US (& Allies) Hypersonic developments and missiles

Tsirkon does not reach a speed of 9M at sea level. 9M reaches an altitude of 30-40 km.

The US military admits that its new hypersonic missile will not be ready by the scheduled date, 09.16.2023.

The Pentagon confirmed to 'Bloomberg' that they will not meet the goal of deploying a hypersonic weapon in the remaining two weeks of the month of September.

"It is not uncommon for deployment dates to be adjusted based on real-time events," the US military said in a statement dated September 14 to Bloomberg.

"We continue to aggressively push forward the testing and deployment of long-range hypersonic weapons. Our goal is to implement the system as soon as possible after a successful test. It is a top modernization priority for the Army and the Department of Defense."

With this delay, Bloomberg notes that it is the second year in a row that the Pentagon will not meet a target date for deploying its first operational hypersonic weapon, even when China and Russia have already deployed new agile weapons that can fly fast and low.

"Last year, the US Air Force failed to meet a similar milestone: declaring operational by the end of fiscal year 2022 a hypersonic missile to be launched from a B-52 bomber called ARRW, due to an irregular testing history. Three failures in the booster tests of an ARRW development model derailed plans for the missile to enter production last year," the US outlet explains.

In June of this year, the Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth, was still confident that they would not need an extension, stating that they were working "very hard" to schedule a "crucial test" to be able to deploy the weapon before September 30.

"But the deployment plan was derailed when the United States scrapped the key test of the one scheduled for September 6, which was canceled after pre-flight checks discovered a problem," the article states.

According to press reports, this new long-range hypersonic weapon, developed by Lockheed Martin Corp. for the US army, it will have a range of 2,780 kilometers and consists of a ground-launched missile equipped with a hypersonic gliding body and associated transport, support and fire control equipment.

Yandex Translate from Spanish

https://sputniknews.lat/20230916/el-ejercito-de-eeuu-admite-que-su-nuevo-misil-hipersonico-no-estara-listo-para-la-fecha-programada-1143772837.html

According to press reports, this new long-range hypersonic weapon, developed by Lockheed Martin Corp. for the US army, it will have a range of 2,780 kilometers and consists of a ground-launched missile equipped with a hypersonic gliding body and associated transport, support and fire control equipment.

Excellent... with a flight range of almost 3,000km in a ground launched version completely violates the INF treaty so that means it is completely dead and there is no going back to it.

Putin promised not to introduce new ground based missiles that violate the INF treaty unless the US did, so now they can make what they want.

And most importantly the Russians have working scramjet motors so a small solid rocket booster to lift the missile into the air and accelerate and climb a bit with a scramjet powered missile would be ideal in terms of size and weight and cost and range performance and of course speed.

Making a missile the same size and weight of the Iskander would probably lead to a scramjet powered missile with a flight range of rather more than 3,000km... remember Iskander is almost 5 tons which is huge... if we assume 3.5 tons is solid rocket fuel that would mean 700kgs is fuel and the remaining 2.8 tons is oxidiser.

With a scramjet motor 3.5 tons can be the fuel and the 14 tons of oxygen can be scooped up on the way to the target, so this 5 ton scramjet powered missile would have the fuel and speed and range of a missile close to 20 tons using solid fuelled rocket propulsion...

Before ICBMs were proven to work both sides were working on giant mach 3 ramjet powered cruise missiles which only had a range of about 3,000-5,000km... look up the Snark and read about that...

With scramjet propulsion they become rather more interesting... and viable.

The US intends to deploy land-based Tomahowk systems in Europe by 2026, and hypersonic missiles in the future? haha, how hypersonic?

I think the USA will not master HGV technology for a long time, especially in the smaller version.

A while ago they seriously considered using SM6 for ground attack, to call something "hipersonic". To give you the scale...

with gliding supersonic bloc apparently - Dark Eagle. 

The thing was not even tested. Years behind scedule.

I just don't understand why the USA could not master it?

No experience in developing and fielding supersonic missiles.

Whether they count as strategic or not doesn't really matter. In 18 months, the New START Treaty expires

Start only applies to strategic range ballistic or cruise missiles so 5,500km or more... but guess what... you could fit retractable undercarriage and call it a UAV and you can make as many as you want.

I just wonder what Russians are going to present in response...

US announcements of deploying  tomahawks to Germany and other such things has led to Putin declaring the INF treaty dead and buried and he authorised the resumption of development of the Medium and Intermediate range ballistic and cruise missiles that had been banned by the INF treaty.

Of course while some might ask why the US is deploying such weapons, perhaps a better question is why are there US military bases in Europe in the first place... there are no European military bases in the US...

I just don't understand why the USA could not master it?

Well, for a while the Russians had not invested a lot of time or money in drone technology... the problem of course is that because of the awful corruption in the US you really don't get value for money and the results can be very hit and miss..

The US space shuttle is a hypesonic glide vehicle, creating hypersonic missile is easy... any country that launches a satellite into space can use that same rocket technology and put a hypersonic speed glider which is going to look space shuttle like and call it a hypersonic glider.

What Russia is doing is making what was previously a ramjet powered missile and putting a scramjet motor into it so for instance the ramjet powered missile like Onyx or Yakhont or Brahmos that uses a solid rocket booster to launch it into the air and accelerate it to speeds that are not supersonic, to then light up its ramjet to accelerate it to mach 2 to mach 2.5 to then fly supersonically to the target and then dive on the target is one thing... a mach 2.5 target attacking your ship moving at 800-900m/s is a real threat.

What the Russians have done is replace that ramjet with a scramjet, which means instead of flying at 25km altitude, it can fly at 40+ altitudes and it can accelerate to speeds of mach 9 to mach 10, which is not 800-900m/s, it is 3,000m/s... the work of the air defences is magnified to the point where interception becomes enormously complicated.

In fact to the point where AMRAAM based and Patriot based air defence systems can't reliably stop a single missile.

Previously you would need to overwhelm defences to get through... a dozen or more storm shadow missiles needed in an attempt to get one through.

With ZIrcon one missile will get through most of the time... but the critical thing is that the zircon missile is not some big expensive 20 ton missile... it is probably 2 to 2.5 tons and can fit into the same launch tubes that Onyx and Calibre fit into.

But more importantly this scramjet propulsion technology can be used in Air to Air missiles as well as surface to air missiles as well as attack missiles of short, medium and long range.

Imagine a 20,000km range cruise missile that weighs 10 tons and carries two types of fuel... normal jet fuel... a kerosene type fuel that the scramjet just burns like normal jet fuel... it can take off from a runway with huge external fuel tanks and it can climb to maybe 15km altitude and head in the opposite direction to its target and pretend to be an airliner with civilian IFF signals flying at 800km/h for 10,000km. Then when the cheap light kerosene fuel burns out those external fuel tanks are dropped and the big wings fall off and the next set of fuel tanks supply the high energy fuel to the scramjet which accelerates the smaller lighter missile so it climbs and accelerates to mach 3 or mach 4 and climbs to 25km altitude where the air is thinner for the next 5,000km... and then those fuel tanks are dropped and the internal fuel which is high energy fuel and the scramjet goes into full AB mode and the missile accelerates to mach 10 or mach 12 and the last 5,000km are flown at 50km altitude or above... it might approach the US of A or Europe from the south and it might start releasing 40kg sized nuclear warheads of the size used in 152mm artillery shells to set of nuclear explosions all over the target area... they might be targeted or they might just be random.

You could have these hidden all over your country and launch them from the start of WWIII onwards... the last could be launched months after the war started...

The US rushed to catch up with Russia and China in hypersonic technology, by Evgeniy Pozdnyakov for VZGLYAD. 07.31.2024.

The US is trying to catch up with Russia and China in the field of hypersonic weapons. Western media reports that the Pentagon has begun new tests, although previous cycles often ended in failure. What problems are the Americans facing on this path, why are they likely to overcome them in the near future, and what does this mean for Russia?

The US Army and Navy recently tested hypersonic weapons. However, whether they were successful and what kind of system was used has not been officially specified. As The Warzone portal writes , citing the Pentagon, the tests took place at Cape Canaveral in Florida, presumably on July 25.

"This test was a significant milestone in the development of operational hypersonic technology. Important hardware and software performance data was collected that will facilitate further progress in the deployment of hypersonic weapons," the military department noted.

Some reports suggest that the weapon may be testing the Dark Eagle missile, also known as the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW). The weapon is part of the only known joint US Army-Navy hypersonic weapons program, which has been underway since 2019.

The long-range hypersonic weapon was publicly unveiled in 2020. The Army planned to field the first LRHW battery by fiscal year 2023, but integration issues pushed the project back . Previous U.S. hypersonic weapons tests have faced several setbacks.

In 2023, three rounds of tests were cancelled due to problems with the launcher. In the spring of 2024, new tests were conducted, which were completed successfully. The missile was launched from a B-52 strategic bomber, which took off from the American Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, RBK recalls .

It is also curious that in 2026 the US plans to deploy intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles (INF) in Germany. As reported in Washington, the list of weapons will include the SM-6 missile (a multifunctional sea-, air- and land-based missile), the Tomahawk cruise missile, as well as the hypersonic weapon under development, "which has a significantly greater range than current ground-based weapons in Europe."

"As for hypersonic weapons, the Americans do not have them yet. The States are seriously behind in the development of these weapons compared to Russia or China. But if the US improves them, we will face the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile system, the flight range of which exceeds three thousand kilometers," Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies (CCEIS) at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, noted in this regard.

The expert community notes that the United States has every chance of successfully completing the process of developing hypersonic weapons. At the same time, experts urge to take Washington's initiatives seriously. For a long time, the Americans did not pay due attention to this area, but given their scientific and technical potential, the States can catch up with Russia and China in the shortest possible time.

"Washington's lag behind Moscow and Beijing in the area of ​​hypersonic weapons is dictated by several reasons. The most important is that our countries pursue different goals. Moscow at one time developed the Avangard complex, which was created as a means of delivering nuclear weapons. This dictated completely different requirements for accuracy," said Dmitry Stefanovich, co-founder of the Vatfor project, research fellow at the Center for International Security at the IMEMO RAS.

"For the US, this task was solved with the help of conventional warheads. In addition, Washington as a whole for a fairly long period of history did not have a huge interest in the creation of strategic systems. Today, Russia and China have already managed to acquire serious hypersonic models of weapons. Accordingly, the priority of this area of ​​engineering thought has increased in itself," he notes.

“At the same time, the United States took quite a long time to get to the current test.

Full deployment will probably have to wait, since the Americans have had a number of unsuccessful tests before. The missile being developed by Washington will be both sea-based and land-based in a container design,” the source emphasizes.

"However, they have not yet published detailed characteristics of the device. But in the coming years, the United States may catch up with Russia and China. There is great interest in this area in America, and there is no doubt about their scientific and technical potential. At the same time, the production of gliding winged hypersonic units remains an expensive process," the expert emphasizes.

In his opinion, the United States will consistently develop its own hypersonic sphere. "First, separate batteries will appear, then they will move on to sea carriers. The deadlines that were announced in the case of deploying warheads in Germany, namely 2026, indicate that the process of creating weapons is slower than the Americans would like," he believes.

"The first place to deploy the new weapons will be the United States itself. Then the missiles will be delivered to Hawaii. That is, Washington's attention in this regard is primarily focused on the Pacific Ocean.

These technologies will reach Germany last. However, trial operations in German regions as early as next year should not be ruled out,” the source clarifies.

Nevertheless, he notes, it is quite difficult to talk about the US clearly lagging behind Russia and China. “In quantitative terms, they will most likely not overtake us. The qualitative aspect remains questionable. But in terms of deployment geography, they retain an advantage. That is, each country has its own advantages and disadvantages,” the expert adds.

"However, Washington cannot catch up with Moscow in terms of combat experience and daily operation of hypersonic weapons. In order to level out this gap, the US has already deployed a number of trial models, which the US military is gradually being drawn into working with. But they will lack experience comparable to the use of this technology in the fields of the Central Military District," Stefanovich points out.

It is indeed dangerous to underestimate American scientific and technical potential, says military expert Maxim Klimov. "Yes, there is a serious decline in engineering education in America, which slows down the process of developing hypersonic weapons. But it is worth noting that these systems are now as important for Washington as they are for Moscow and Beijing," he adds.

“The States already have a wide range of weapons.

Let me remind you that they deliberately chose supersonic weapons as anti-ship missiles, since this allows them to equip carriers with a larger ammunition load. Moreover, the US has quite good reconnaissance and targeting systems, which is extremely important for work in this direction,” the source emphasizes.

"However, in the area of ​​hypersonic devices, the Americans encountered an unexpected problem: a non-optimal vertical launch cell connector. It was created by developing 20th century torpedo weapons. And if the adopted standards served well for the same Tomahawk missiles, they later played a cruel joke on the US," the expert notes.

"They were not suitable for hypersonic munitions, which posed additional challenges for Washington in developing new weapons. Nevertheless, the States are making considerable efforts to develop in this area. As for Germany, the deployment of hypersonic systems there is no alternative for America, since in this regard the Pentagon is guided by the goal of creating conditions for a disarming preventive strike against Russia," he believes.

"Of course, the US may not make it by 2026. However, sooner or later, weapons will be delivered to Germany. In addition, Washington will try to push missiles into other regions of Europe, which is why we need to closely monitor future wording on peace agreements. The US will also try to deploy weapons on islands in the Pacific Ocean to contain China," Klimov concluded.

https://vz.ru/world/2024/7/31/1279916.html

Such weapons 1000 km from Moscow are very dangerous for Russia. The US will again try to deploy first-strike nuclear weapons close to Moscow.

Yes, Tsirkon is a good answer, but when it comes to hitting NATO decision centers, not the US itself. As for the US, they would have to keep 885M patrols close to the US coast. Then there are a few minutes of flight to the US decision centers. On the other hand, Yasen M will have rather other ASW tasks and destroying the US fleet.
The point is that Russia currently does not have the means to directly strike very quickly at decision-making centers, etc. in CONUS itself. The US, if it deploys missiles in Poland, is 3 to 4 minutes of flight to Moscow.

Kabarovsk class submarines. It is quite possible they are a combination of Poseidon nuclear torpedo and VLS carriers. Like wrote:

Interesting option. Tsirkon and Poseidon are a terrifying mix. As for Tsirkon, the question is what range can the nuclear-armed version have? I hear that for land targets Tsirkon has a range of up to 1500 km according to some sources. More than for surface targets, which is understandable. With a nuclear warhead, it could be as much as 2000 km hmmm. In addition, Khabarovsk will certainly be a very quiet submarine, similar to 955A or 885M or even better. I am very curious about these ships when they launch it.