The math associated with intercepting a single missile moving at speeds above Mach 5 is too complex for systems to manage today, but the fact of the matter is, that a high volume of lower-cost weapons could prove just as effective as a low volume of high-cost ones in a large number of mission sets, and these lower-cost weapons are already in service today. Contrast that against the $100 million unit cost of hypersonic missiles and the problems become evident: You could launch 50 Tomahawks at a target for the same price as a single hypersonic weapon. And that’s where the question of cost comes in.Īmerica’s subsonic Tomahawk cruise missiles come in a variety of forms, but the most modern iterations ring it at around $2 million each. (Wikimedia Commons)Įven if modern air defense systems like Russia’s S-400 or America’s Patriot missile system, were magically capable of having their interceptors find their targets 100% of the time, all it would take to defeat them would be launching more missiles than they have interceptors for. Images of the target location suggest that many missiles made it through unscathed. Hypersonic cruise missiles, on the other hand, use experimental propulsion systems called scramjets to fly more like aircraft at hypersonic speeds, flying along a fairly horizontal flight path at speeds as high as Mach 10 or even better. They then glide at high speed (Mach 20 or more in some cases) down toward their targets unpowered. They are carried into the upper atmosphere via high-velocity boosters but are released at lower altitudes. Hypersonic Boost Glide Vehicles (HGVs) aren’t all that different than the warheads on traditional long-range ballistic missiles, at least in the early stages of their flight path. No nation has managed to field an operational hypersonic cruise missile to date, but the United States seems to have the inside track in that regard. Russia and China each have one of the former in service, in the Avangard and DZ-ZF respectively. There are only two forms of modern hypersonic weapons that we can confirm meet this “un-interceptable” criteria: hypersonic boost-glide weapons, and scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missiles. Related: Is America really losing the hypersonic arms race?Īn artist’s rendering of a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle (left) and a scramjet-powered cruise missile (right). So, in the interest of providing balanced context, this time we’re going to discuss some of the biggest problems facing hypersonic missiles today, and why the way a nation addresses these problems will dictate the actual value of these systems in 21st-century conflict.īut first, here are some important things to keep in mind when discussing hypersonic weapons in general. We’ve covered the types of hypersonic weapons being developed and their uses at length before. Yet most… are still somewhere in between. Hypersonic missiles come with a whole litany of technological, economic, and geopolitical problems that may render some high-Mach efforts practically useless, and others extremely vital. But the complicated truth is, that hypersonic missiles can be both game-changers and entirely unnecessary - and the defining variables between the two come down to how they’re developed, built, and leveraged in a fight. ![]() Continued investment in these weapons is either a life-or-death enterprise or an exercise in media hype and the military-industrial complex’s insatiable need for urgent new defense initiatives to pad investor pockets. Like so many raging debates on social media and in the comments beneath articles like this, the internet’s distaste for nuance would have you believe that there’s only one correct answer when it comes to hypersonics.
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