The battle for hypersound: 1:0 in favor of Russia
The topic of hypersonic weapons has recently gained great popularity in the world media. And this is not surprising, because protection against hypersonic missiles has not yet been invented.
Actually, the battle for hypersound has been going on for 60 years now, with varying success and long-term downtime. The main participants in the competition were the USSR and the USA, even the first experimental aircraft appeared.
But already in the mid-1960s, a direction that promised unprecedented and unheard of prospects ran into a technological barrier: to conquer hypersound, new scientific and technical solutions were needed in the field of materials science, propulsion engineering and control systems. Aviation at near-space speeds was postponed indefinitely.
The modern scientific and technological revolution, which started shortly after the end of World War II, continues, and we are currently experiencing its fifth wave. One of its main achievements is the new battle for hypersound, in which Russia is taking the lead with the Kinzhal hypersonic aircraft missile system.
The main thing you should know about the “Dagger” is that it is Russia’s asymmetric response to the concentration of NATO strike forces near its borders, nullifying all preparations for missile defense sites in Poland and Romania, as well as the deployment of THAAD and anti-missile systems anywhere Aegis, which simply will not have time to react after launching “daggers” carrying half-megaton nuclear warheads.
“Dagger”, like other examples of new promising weapons in Russia, internal and external demons tried to ridicule and chatter. Putin, they say, shows cartoons to serious people. A little over a year and a half has passed since the announcement of new Russian defense systems, and no one is laughing anymore. New types of weapons really exist and are capable of doing what they were created for.
It can be said that American politicians and the military have successively gone through the stages of rejection, denial, bargaining, rethinking the humiliation they suffered after such long and expensive preparations in the geopolitical chess game, so that now they have moved directly to the point.
Somewhere in early August, it became known that a tender was held in Washington in which the leaders of the American military-industrial complex competed for the right to become the creators of a complex for protection against hypersonic weapons.
We can say that a miracle did not happen and the companies won the tender, without which not a single expensive defense project can be implemented. The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) concluded contracts with Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon based on the results of the bidding.
It is these leaders of capitalist production who are entrusted with forging the shield that should (in theory) save the United States from the all-pervasive Russian hypersound. The competition for the development of systems for intercepting and destroying hypersonic aerodynamic and ballistic targets was announced by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA and MDA almost a year ago - in November 2018.
The main details of the terms of reference were not disclosed in the open tender documentation. You have to understand how top secret they are. Only the names of the contractors and the code names that they have already assigned to their future developments are known.
Thus, Boeing, which has recently been pretty battered by scandals and complaints, will work on the HYVINT system, Raytheon is going to arm the American guardians of the sky with a certain SM3-HAWK system, and Lockheed Martin promises to take a break from the F-35 for now and hit the adversary with the Valkyrie complex. The main thing, as usual, is to choose a brighter sticker and let in the fog of secrecy.
However, it is possible to guess what exactly corporations will do. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Michael Griffith said in 2018 that the United States simply does not have radars capable of monitoring space over tens of thousands of kilometers and detecting missile launches. The speed of Russian “daggers” exceeds 10M, which means their late detection is tantamount to complete blindness.
The satellites of the United States military space group cannot detect them either. The same deplorable situation is observed with the means of destroying enemy missiles. Today, the United States has 44 silo-based interceptor missiles, mostly stationed in Alaska.
The Pentagon is going to solve the issue through an additional network of orbital surveillance satellites of a new generation and new interceptor missiles capable of destroying hypersonic targets at the maximum distance from their territory.
After the completion of the tender, each of the corporations mentioned above estimated the scope of work at $4,5 billion. According to the terms of the competition, projects must be submitted to the Pentagon by May 2020. However, there are doubts about the success of these projects. And everything would be fine, but two of the three corporations that won the tender - Boeing and Raytheon - had already created a missile defense system for the United States, which with a clear conscience can be called a costly failure.
The Pentagon announced the complete closure of the missile defense project simultaneously with the completion of bidding on hypersound. $1,2 billion of American public money was poured into the failed program, which no one is in a hurry to return.
It seems that the latest developments in protection against hypersound for Very Big Money, which Raytheon and Boeing skillfully shook out of the pockets of the Pentagon, are another bluff and “cut” of gluttonous military-industrial corporations.
“We have such devices, but we won’t tell you about them...”
As the Soviet “cooperatives,” the forerunners of modern “effective managers,” said thirty years ago, “strike iron while Gorbachev does.”
The American military-industrial complex needs to forge iron while Donald Trump is in the White House, who has been in a complete hickey and “honeymoon” with him for three years now.
So they are in a hurry to rake in the loot at hypersonic speed, before the hand of the giver becomes impoverished...
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.