US Military Seeks Hypersonic Weaponry

Dr. Eggman writes "In an interview with the Star-Telegram, the Air Force's chief scientist, Mark Lewis, talks about the USAF's latest research direction. The service is working on hypersonic missile and bombers for the purposes of reconnaissance and attack. In response to Chinese and Russian anti-satellite developments, the Air Force plans to develop weapons capable of sustained travel at Mach 6 to allow them to deploy against and take out anti-satellite launch sites before the enemy can fire their missiles. Furthermore, should the US spy satellite network be brought down, the Mach 6 recon flight systems would be capable of filling in. Air Force officials hope to deploy a new interim bomber by 2018, followed by a more advanced, and possibly unmanned, bomber in 2035." We've discussed on a number of occasions the scramjet technology that would power such vehicles.

Dead before you hear it coming

Funny, Pynchon in his Gravity's Rainbow [amazon.com] frequently made the point that the V-2 was an especially inhumane weapon because, falling faster than the speed of sound, it killed you before you even knew it was coming.

Re:

Funny, that seems rather the most humane possible way of obliterating someone. After all, as you said, they don't even know it's coming. I might call it the least *sporting*, though...

Crucifixion?

Crucifixion's a doddle.

Re:

Uh, I didn't know there was a humane way to kill people with military hardware. I must know more.

Re:Dead before you hear it coming

I think that you have it exactly backwards. For example, one of the primary goals of the Geneva conventions, other than laying out the rules for treatment of POWs, was to ensure that only weapons which deliver a quick and certain death, with the minimal amount of suffering, were used in warfare between signatories. This is why weapons such as the crossbow and others not deemed lethal enough were banned because they caused more agonizing deaths too frequently to justify their use in the face of better available weaponry (i.e. the only reason they would be chosen over a standard rifle would be to increase the suffering of the enemy which was not a valid reason under the agreement).

Re:Dead before you hear it coming

How is that different from any other way of dying in modern warfare?

Bullets, bombs, missiles, grenades, lasers, modern cannons, etc.: You will be dead before you know what's coming.

Arrows, poison gas, mortars, knives, crowbars, flames, etc.: You may have a split second or so to understand what is about to happen to you. Then you die.

No fair calling out radar or other sophisticated sensing systems, here. You could know that a V2 was coming through intel or visually or through crude radar even during WWII. You didn't have much time, no, but RF signals travel much faster than a V2. Even then: If you are the target coordinate of pretty much any modern weapon, you are on the fast track to fine-pink-mist-ification.

War is hell. Nothing can change that. Killing has become our most efficient national product. From the standpoint of a potential victim, I think I'd rather be instantly killed than mortally wounded so that I can spend a few days in agony before I die and my blood and organs are infected beyond use to anyone else.

  Frankly, I don't want to see the V2 or missile or bomb coming for me. I want either an early warning system that would allow me enough time to have a chance of survival (like we have already, the phalanx or CIWS- it has saved my ass); or else I want to go from a state of stupefied boredom to dead in the time it takes a fast explosive shockwave to dissociate my neurons.

There, I said it. Call me a coward, but I've actually dealt with the whole idea of staring death in the eye, and it is over-rated.

-b

Re:Dead before you hear it coming

Bullets, bombs, missiles, grenades, lasers, modern cannons, etc.: You will be dead before you know what's coming.

Actually, the bullets from small arms are designed to wound a large fraction of those they hit rather than kill them. That's one reason military rounds are typically full metal jacket rather than soft point. Soft point bullets expand or fragment upon impact and deposit more of their energy in the body. Military rounds are often designed to pass through the body with little expansion.

There is a logical reason for this. If you instantly kill an enemy soldier, you've removed one soldier from the battlefield. If you wound an enemy soldier, you've removed the wounded soldier and the two who are carrying him to safety from the battlefield and also terrified anyone within earshot. You've also increased the number of vehicles needed to carry the wounded, the number of hospitals, doctors and nurses required, and the overall cost of the battle. It's cold, heartless logic, but logic none the less.

Black Helicopters

I don't get it. If the government has a secret database of information on everyone in the world, including enemy personnel, and they have black, stealth helicopters waiting to attack anywhere in the world at a moment's notice, why all the nonsense about hypersonic attack craft?

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Because The military industry think they can sell it to congress. And I have to admit, they have come up with a nice threat to make it sellable.

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Well since you and the mods have replied seriously to what was a light-hearted joke, I'll respond seriously to you. Having a potent strike capability that nigh instantaneous (as in a few hours) is pretty handy to have for merits that are obvious. I don't buy the whole satellite warfare line. Once we start blowing up satellites, then the orbitals become unusable. So barring a mad scientist destroy the world scenario, I don't believe satellite warfare is a real threat. It would be like poisoning a well that y

Rendering the Orbitals Useless

So barring a mad scientist destroy the world scenario, I don't believe satellite warfare is a real threat. It would be like poisoning a well that you drink from as well as the enemy.

If you're about to lose a war, you do what it takes to survive and ignore the long term consequences. Life without satellites is better than life without life.

Re:Black Helicopters

Because, there is a government agency called the WCGI (Wicked Cool Gadgets Initiative) which is responsible for developing kickass technology for the military. The charter of this agency is simply to "develop the most awesome, wicked cool gadgets possible". If they can come up with something that sounds really sweet, they'll put money into developing it regardless of whether or not anyone needs it. If the tech is cool enough, the military will find some way to use it.

Aurora?

Is the Aurora [wikipedia.org] finally coming out of the shadows?

It's hysterical

Seeing the picture of the prototype being dropped from a 50 year-old B-52. And the design is 60 years old! They just don't build 'em like that anymore.

Re:It's hysterical

The B-52 will likely outlast it, too. Its planned to be in active service until the 2040s.

HVM

Didn't we develope Hyper Velocity Missiles back in the early 80s? No payload, they killed by traveling at mach8. I wanted one as a kid.

This killing machine was much more obscure...

The device was called "Pluto VSLAM".

http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app4/slam.html [designation-systems.net]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto [wikipedia.org]

It's from the 1950/60s. What a naive and stupid era.

This is just corporate welfare

All these pie in the sky projects are simple ways of creating high paying white collar jobs in the home districts of powerful senators. The real serious immediate threat facing America is the possibility of a terrorist group smuggling in a low grade weapon, nuclear, biological or chemical into the country and detonating it. These hypersonic toys do nothing to protect us against such threats. But border security customs security and port security creates lots and lots of blue collar jobs at the ports and borders. Not at the home district of "bridge to nowhere" pork barrel Senators.

Regan talked about welfare queens. These hypersonic engineers are the new welfare queens.

Re:This is just corporate welfare

The real serious immediate threat facing America is the possibility of a terrorist group smuggling in a low grade weapon, nuclear, biological or chemical into the country and detonating it.

Actually, the chance of any of those happening is slight because of the technology required to create them. Nuclear and biological weapons, in particular, require a technological infrastructure which terrorists groups--especially the modern, non-state, distributed groups--don't have and, frankly, don't want. The insurgents in Iraq are doing fine with nothing more complicated than explosives, detonators, cel phones and RPGs. Even 9/11 was a decidedly low tech attack: hot building with big, flammable thing. Modern terrorism is about sascading system failures, and you don't need a nuke to do that. Look at the steadily declining amount of electricity available to the residents of Bagdhad to see how you can paralyze an entire city with nothing more than simple explosives and carefully chosen targets.

The real issue here is the Air Force's refusal to acknowledge that its force structure is out of step with the threats we're facing now. The Air Force wants more and more F-22s, even though the F-22 hasn't been near Iraq and Afghanistan and it won't go near them, as it's payload and loiter time are too small for close air support, which is all our pilots and aviators are doing over there. Air Force brass also continues to give short shrift to the A-10, even though it's uniquely suited to the present, and potential future, conflicts.

Take a look at the Air Force budget request for the next budget and you'll see it's stuffed full of shit we don't need. Meanwhile things we do need, like more airlift capacity, more tankers, etc., are being ignored because they don't go Mach 2. All of the services are having to adapt to the current realities. The Air Force is doing the worst job.

The other side of the issue is that the procurement system is completely broken, but that's a whole 'nother thread.

Regan talked about welfare queens.

And he was telling a lie [washingtonmonthly.com] and continued to tell even when called on it. If you want to do some research you will find that, before Welfare "Reform", the average stay on welfare was 1.9 years. Only about 5% of welfare recipients were on welfare for more than 5 years. It was actually one of the most efficient and effective social programs this country has ever undertaken.

That said, I do agree with you that the broken procurement system has enabled corporate welfare of the worst kind.

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All these pie in the sky projects are simple ways of creating high paying white collar jobs in the home districts of powerful senators.

On the other hand, cutting edge military technology is what allowed us to roll over most of Iraq in a matter of weeks. Had we stopped research during the last major conflict, we'd be going in with 1970's era technology, and American fatalities would have been much higher than the 1000s.

What's more, modern research focuses on reducing civilian casualties. The weapons of yes

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I'm not convinced nuclear terrorism really is a threat, a nuclear strike on US soil would result in a nuclear response by the US and even people as nutty as Osama know that whilst they've been able to hide from conventional forces they can't hide from a nuclear retaliation.

Russia is heading further and further towards it's cold war state with it's assassination of Litvinenko on British soil, it's incursion into Japanese airspace, it's buzzing of US aircraft carrier in the pacific, silencing of opposition pa

2035

27 years is a long time to project for technology.
For example, Ray Kurzweil bet $10,000 [longbets.org] that computers will have passed the turing test by 2029.
Even if you think Kurzweil is an optimistic hack, 27 years is 18 iterations of Moore's law. If that continues, we'll have computers with 200,000 cores and 32 petabyte hard drives by 2035.
I'm not saying that will happen, my point is just that it's probably not prudent to make such long-term plans wrt defense technology, because it's quite likely that technological advancements will make most of your plans obsolete by the time you get that far out.

Advanced Military Systems are Great

and their deterrent power shouldn't be downplayed.

But amidst news of new systems a lot of folks forget that the greater part of U.S. strength is so-called "soft power." Economic strength, alliances, energy security, cultural strength, and good-old fashioned good will are examples.

They are harder to develop but are also harder to fight and confer an immeasurable advantage. Building hypersonic weapons is a good thing, but it's a lot easier for your geopolitical competitors to steal the plans and copy it than it is for them to steal your alliances or international good will.

Sources of soft power aren't usually included in defense planning because areas like economic policy and cultural strength appertain variously to non-military departments or even the private sector. But they should be, because our competitors (like China) are.

That said, the United States has a lot of work to do to restore the soft power that eight years of the Bush administration has squandered. Let's hope the next administration is more astute and capable.

Re:Advanced Military Systems are Great

Demonstating a willingness to invade an ill-behaved country (Iraq) is a form of soft power that your ideology prevents you from seeing.

I don't think you quite understand the meaning of "soft power."

From the Wikipedia article on Soft Power [wikipedia.org]:

Soft power is a term used in international relations theory to describe the ability of a political body, such as a state, to indirectly influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies through cultural or ideological means.

and

Soft power . . . distinguishes the subtle effects of culture, values, and ideas on others' behavior from more direct coercive measures called hard power such as military action (hard power) or economic incentives.

"Willingness to invade" is classic hard power. Please make sure you know what you are talking about before reflexively posting a defense of whatever policy you espouse.

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Please make sure you know what you are talking about before reflexively posting a defense of whatever policy you espouse.

Advice you might consider as well.

"Willingness to invade" is classic hard power.

On the contrary. "Willingness to invade" is classic soft power - totally passive, inactive, and indirect. It's a cultural and ideological value. Of course, every so often you have to excercise hard power - and actual or positively threatened invasion to maintain the influence of the "will

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So your definition of "ill-behaved" is that the country's rulers horribly mistreated some of its citizens. Tell me why this definition wouldn't apply to North Korea, Burma(Myanmar), Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Syria, Cuba or China or ....the list goes on and on. And why haven't we invaded them yet?

We HAD mach 3 birds and weapons

The legendary SR-71 Blackbird, her kid brother the YF-12A interceptor, and the flexible, quick-shooting ASAT weapon. Why go faster? Hypersonic aircraft would run into even tighter restrictions flying in domestic airspace, fuel constraints, not to mention the logistics if the aircraft's requirements are so exotic it requires highly trained crews to maintain it.
"Kelly" Johnson, the father of the U-2/TR-1 and the Blackbirds, came up with a kinetic energy weapon that used no explosive in it. Dropped from 100,000 feet from a Blackbird bomber, the one ton device would have the kinetic energy of a large container freighter hitting at terminal velocity. No explosives whatsoever, just pure momentum. Couple that with a GPS guidance system and you'll have your own man-made meteorite that'll flatten whole city blocks from the impact alone, with pin-point accuracy.

We're back in 1960.

We're about to elect a fairly fresh Democrat Senator after an eight-year Republican administration and resurrect hypersonic jets (the X-15) and supersonic bombers (the XB-70). Will British music, long hair, and brightly colored clothes be next?

Lasers?

Laser weapons are faster than mach 6 for sure.

Re:Wasting resources?

Imagine six 9-11's on our [critical] infrastructure.
Wait, do you want me to imagine 5466, or -12?

Re:Wasting resources?

Imagine six 9-11's on our [critical] infrastructure.
Wait, do you want me to imagine 5466, or -12?

Wait, what?

What kind of order of operations did the teach where you learned to do algebra?

Clearly he meant 43.

Which, incidentally, is one better than the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Re:Wasting resources?

Imagine six 9-11's

I tried to, but I couldn't figure out what part of the pentagon the 6th would hit.

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Things like terror are far worse. Imagine six 9-11's on our [critical] infrastructure.

The 9-11 attacks were horrible for the people actually involved, but they're really, really small compared to a nuke going off in a city. Terrorism is bad, but it's not a threat to our nation's survival.

Re:Wasting resources?

Aircraft capable of sustained speeds of Mach 6 doesn't just have to have military purposes. This research could be applicable well beyond, in space exploration and more. As a launch veichle, a reusable hypersonic design is one of NASA's prime goals. Materials capable of withstanding the forces present at Mach 6, and even more so, for sustained periods of time could bring great advances in material sciences and result in stronger commercial airplanes, enhance the durability of electronics, or at the very least provide materials more capable of dealing with extreme friction. Military spending just happens to be one of the easier ways to get approval for a range of applicable technologies.

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Six 9-11's, for fuck sake more people kill themselves driving to work every year than the terorrist could do in 10 years. Wake me when something interesting happens.

Last time I checked Russia already had a nuclear capable missile with independent, multiple warheads.....twenty-five years ago.

And also last time I checked we only fuck with other countries when it is our business, Iraq our business (cleaning up the mess from GW 1), Iran yep still our business (damn revolutionaries kicked out our puppet gov

Re:Wasting resources?

However, we do know that if you take our current healthcare problems, and try to bandaid on a fix like national healthcare, we will end up with some beast of a system that costs more and provides less.

Funny how you think that you "know" that, given that we're essentially the only developed country that doesn't provide some form of national health care, we pay almost twice as much for healthcare as the next most expensive country, and even with all that money we're spending, we're nowhere near the top of the list of healthiest or longest living populations.

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Funny that the US is the only country with a healthcare system that spends 90% of its resources on the elderly - specifically in the last five years of life. The rest of the world seems to take the attitude that old people die, so shut up and die.

Comparisons about what country is the "healthiest" is pointless - everyone else long ago figured out that if the government was going to pay they weren't going to get neonatal intensive care or transplants for 70-year-olds. Apparently it was decided that was an O

Re:Wasting resources?

Funny how you think that you "know" that, given that we're essentially the only developed country that doesn't provide some form of national health care, we pay almost twice as much for healthcare as the next most expensive country, and even with all that money we're spending, we're nowhere near the top of the list of healthiest or longest living populations.

You are conflating demographic and environmental factors with healthcare outcomes.

If you, for example, remove non-medical causes of premature death (car accidents, homicide, etc) Americans outlive other industrialized countries. Healthcare is only a small factor in life expectancy, and average healthiness is almost completely unrelated to healthcare in the industrialized world. The environmental and demographic factors are atypically poor in the US relative to the industrialized world.

If you look at direct measures of healthcare outcomes, such as diagnostic accuracy and disease survival rates, the US leads the industrialized world by a large margin. The elephant in the room in the recent Lancet Oncology study, for example, was that cancer survival rates in the US are much higher than in any other industrialized country in the world -- about 20-40% on average depending on the country and the cancer. So in this sense, Americans are paying more but they are also receiving much more.

The real situation is that the US has terrible non-medical factors that drag down its statistics but compensates with the best average medical outcomes by a huge margin. In most of the rest of the industrialized world, you have middling to good non-medical factors and middling to poor medical outcomes. In other words, the aggregate statistics are not measuring the same thing. Since we pay the medical establishment to produce positive medical outcomes, it would seem prudent to evaluate their efficacy based on those results and not on the number of automobile accidents people are involved in.

At a minimum, it would be foolish to trash a medical system that produces results such as cancer survival rates that no other system is currently coming close to. The US system may be byzantine and inefficient, but it also outperforms the rest of the world in the key metric of medical results. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water, at least not until a national healthcare system exists with equivalent medical outcomes.

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Undoubtedly, the most important "non-medical" factor is the fact that close to 1/4 of the population doesn't have proper access to the medical system in the first place, thereby exacerbating any medical problems that they have until it's too late. You can't just sweep that under the rug.

If you eliminate accidents and homicide from the statistics, Americans live longer. Period. Do you realize how radically better US healthcare would have to be for your assertion to hold up in the statistics? Direct heal

Re:Wasting resources?

You need to provide links to back up your assertions because your numbers don't add up as far as I can tell. The CIA Factbook gives Japan 4 more years of life expectency than the USA. With the USA's 6 per 100,000 homicide rate and assuming on average a murder victim is 25 years old, that shaves 3 months off US life expectancy relative to Japan, even assuming zero murder rate in Japan. Similar math on car accidents shaves about 6 months, even assuming that nobody in Japan drives. Since I highly doubt that people in the USA are much clumsier than the rest of the world, you have yet to explain an additional 2.5 years of difference compared to my overly conservative estimates. Then you have to explain why we're paying so much more than these other countries; we ought to be living to 120 years old on average at these prices.

The fact that there may be public healthcare for the poor is irrelevant to most people, who aren't poor enough (or don't have the requisite children) to get in the plan, but don't have a pristine health history that allows them to buy individual insurance.

Face it, the thousands of privately managed risk pools, middlemen, ever-changing contracts, murky and confusing billing procedures, etc. make our healthcare system an insane, broken expensive nightmare unless you work at a large corporation. (Which is probably by design, as it creates a feudal-like system to keep corporate employees loyal at the risk of losing coverage for their families.)

The UK and Canada seem to do all right.

What makes you think we can't do it as well as or better than they do?

hahaha

"They just don't realize it yet." Uh huh. They OBJECTIVELY have the best standards of care in the world and have had their programs going for decades. When are they going to "realize" it?

"230+ years of watching government fuck up everything it touches." You're absurd. Government has fucked up the military? It's fucked up the road system? Boy, I sure hate driving on that Eisenhower Interstate system, don't you? Government fucks up the sewers and sanitation? Please pull your archlibertarian head out

The point flew over your head

Quote : "How the fuck is the LARGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD supposed to "keep out of other countries' business"?

There is a difference between being the largest economy of the world, and the largest bully. Nothing in being the largest economy of the world force you to have a big army, and a big nuclear arsenal beyond what is necessary for retaliation, and certainly nothing force you to invade other country which never heard of you, and nothing force you to blackmail other country against producing cheaping anti aids drug (a pet peeve of me, international treaty allow it for emergency situation but the US blackmail a lot of country against doing this, or even retaliate). The fact is that the US seems to be quite trigger happy and forget what diplomacy is. If it was not the case, you would not have so-unhappy-ally and falling out with decades old ally. In case you don't remember you had a lot of support a few years ago before you decided to squander it into what i would call bullying Iraq. Nobody ask you to be isolationist. But sometimes, sometimes, it would be nice if you could leave people which are not disturbing you alone in their own FUCKING country. And I am not even speaking of Irak alone. Nicaragua. Chile. Panama. And so on. You are part of the world, but most of the time your extern politic amount to "do whatever we say or we crush you, crush you so bad you won't believe it".

Remember kids, respecting others [person,country] goes into a long way to get respect back. Bullying other make you a nice target. And spitting on your friend make you look like an idiot.

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"And just exactly how is that supposed to happen? How the fuck is the LARGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD supposed to "keep out of other countries' business"?"

Oh i dunno.. the ron paul platform?

- no tarrifs, especially retaliatory corporatist based ones
- stop secretly (or recently overtly) overthrowing other peoples governments (theres about 60 years for you to say sorry for currently)
- no sanctions against "misbehavior" (the very fact that americans are so arrogant to think they can tell people how to behave und

Re:

I said you could start with manifest destiny. Now that you've admitted that your initial claim of "The only land the US has taken is for cemeteries for their dead soldiers." is false, perhaps now you can move on and actually learn something...

...or perhaps you can't. Judging from the quality of your posts thus far, I doubt that you have much capacity to learn.

I really don't care either way. As I said earlier, it's not my job to educate you.

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Well I don't! He ruins my world-domination schemes enough without going into super form, let alone hyper!

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It's how military R&D works. We're using stuff now that was developed what...20 or so years ago, if not more in many cases? The life cycle of this stuff is a lonnnnnnnng time (a combination of your standard red tape and just the time it really does take to properly push out this kinda stuff).

'Course, this often causes R&D to be fighting the last war. They're developing advanced technology that would be nice now, but not always useful for the next brand of warfare.

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I would argue this. We're not necessarily using stuff developed 20 years ago - no more than we are using "computers that were developed in the 50s." Yeah, the extremely basic concept is pretty old (yeah, our planes still fly and we still call them planes, but they are a far cry from what the Wrigh