By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven
The US Navy has fired an emerging hypersonic “prototype” round as far as 109 nautical miles in only two minutes, marking a potential breakthrough in the realm of high-speed attack at five-times the speed of sound.
Hypersonic Missile Launch
Weapons developers describe the projectile as a “hypersonic body shape,” and say that the prototype was fired at White Sands Missile Range from an electromagnetic gun.
“We were able to gather data, prove the ability to gather data in hypersonic regimes and take that data and share it with academia and our partners. We were able to prove our models, test out our components, technologies and subsystems,” Adam Jones, Advanced Hypersonic & Guided Weapons Division Head, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, told an audience last year at the 2022 Sea Air Space Symposium.
Several key areas of ongoing inquiry, likely to be greatly advanced by this prototype shot, are what Jones referred to as boundary layer transition and thermal heating. Each of these are crucial areas of hypersonic flight necessary to ensure flight path trajectory, speed, targeting and in-flight thermal stability.
Temperature is, among other things, crucial to hypersonic flight as projectiles traveling at Mach 5 speeds can easily overheat and either explode or veer off course. To counter this risk, engineers regularly build hypersonic projectiles with special advanced, heat resistant materials to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted flight path.
These dynamics also pertain to Jones’ comment about “boundary layer,” a term referring to the air flow surrounding a hypersonic projectile. Weapons developers work to ensure that the air flow or “boundary layer” surrounding the weapon in flight is “laminar” or smooth, as opposed to “turbulent.” A turbulent air flow can cause molecules to move around between layers surrounding the projectile and possibly cause the round to overheat or simply veer off course.
“We are learning how to fly at Mach Five. We also looked at the functional areas across Hypersonics Applied Materials, high temperature and advanced structural materials guidance, navigation control and hypersonic body shape,” Jones said.
How soon might this projectile and gun be operational on board a warship? What might that mean to tactical commanders? White Sands Missile Range, N.M., has a “desert ship” test environment to assess Naval weapons systems from the test range in the desert, yet further kinds of integration and testing may be needed before the weapon can fully integrate into a ship’s weapon system.
However, firing hypersonic weapons from the deck of a destroyer or cruiser may not be that far away, and it is something which promises to reshape the paradigms for maritime attack.
For instance, should a forward operating drone be able to locate an approaching fleet of small attack boats approaching the horizon, identify land-launchers for anti-ship guided missiles or even detect enemy warships from greater standoff ranges than previously possible, ship commanders could fire off a hypersonic missile to destroy the target in minutes if not seconds.
The principle advantage of hypersonics is simply ….”time,” the speed at which they can hit an enemy target massively shortens the response curve for potential enemies. Ship or shore defenses, for example, would simply be quite challenged to see and respond to an approaching hypersonic projectile fast enough, a circumstance making them quite vulnerable.
Hypersonic Weapons
“For way too long the Navy has invested in defensive systems. We made a transition to offensive systems and the Navy is leading the way,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee – Defense at a 2023 Budget hearing. Responding to inquiries about the program from Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., Gilday explained how the Army and the Navy were collaborating on a Common Hypersonic Glide Body (CHGB) to support hypersonic weapons systems. The Army plans to field its ground-mobile Long Range Hypersonic Weapon by 2023 and the Navy says its on track to deploy its Conventional Prompt Strike on destroyers by 2025.
The glide body is a warhead which gets thrust into the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds traveling five or more times the speed of sound. Once airborne, the weapon can skip along the upper boundaries of the earth’s atmosphere before relying upon the sheer speed of its descent onto a target. Destruction of a target can be accomplished by the sheer force and speed of impact.
“Our all-up round (CHGB) is a 34-inch booster which will be common between the Army and the Navy. We will shoot exactly the same thing the Navy shoots out of a sub or ship,” Robert Strider, Deputy, Army Hypersonic Project Office, told an audience Aug. 11 2021 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville Ala.
Citing the promise of the technology and the rapid progress of the program, Gilday said the Navy’s hypersonics program has met every benchmark milestone. He explained this has been in large measure due to the fact that the Navy doubled its hypersonics budget from $.7 billion to $1.4 billion.
Gilday’s emphasis upon offense is indeed quite significant as it parallels current thinking about how, when it comes to missile attacks and missile defense, offensive and defensive operations are deeply intertwined. Certainly one clear way to increase protection against hypersonic missiles is to ensure catastrophic, rapid, hypersonic retaliation. Perhaps in this respect, hypersonic weapons could operate as a conventional application of strategic deterrence by informing potential adversaries that an attack with hypersonic weapons will instantly be met with a massive offensive strike using hypersonic missiles.
There is also the possibility of using hypersonic projectiles themselves as interceptors against incoming hypersonic missiles, as they could travel at speeds necessary to perform an intercept. Much of the targeting specifics and guidance technologies when it comes to hypersonics are likely not available for security reasons, they are known to be maneuverable and difficult to track, one reason why the promise of launching a large scale hypersonic weapons attack could serve as a deterrent and “prevent” or “defend against” any enemy attack with hypersonic weapons.
Navy to Fire Hypersonic Weapons from Submarines in 2028
An ability to fire a lethal long-range missile traveling more than five times the speed of sound from beneath the surface of the ocean would present unparalleled problems for an enemy under attack, as the launch point might be virtually undetectable and the speed of flight so much that the approaching weapon simply couldn’t be tracked in time.
This attack scenario describes the US Navy’s vision for submarine-launched hypersonic flight, a now-in-development technology expected to be ready by 2028, according to comments to Congressional lawmakers from Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday.
Sub-Launched Hypersonic Weapons
“We will continue to make investments in hypersonic capability and plan to have a hypersonic weapon launched from a submerged submarine by 2028. We are meeting every benchmark in that program and we doubled the Navy’s funding for hypersonics last year,” Gilday told members of the Senate Armed Service Committee at a budget hearing next year.
Hypersonic weapons are essentially “here” for the US military which can already fire both ground and air launched hypersonics. As part of this integrated plan, the Navy is preparing to deck-launch hypersonic projectiles from service warships, a development likely to change the paradigm for surface-to-surface and surface-to-land attack.
As part of this effort the Navy is now testing new ship-deck launcher systems capable of firing hypersonic weapons. An ability to successfully launch hypersonic projectiles from Vertical Launch Tubes built into a submarine from beneath the surface, however, is yet another breakthrough step.
Tomahawk missiles, for example, can travel as far as 900 miles to a target at 500mph after being launched from a submarine beneath the ocean. New Tactical Tomahawk weapons introduce the ability to architect cruise missiles that can change course in flight to hit moving targets at sea. A maneuvering hypersonic missile, however, is yet another level of high-speed missile attack, as they do not follow a known trajectory or path like a ballistic missile and travel from one radar aperture or field of view to another as speed nearly impossible for traditional radar to track.
Tactically speaking, an ability to fire hypersonics from beneath the sea could introduce a new kind of surprise attack capability for submarines. While Tomahawk Block IVs operate with a two-way data link, an ability to loiter above targets and an ISR-like capability to send back target information, they are nowhere near as fast as a hypersonic projectile would be. Tomahawks were engineered to fly parallel to the surface or ground to evade Soviet air defenses years ago, yet speeds of 500 mph are much easier for enemies to track than a hypersonic projectile would be traveling more than five-times the speed of sound.
Lurking beneath the surface in coastal waters near hostile territory, hypersonic missile-armed attack submarines would present enemies with quite a dilemma, as they could hit enemy targets on shore while remaining quite difficult to detect by enemy ground or air radar systems. A surface ship or lower flying aircraft, by contrast, would likely be seen and known by an enemy at great distances, whereas a submarine might succeed in eluding detection and be in position to launch surprise attacks capable of destroying high-value enemy targets from the ocean within minutes.
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