In the run-up to Vladimir Putin’s preordained election victory this month, the Russian president staged a provocative show of new, supposedly unstoppable nuclear weapons that would have made Grigory Potemkin proud.
In a March 1 address in Moscow, Putin touted a new generation of what he called “invincible” cruise missiles, underwater drones, and hypersonic warheads, a presentation complete with cartoonish animations depicting the futuristic weapons weaving around U.S. radars and striking targets halfway around the globe.
Take the X-101 air-launched missile, which is purportedly powered by a nuclear propulsion system that experts think would be dangerously impractical.
“It is a low-flying stealth missile carrying a nuclear warhead, with almost an unlimited range, unpredictable trajectory, and ability to bypass interception boundaries,” Putin claimed. “It is invincible against all existing and prospective missile defense and counter-air defense systems.”
So, according to Putin, we’re screwed.
“I get paid to make strategic assessments, and I would just tell you that I saw no change to the Russian military capability,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters after reviewing Putin’s video clips. “Each of these systems that he’s talking about are still years away. I do not see them changing the military balance.”
Mattis is making a simple point. There’s little to no advantage in having a nuclear-tipped weapon that can evade U.S. air defenses when you already have a vast arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles that can easily overwhelm America’s rudimentary missile shield.
In other words, Mattis said, if the Russians want to start a nuclear war, “They have the capability to do right now what he was touting. So, it doesn’t change anything,”
Except it does, just not in the way Putin implied.
Both Russia and China are investing heavily in developing hypersonic glide vehicles, aircraft that can travel five or six times the speed of sound, have a low flight profile, and can maneuver instead of following a predictable track.
While hypersonic weapons may do little to change the nuclear balance, they could give an adversary a potentially decisive edge in conventional warfare.
“When the Chinese can deploy tactical or regional hypersonic systems, they hold at risk our carrier battle groups. They hold our entire surface fleet at risk. They hold at risk our forward-deployed land-based forces,” Michael Griffin, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told a Washington defense conference this month.
Developing defenses for the hypersonic threat is his “number one technical priority” for the Pentagon, said Griffin, who has been on the job less than a month.
Defending against an incoming missile that can fly a mile in one second is no easy task, but not impossible by any means, says Tom Callender, an expert in naval warfare and advanced technologies at the Heritage Foundation.
“Definitely not indefensible, a lot of hyperbole from Vladimir Putin,” Callender says, pointing out that current shipboard and land-based missile defenses have some capability against even super-fast missiles, and new technologies hold even more promise.
Two systems in the prototype stage are the Navy’s railgun and a ship-based laser.
The electromagnetic railgun, which uses a series of powerful magnets to fling a projectile up to 100 miles at nearly 5,000 miles per hour, is seen as particularly suited to counter the hypersonic threat.
“Fully invested in railgun,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told a House committee this month. “We continue to test it. We’ve demonstrated it at lower firing rates and shorter ranges. Now, we have to do the engineering to, sort of, crank it up and get it at the designated firing rates at the 80-to-100-mile range.”
The ship-based Laser Weapon System, or “LaWS,” was tested aboard the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf in 2014, and showed it could take out small boats and drones. But the Navy is looking to install more powerful directed-energy weapons on ships in the coming years.
“Hypersonics and railgun are high-interest items of the Navy,” said Vice Adm. William Merz, the deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, in a separate congressional testimony this month. “I do believe they’re game changers.”
Lasers have an inherent disadvantage against hypersonic weapons because they destroy a target by hitting it with concentrated intense heat, while hypersonic vehicles are specifically designed to withstand the very high temperatures generated by their hypersonic flights.
“On a hypersonic cruise missile, the nose cone is designed to withstand high heat of those high speeds,” said Heritage’s Callender. “It’s already heat-resistant, so trying to burn through something that is heat-resistant makes it even harder.”
The other big challenge is the need for better sensors to spot and track the super-fast missiles sooner.
“If you can’t see it, you can’t shoot it,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, head of the Missile Defense Agency. “We need birth-to-death custody” of the threat.
Unlike ballistic missiles that travel in a neat parabola, hypersonic missiles can maneuver and change course at low altitude, literally below the radar.
“There are gaps,” Greaves said in a speech this month. “What we are looking towards is to move the sensor architecture to space and use that advantage of space, in coordination with our ground assets, to remove the gaps.”
U.S. commanders insist today’s capabilities are sufficient to defeat today’s threats, but warn those threats, especially from China and Russia, are evolving faster than ever.
“No one can predict the future with certainty. We will inevitably face surprises, but we have to try to peer into the fog, looking for trends that point us towards where warfare is headed,” said House Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, at a recent hearing on future warfare. “History tells us that even great powers can be overwhelmed by change that they do not recognize or to which they do not adapt.”
And Thornberry says the time to adapt is now. “There’s a lot of truth in former Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld’s comment that, ‘You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want or wish to have at a later time.'”
