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War Tech the US, Russia, China and India All Want: Hypersonic Weapons
An anonymous reader writes: They can hit any target in 30 minutes or less. They travel anywhere from Mach 5 to Mach 25. All the major powers want them, and many look at them as a military game changer — if only they can make them work. Are hypersonic weapons the future of military doctrine?
Hypersonic weapons — or ballistic weapons that can hit a target flying many times faster than the speed of sound — have been hyped since the 1970s. Currently almost all of the major powers are trying to build them. The U.S. and China seem to be the furthest along, and are working on various types of systems. China hopes such weapons could be a game changer and deter any U.S. actions in Asia. There is, however, one big problem (besides the insane amount of technology to make them work, considering their speed): a possible arms race that could lead to a nuclear war:
"According to some analysts, the development of hypersonic weapons creates the conditions for a new arms race, and could risk nuclear escalation. Given that the course of hypersonic research has acknowledged both of these concerns, why have several countries started testing the weapons?"
Hypersonic weapons — or ballistic weapons that can hit a target flying many times faster than the speed of sound — have been hyped since the 1970s. Currently almost all of the major powers are trying to build them. The U.S. and China seem to be the furthest along, and are working on various types of systems. China hopes such weapons could be a game changer and deter any U.S. actions in Asia. There is, however, one big problem (besides the insane amount of technology to make them work, considering their speed): a possible arms race that could lead to a nuclear war:
"According to some analysts, the development of hypersonic weapons creates the conditions for a new arms race, and could risk nuclear escalation. Given that the course of hypersonic research has acknowledged both of these concerns, why have several countries started testing the weapons?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... Yes Shaurya is already in production.
War
Uh
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
(Say it again)
Russians already solved this problem long ago with maritime high speed supersonic bombers specifically designed to rush in and kill carrier groups covered from air threats by equally fast and nearly as long range Su-27 derivatives. They're the only ones in the world with a massive fleet of supersonic (we're talking near and beyond mach 2 here - F-35C for example is much slower) bombers specifically designed for ship killing job that are armed with cruise missiles that match the launch platform.
Here's one example of such an aircraft:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The only task those aircraft are designed for is to get in launch range and fire off their Kh-15 missiles that themselves have ~300km range.
It's pretty well known that if a real war was ever to break out, there would be two kinds of aircraft carrier ships. Those in ports and those beneath the sea. The real purpose of modern aircraft carrier is long range power projection over small weak states with no MAD deterrent or significant air/submarine force. That is why as long as Soviet threat persisted, the main air defense aircraft on aircraft carriers was extremely expensive long range F-14. It was the only aircraft US had that had the radar range and missile range to have even a remote hope of success in counter strike against such bombers going in for the kill before its mothership is killed.
The only significant strategic advantage that supersonic weapons offer is better first strike capability. Everything else is just tactical, like having better air defense penetration, and is generally not cost effective as you could likely make a much larger swarm of modern ~mach 3-5 rockets that have only marginally lesser kill ratio to compensate for this advantage for the same cost.
Your description is accurate for *some* airbreathing engines, but not others. In turbojet engines, such as those on the Concorde, the airflow is first slowed, then compressed by fans prior to ignition. In ramjet engines, you dispense with the compressor, relying on the engine geometry and the speed of the incoming airflow to compress it, but you still slow it to subsonic speeds before igniting it. In a scramjet, however, the airflow is compressed (by engine geometry, not a compressor), injected with fuel, and ignited, all without ever slowing below supersonic speeds.
This is difficult, for a number of reasons, but there has been substantial progress in the last decade or so. In particular, the X-51, an uncrewed scramjet aircraft, went hypersonic for 3.5 minutes on a test flight in 2010. (I seem to remember it actually being reported on Slashdot.) So hypersonic, airbreathing flight is, at least, *possible*. It remains to be seen whether it can be made *practical* for routine application, but a few major militaries seem to think so.
You have to read the policy paper that came back a couple of years ago. The idea is to increase the power projection capabilities of the US Armed Forces so that in a case of substantial shutting down of US military bases around the world they can strike more or less anywhere they want in the world in a short amount of time. There were moves to use modified Minutemen missiles for this but the Russians were kind of skeptic about it since they claimed you couldn't tell the payload of the missile and they would consider it as if it was a nuclear launch. Even if they have short range missiles that are kind of iffy in themselves like Iskander.
The Russians have quite a few Mach 3.0 missiles of which they sold a couple to India and to a lesser degree China. As a mainly continental nation they always had this power projection problem to begin with. The article is mistaken as the idea of hypersonic weapons has been around since at least WWII. Read the Wikipedia pages for the Nazi Silbervogel and the US Aerospaceplane. The projects failed at the time as the technological problems were too large to tackle and the materials were not good enough. In fact they may still not be there yet.
If you want to read about Russian and Indian Mach 3.0 weapons go to the Wikipedia pages for the Moskit and the BrahMos. During the Soviet Union the Russians also had the Spiral spaceplane prototype which was akin to the US Dyna-Soar effort although it progressed a bit further than that one. The Chinese supposedly are drop testing a mini-shuttle similar to the X-37 which people have been calling the Shenlong.
The US and Russia have had hypersonic weapons since the 60s. We just call them ICBMs. As far as I can tell the Shaurya is just a smaller version of one. It certainly is much slower than an ICBM (mach 7.5 vs probably well over mach 10 for an ICBM).
I don't see anything that suggests these weapons are particular effective against naval targets without nuclear weapons (blowing up task forces with nukes is 1950s technology). They seem to be designed to hit fixed targets.
This isn't a trivial problem - to hit a moving target you need a bunch of things:
1. The ability to do terminal maneuvers. When you weigh a metric ton and are travelling at mach 8 that isn't a trivial problem.
2. A sensor able to detect the target despite countermeasures. The further off you can detect the target the easier problem #1 becomes. If your sensor is active then that creates another whole mess of possible countermeasures including making the job of an interceptor easier (since it too has to solve all these problems to hit you and your active sensor makes the job of their passive sensor easier).
3. Sufficient intelligence to initially target the weapon close enough to the target for #2 and #1 to work. When your target is 500 miles away, knowing where it is within a mile or so is not easy. Keep in mind that in a real war situation where you're shooting at US carriers, you're not going to have any satellites in orbit for long.
The basic concept of a rocket goes back to 400BC and Archytas, who built a wooden bird propelled along wires by steam.
The basic concept of the modern jet engine was patented as a stationary turbine in 1791 working versions were built in the 1800s. Turning it into an aircraft engine was just a matter of making it smaller and lighter.
Charles Babbage came up with the concept of the Analytical Engine in 1800s, even though he couldn't build it at the time.
The idea of sending messages through a network of wiring comes from the telegraph, which showed up in the 1750s.
GPS navigation is a combination of a lot of technologies; rocketry (already mentioned), radio (Marconi in the late 1800s), navigation by triangulation (celestial navigation, the whole of written history), atomic clocks (Lord Kelvin, 1800s) and so on.
Modern day technology didn't suddenly pop into being during WWI. but rather is an evolution of older, pre-1914 technology and most of those older technologies weren't actually developed as tools of war. The human race just happens to be very good at taking any technology available and using it to kill one another.
tl;dr - don't dis pre-1914 tech. Without it, we'd all be sitting in caves drawing crappy pictures on the walls for entertainment.
That's a good argument for R&D investment, not for war. Defence spending happens to be a traditionally easy way to get lots of R&D money, but it isn't the only way. It was WWII defence money that built the first computers, but it was almost all civilian commercial R&D that took us from there to pocket computers that are orders of magnitude more powerful.
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Benevolent? Excuse me? Seriously?
The Americans today are no different to the Nazis at their time, brainwashed into thinking they represent "superiority" "peace" and "greater good", but history will remember them as the ones who fucked up the world.
US CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY & GLOBAL TERRORISM
This is a version of an an original page atributed to Robert Elias, a US Professor of Political Science , a list which, like so many others, has otherwise 'disappered'
US CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY & GLOBAL TERRORISM
US Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction
The indiscriminate use of bombs by the US, usually outside a declared war situation, for wanton destruction, for no military objectives, whose targets and victims are civilian populations, or what we now call "collateral damage."
Japan (1945) China (1945-46) Korea & China (1950-53) Guatemala (1954, 1960, 1967-69) Indonesia (1958) Cuba (1959-61) Congo (1964) Peru (1965) Laos (1964-70) Vietnam (1961-1973) Cambodia (1969-70) Grenada (1983) Lebanon (1983-84) Libya (1986) El Salvador (1980s) Nicaragua (1980s) Iran (1987) Panama (1989) Iraq (1991-2000) Kuwait (1991) Somalia (1993) Bosnia (1994-95) Sudan (1998) Afghanistan (1998) Pakistan (1998) Yugoslavia (1999) Bulgaria (1999) Macedonia (1999)
US Use of Chemical & Biological Weapons
The US has refused to sign Conventions against the development and use of
chemical and biological weapons, and has either used or tested (without
informing the civilian populations) these weapons in the following
locations abroad:
Bahamas (late 1940s-mid-1950s) Canada (1953) China and Korea (1950-53) Korea (1967-69) Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (1961-1970) Panama (1940s-1990s) Cuba (1962, 69, 70, 71, 81, 96)
And the US has tested such weapons on US civilian populations, without
their knowledge, in the following locations:
Watertown, NY and US Virgin Islands (1950)
SF Bay Area (1950, 1957-67)
Minneapolis (1953)
St. Louis (1953)
Washington, DC Area (1953, 1967)
Florida (1955)
Savannah GA/Avon Park, FL (1956-58)
New York City (1956, 1966)
Chicago (1960)
And the US has encouraged the use of such weapons, and provided the
technology to develop such weapons in various nations abroad, including:
Egypt, South Africa, Iraq
US Political and Military Interventions since 1945
The US has launched a series of military and political interventions since
1945, often to install puppet regimes, or alternatively to engage in
political actions such as smear campaigns, sponsoring or targeting
opposition political groups (depending on how they served US interests),
undermining political parties, sabotage and terror campaigns, and so forth.
It has done so in nations such as
China (1945-51) South Africa (1960s-1980s) France (1947) Bolivia (1964-75) Marshall Islands (1946-58) Australia (1972-75) Italy (1947-1975) Iraq (1972-75) Greece (1947-49) Portugal (1974-76) Philippines (1945-53) East Timor (1975-99) Korea (1945-53) Ecuador (1975) Albania (1949-53) Argentina (1976) Eastern Europe (1948-56) Pakistan (1977) Germany (1950s) Angola (1975-1980s) Iran (1953) Jamaica (1976) Guatemala (1953-1990s) Honduras (1980s) Costa Rica (mid-1950s, 1970-71) Nicaragua (1980s) Middle East (1956-58) Philippines (1970s-90s) Indonesia (1957-58) Seychelles (1979-81) Haiti (1959) South Yemen (1979-84) Western Europe (1950s-1960s) South Korea (1980) Guyana (1953-64) Chad (1981-82) Iraq (1958-63) Grenada (1979-83) Vietnam (1945-53) Suriname (1982-84) Cambodia (1955-73) Libya (1981-89) Laos (1957-73) Fiji (1987) Thailand (1965-73) Panama (1989) Ecuador (1960-63) Afghanistan (1979-92) Congo (1960-65, 1977-78) El Salvador (1980-92) Algeria (1960s) Haiti (1987-94) Brazil (1961-64) Bulgaria (1990-91) Peru (1965) Albania (1991-92) Dominican Republic (1963-65) Somalia (1993) Cuba (1959-present) Iraq (1990s) Ind
I guess setting up puppet governments in places like Iran and Chile doesn't count, as far as you're concerned? Or failing to do so, such as in the Bay of Pigs fiasco?
I always have to chuckle when I see comments like yours, made by Americans who are so blindingly ignorant of their own history.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Keep guessing then. ICBM's are by definition hypersonic weapons so nothing other than better targeting has changed since the 50s.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue