs said there is institutional resistance in Washington to the idea, but she believes the United States will eventually deploy space-based interceptors because of the operational benefits they would offer.
“I think we’re going to do it at some point,” she said. “The question is when.”
Legacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative
In a nationally televised address to the nation, President Ronald Reagan in 1983 kicked off efforts that would lead to serious work on space-based interceptor technologies.
“Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope — it is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive,” he said from his desk in the Oval Office at the height of the Cold War.
“What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” he added.
Reagan noted there would be technical obstacles. “But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war?” he asked. “We know it is.”
He called upon the U.S. scientific community to provide the means of rendering enemy nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.”
Thus began the Strategic Defense Initiative, which critics derided as “Star Wars” in reference to the sci-fi movie franchise.
A research-and-development effort that emerged from SDI was Brilliant Pebbles, which was focused on technology that would enable basing interceptors in space. However, the waning of the Cold War sapped momentum for the initiative. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush announced that the ambitions of the SDI program would be scaled back from defending against a massive Soviet missile attack, with a new focus called Global Protection Against Limited Strikes.
In 1993, with the Soviet Union no longer in existence and political pressure to cut military budgets, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin announced “the end of the Star Wars era.”
The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization became the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, with a priority of developing ground- and sea-based regional defensive systems.
Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the legacy of SDI continues to shape today’s debate between proponents and opponents of space-based interceptors.
“Those fault lines are still very evident,” he said. “In the ‘80s with Star Wars, that’s when this really became religion for a lot of people. And many of those people are still around. Some of these people were much younger during those previous debates, and they’ve held onto their views ever since then.”
Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin worked on the SDI effort early in his career.
Harrison noted that today’s opponents of space-based interceptors often tout the same arguments from 30 years ago.
Kingston Reif, director of disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, hopes that the United States doesn’t invest in new programs.
“Past U.S. efforts to develop and deploy a space-based missile defense have known many names, including Strategic Defense Initiative, Brilliant Pebbles and Global Protection Against Limited Strikes. And all have suffered the same fate: cancellation due to insurmountable financial, technical and strategic obstacles,” he said in an email. “Space-based interceptors are unaffordable, unworkable and massively destabilizing.”
Democratic politicians have traditionally opposed the idea, a partisan trend which could continue. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has already thrown cold water on it.
“A space-based interceptor layer … has been studied repeatedly and found to be technologically challenging and prohibitively expensive,” he said in a statement after the 2019 Missile Defense Review was released.
Frank Rose, a senior fellow for security and strategy at the Brookings Institution, said he has “a hard time believing” the current Democrat-controlled House of Representatives would fund the development of such a system. “It’s unlikely that we will see any real money after the study is completed, but we’ll see.”
Would Space-Based Interceptors Spark a New Arms Race?
The United States currently faces no legal obstacles to deploying conventional space-based interceptors, also known as SBIs. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty banned it, but President George W. Bush withdrew from the agreement in 2002. The Outer Space Treaty only prohibits stationing weapons of mass destruction.
That doesn’t necessarily mean putting SBIs in orbit is a good idea, analysts say.
“If the U.S. decides to field space-based interceptors, it will upset the status quo by breaking with the taboo of weaponizing space,” International Institute for Strategic Studies analysts Michael Elleman and Gentoku Toyoma said recently in a policy paper. “Such moves could provide a rationale for other actors to exploit this domain, creating an arms-race dynamic among major space powers.”
The introduction of anti-satellite weapons, or ASATs, by other nations would likely follow, they predicted.
Frank Rose, a senior fellow for security and strategy at the Brookings Institution, said Russia and China see space-based missile defenses as an existential threat.
Kingston Reif, director of disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said the deployment of interceptors in space would be a disaster for strategic stability.
“To ensure the credibility of their nuclear deterrents, Russia and China would likely respond by building additional and new types of long-range ballistic missiles as well as missiles that fly on non-ballistic trajectories,” he said in an email.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been touting his country’s development of new long-range, highly maneuverable nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles that can fly at speeds of Mach 5 or faster while staying inside the atmosphere. China is also aggressively pursuing hypersonic weapons, Pentagon officials have noted.
“From a Russian or Chinese perspective, even if our system is really only intended to counter North Korea or Iran, they may look at it and say, ‘Hey, it could be [used] against some of our missiles.’ And then we would argue back and say, ‘Oh, but it would not be able to intercept the vast majority of your missiles.’ And both sides would have a point,” said Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Additionally, the weapons could potentially be viewed by other nations as giving the United States a new means of taking out their satellites or space launch vehicles, Harrison noted.
President Donald Trump recently stated that the overarching U.S. goal for missile defense is to be able to destroy any missile launched against the United States “anywhere, anytime, anyplace” — a comment that is unlikely to reassure Russia and China that a space-based interceptor layer would be limited and not directed against them.
Thomas Roberts, a missile defense expert and program manager at CSIS, said because of orbital requirements and physics, it’s impossible to design an architecture that would protect against a North Korean attack but not pass over China or the southern regions of Russia.
Reif said Russia and China could take steps to improve their ability to destroy such U.S. interceptors, thereby greatly increasing the threat to the nation’s space assets.
There are several varieties of ASAT weapons, such as direct-ascent, co-orbital, non-kinetic, jamming and cyber, Elleman and Toyoma explained.
Some of these technologies are not prohibitively expensive or too technologically advanced for multiple nations to obtain, they said. “Because the interceptors must orbit at low altitudes of 200 kilometers or less when above the anticipated launch location, and because they travel along predictable orbits and can be easily tracked using radars, an adversary capable of developing long-range missiles could almost certainly build a ground-based ASAT weapon.”
Pentagon officials have already identified space as a warfighting domain on par with land, air, sea and cyber. The 2019 Missile Defense Review noted that China and Russia are already developing new types of offensive missiles as well as counter-space capabilities such as ground-launched missiles and “experimental” satellites that could potentially be used to attack other nations’ spacecraft.
“Some may argue that the weaponization of space is inevitable given the number of countries interested in accessing and exploiting this domain,” Elleman and Toyoma said.
“The U.S., according to this argument, should take the lead and advance its interests before its adversaries decide to take advantage of a reluctant America. … [However], the risk that space-based interceptors could lead to a new arms race in space should be considered carefully.”
While countries like China or Russia may take countermeasures if the United States deploys a robust space-based interceptor layer, Harrison does not expect them to develop a similar system because of the cost burden and other challenges. “I don’t know why they would because if it’s not a good idea for us, I don’t think it’s a good idea for them either,” he said.
Pentagon Could Put Directed Energy Weapons in Space
While much attention has been focused on renewed U.S. interest in potentially deploying space-based interceptors, another concept that emerged from President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s is also being reexamined: putting lasers or neutral particle beams in space to shoot down enemy missiles.
“Directed energy to me is where we want to go in the long run,” Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin said in September during a roundtable on Capitol Hill. “We will be pushing advances in directed energy forward for the next few years.”
President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2020 budget request for the Missile Defense Agency includes $304 million for technology maturation initiatives involving these types of technologies.
“Working with national laboratories and industry, MDA will address laser scaling by investing in the laser component technology required to demonstrate efficient electric lasers,” budget documents said. The agency plans to conduct component demonstrations to prove out laser capability.
The funding proposal also includes money for a neutral particle beam effort which will “design, develop and conduct a feasibility demonstration for a space-based directed energy intercept layer,” the documents said. “These efforts will leverage past and current work on particle beam and related enabling technologies as well as laser scaling, pointing and stability to provide a component technology to improve the cost-benefit and size, weight and power for an operational system.”
A future system of this kind would offer new “kill options” for the nation’s ballistic missile defense architecture and add another layer of protection for the homeland, the documents said.
Laser weapons use amplified beams of light to attack targets.
A neutral particle beam weapon would fire atomic particles at near-light speeds towards enemy platforms. The technology can be traced back to the Strategic Defense Initiative, Missile Defense Agency Deputy Director Rear Adm. Jon Hill noted.
“We think it’s got a lot of promise for the missile defense mission, and so our focus in FY ‘20 is to lay the foundation to get to an on-orbit demo” by 2023, he said during a briefing with reporters at the Pentagon when the budget proposal was rolled out.
The agency plans to conduct ground tests and demonstrations of neutral particle beam technologies with a focus on feasibility and maturing the technologies before they are put into space, Hill said.
Directed energy weapons would offer several benefits relative to kinetic interceptors, said Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“You don’t have to worry about the time of flight … because the energy beam is going to travel at the speed of light,” he explained. “That gives you more time to identify a target and make the decision, and then fire; whereas with the kinetic interceptor you’ve got to fire very quickly because you have to take into account how long it’s going to take for your interceptor to fly towards the missile.”
Another advantage is that they could be reused to fire as many shots as their power systems would allow, he noted.
Fewer satellites would be required for missile defense if they were armed with directed energy weapons rather than kinetic interceptors, although the per system cost would likely be higher, he said.
Still fewer satellites would be needed if mirrors could be incorporated into the architecture, an idea which has been floated before, he noted. “With that you could only have a handful of really powerful lasers scattered around in orbit and then have more mirrors in other places that would reflect the light towards a missile” and destroy it.
But developing systems that could be used effectively in space is no easy task.
“You’ve got to have the powerful laser, you’ve got to miniaturize it, and then you have to have the power source on your satellite,” Harrison said. “All of those things are technical challenges.”
Employing mirrors would be another hurdle. “Obviously you don’t want it jittering or moving around and it has to be very precisely positioned” to hit the target, he added.
Directed energy technology is also not as mature as kinetic interceptor technology, he noted. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done if those systems are going to be fielded.”
But Griffin expressed confidence that an effective system could be created.
“I believe … we can develop space power systems that will provide what we need, but belief is an opinion held without benefit of facts,” he said. “It’s our job to go out and do the experiments and the prototyping to generate those facts.”
Levan Ramishvili
Iran and North Korea: Soon To Build Hypersonic Missiles?
Could it happen? A U.S. general thinks so.
Key Point: The concern is that once Russia and China have perfected their own hypersonic capabilities the technology will begin spreading, as it often has historically with everything from missiles to nuclear weapons technology.
It is extremely likely that Iran and North Korea will acquire hypersonic missiles, according to a senior U.S. general.
Back in April of last year, Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, testified to the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. During the hearing, Sen. Susan Collins asked Greaves about the risk that China and Russia’s hypersonic missile technology will be proliferated to countries like North Korea and Iran. “I assess that risk as extremely high,” Greaves responded. “I don’t see what will prevent it from happening.” He added that this is the reason why “the hypersonic threat is something that we need to address expediently.”
Hypersonic missiles travel at speeds greater than Mach 5, or between 3,106 and 15,534 miles per hour. There are two basic types of hypersonics. The first are called hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), which are launched into the atmosphere from a rocket and glide to their targets at altitudes of between forty and one hundred kilometers—or even higher. These HGVs typically fly at faster speeds than the second type of hypersonics, hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs). As their name suggests, HCMs are cruise missiles that fly at hypersonic speeds. During their entire flight, they are powered by rockets or high-speed jet engines like scramjets.
Hypersonic missiles are uniquely destabilizing in a number of ways. For one, their extreme speed greatly compresses reaction times and reduces the effectiveness of defensive systems. Their altitude and maneuverability also pose tremendous issues. With regard to the former, HGVs travel at altitudes lower than ballistic missiles while HCMs fly higher than traditional cruise missiles. In both cases, this limits the ability of traditional missile defense systems to shoot them down. Especially with HGVs, the high maneuverability poses a biggest issue. HGVs combine the best characteristics of traditional ballistic and cruise missiles. They travel at incredible speeds like traditional ballistic missiles, but don’t fly along a predictable trajectory like ballistic missiles. Instead, they are highly maneuverable, similar to cruise missiles.
Currently, the only three countries with mature hypersonic research programs are the United States, China and Russia. As Ankit Panda first reported, China conducted two tests of a new hypersonic missile, the DF-17, in November 2017. An unnamed U.S. government source told him at the time that “the missile is explicitly designed for operational HGV implementation and not as a test bed.” The source also noted that this was “the first HGV test in the world using a system intended to be fielded operationally.”
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin also recently claimed that his country has built an “invisible” Kinzhal hypersonic cruise missile that can travel at speeds of Mach 10. While the United States has refused to confirm Putin’s claim, Gen. John Hyten, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), has said, “I can tell you that we have observed both Russia and China testing hypersonic capabilities.” He added: “You should believe Vladimir Putin about everything he said he’s working on.”
The concern is that once Russia and China have perfected their own hypersonic capabilities the technology will begin spreading, as it often has historically with everything from missiles to nuclear weapons technology. Greaves is hardly the first person to raise concern about the proliferation problem. Last year, the RAND Corporation published a pathbreaking study about this problem. The report outlined some of the dangers that the proliferation of hypersonic missiles would create, including forcing nations to adopt risky strategies to avoid decapitation and counterforce strikes. These include the devolution of command and control, which would give lower-level officials the ability to launch strikes, and forcing nations to disperse their strategic forces to prevent them from being wiped out in a first strike.
Unlike Greaves, RAND proposed a clear policy to prevent this future. The report explained that China, Russia and the United States agreeing to not export or co-develop hypersonic capabilities would go a long way to at least greatly slowing their proliferation. That is because there are formidable technical barriers that make developing hypersonic missiles difficult, time consuming and expensive. These barriers include, according to the report, “thermal management and materials [namely, the missiles experience intense heat over prolonged periods of time]; air vehicle and flight control; propulsion for HCMs; and testing, modeling, and simulation.”
Of course, this calls for diplomacy that is outside the purview of the director of the Missile Defense Agency. For its part, Greaves said that the MDA is working with the Pentagon to develop better defenses against hypersonic missiles. He added that Mike Griffin, the new undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has made hypersonic missile defense a top priority. According to Greaves, defending against hypersonic missiles “starts with birth to death tracking of that maneuvering target.”
To do this, America needs better sensors, with the MDA director repeatedly stressing the need for more space-based sensors during the hearing. As he had previously explained, the curve of the earth limits America’s ground and sea-based sensors’ ability to track missiles. “We have globally deployed sensors today, but—just look at the globe—there are gaps,” Greaves said last month. “What we are looking towards is to move the sensor architecture to space and use that advantage of space, in coordination with our ground assets, to remove the gaps.”
Of course, the unknown variable here is time, as it isn’t entirely clear when the Chinese or Russian hypersonic threat will materialize. Reports have said that U.S. intelligence believes China’s hypersonic missiles could be operational as early as 2020. The technical defenses Greaves is advocating for will also take plenty of time and money to get up and running. The RAND report suggested China, Russia and the United States have at most a decade to come to an agreement that would effectively prevent their spread. But first diplomacy would need to start, and there’s been little indication that is happening.
Zachary Keck (@ZacharyKeck) is a Wohlstetter Public Affairs Fellow at the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.
Levan Ramishvili
The U.S. is supposed to get its hands on a hypersonic by 2023. But is it too late?
Here's What to Remember: Putin brushed away concerns about China’s recent hypersonic glide vehicle test and instead shifted the focus to U.S. capabilities. “We saw the reaction of our American partners in this regard. But we do know that our American partners are slightly ahead in development of hypersonic weapons after all,” he said.
Vladimir Putin touted Russia’s hypersonic arsenal while expressing unprecedented concerns over similar U.S. capabilities.
“We have carried out a test, and a successful one,” Putin said at a recent finance conference. “As of next year, we will have another sea-based missile, a hypersonic one. Mach 9. The time of approach to those who issue orders will be five minutes.” Putin was referring to the 3M22 Tsirkon, a new hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile that is slated to enter service sometime in 2022.
Putin couched Russia’s ongoing investments in hypersonics in the context of perceived “threats” from NATO’s easternmost military infrastructure. “Now, the situation has come to a point that anti-ballistic missile defense systems are being deployed in Poland and Romania,” he said. “And the MK-41 launchers stationed there can have Tomahawk strike systems mounted on them. This creates threats for us.”
“In response, we had to commence work on developing hypersonic weapons. This is our response,” Putin added. He noted it was Washington that first withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Anti-Ballistic Missile arms treaties.
Putin brushed away concerns about China’s recent hypersonic glide vehicle test and instead shifted the focus to U.S. capabilities. “We saw the reaction of our American partners in this regard. But we do know that our American partners are slightly ahead in development of hypersonic weapons after all,” he said. “They simply don’t talk about it and nobody is making a fuss about it. Just like nobody made a fuss when they tested their anti-satellite weapon ten years ago, which they have now. When Russia carried out such test just recently—then it was a fuss around the world.”
Putin’s comments mark one of the first times when a top Russian official publicly offered what can be interpreted as a relatively positive assessment of U.S. capabilities in the domain of hypersonic weapons. Russian experts and commentators have consistently dismissed, downplayed, and even mocked U.S. hypersonic weapons programs in recent years.
Putin did not elaborate on his comparative assessment of U.S. and Chinese capabilities, which defies the consensus of top U.S. defense officials and military experts. “We’re not as advanced as the Chinese or the Russians in terms of hypersonic programs,” Gen. David Thompson, the vice chief of space operations, said last month at the Halifax International Security Forum.
China showcased its DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle during a 2019 military parade; the system achieved initial operating capability status that same year. In addition to their sweeping investments in hypersonic missile technology, it was revealed earlier this year that China’s defense industry is conducting cutting-edge research into unmanned aerial vehicles capable of traveling at hypersonic speeds.
The U.S. military is due to receive its first hypersonic system—the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon—by fiscal year 2023, with the Navy’s hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike weapon not far behind.