Summary: Space based directed energy (DE) weapons are the only thing capable of reliably intercepting hypersonic glide vehicles --- and the USA does not have them at this time.
The author worked on this project, and does remark that the only way to power the jet-borne laser at the time was to essentially pack a liquid rocket inside a 747 - but advancements in laser tech over the last 20-30 years have created alternatives like solid state systems.
If the US would have still had smart strategists in positions of power we wouldn't have had to deal with all this hysteria about Russian hypersonic wunderwaffen.
After all, how much damage can the Russians inflict with 10 or 20 or, let's say, with 50 such missiles? Not much, maybe they'll damage a building or two, maybe there will be some casualties on US soil, but not enough, and by a large margin, to win a war. Or, to put it another way, if the US were to militarily fold as a result of 50 such missiles hitting them on their home turf then they wouldn't have stood a chance anyway, hypersonic missiles or not.
But this guy (otherwise pretty smart when it comes to tech) is not in the business of ensuring a strategic win for the US in a possible confrontation against Russia or China, he's in the business of selling his new tech (apparently some new laser gun?) and of making money for himself and for his investors.
If it hadn't been clear, I'm ignoring the nuclear component in all this, as a Russian/Chinese nuclear hit on US soil, no matter the "transport" procedure (via "hypersonic" thingie or not) will very soon be matched by the US hitting Russian/Chinese soil in return. But, again, that's a totally different discussion to have, having "hypersonic missile" capabilities or not is quite orthogonal to it.
A few hundred missiles taking out large fixed critical infra like refineries is existential. Advanced rocketry tech is eroding fortress American with will greatly limit US expeditionary posture that relies on unmolested homefront. Think precise long range strikes against ships in port or strategic bombers in harden bunkers, space infra stations or production facilities. Everything changes when CONUS becomes vunerable to foreign power projection - something that constrains nearly every US adversary who has to consider homeland strikes.
E: over post limit
IMO RU has been relatively restrained in attacking power infra, mostly lower level nodes (substations) on the grid that's repairable vs what happened to Baghdad during first gulf war, worsened by western sanctions that prevented repair. UKR resilience mostly largely due to having access to spare parts from global producers. It hasn't been a "hands off" situation. Replacing transformers is very different from rebuilding power plants. Severely grading infra is closer to "call it quits' ' total war which war hasn't yet devolve to.
> it couldn't have won the war anyway
This is more or less the point. Critical infra vulnerability on CONUS opens up the “let's not have unwinnable war condition” - it's essentially an escalation rung that US hasn't had to deal with, and will circumscribe the ability for the US to respond. It's function more useful in context deterrence via conventional MAD in peer scenarios (i.e. US vs PRC over TW). There's a reason Biden specifically communicated to PRC and RU that even cyber attacks on US critical infra will be interpreted no different than kinetic war. The value of global precision strike hypersonics is predominantly to shape/limit US behaviour in the same way US carrier groups or strategic bombers projected off adversaries' shores shape/limit theirs. And so far the US has near unilateral monopoly over such deterrence/coercion/persuasion.
You would think so, but, then again, Ukraine has been pretty resilient in the face of much more and devastating attacks targeting its infrastructure (mostly related to power generation, as far as I can tell).
As for the refineries, I agree, it would most definitely suck to have some of them taken off-line, but the discussion comes back to the point I was mentioning, meaning if the US is ready to call it quits because it will have to introduce some gasoline rationing as a result of a World War (because at that point we would be in the middle of WW3) then, honestly, it couldn't have won the war anyway. You need some resilience built in, both at the technical level (maybe have more refineries that would be more spread out, for example) and at the national psyche level, for lack of a better term.
Ten or twenty buildings on the continental US being hit by Russian hypersonic missiles may seem like basically nothing, but on 9/11 we lost two buildings, plus minor damage to the Pentagon, and the US collectively lost it's shit. It's still looking for it, more than a decade later. It's not the destruction from the Russian missiles I'm worried about, it's the US's totally unhinged response that I'm afraid of.
> After all, how much damage can the Russians inflict with 10 or 20 or, let's say, with 50 such missiles? Not much, maybe they'll damage a building or two, maybe there will be some casualties on US soil, but not enough, and by a large margin, to win a war. Or, to put it another way, if the US were to militarily fold as a result of 50 such missiles hitting them on their home turf then they wouldn't have stood a chance anyway, hypersonic missiles or not.
You (and the article, frankly) are pointing them at the wrong targets: the best application of hypersonics is to shoot them at the US's blue water navy. The combination of perfect, real-time information via synthetic aperture radar and highly maneuverable hypersonics turns an aircraft carrier into an extremely expensive floating coffin.
> The combination of perfect, real-time information via synthetic aperture radar and highly maneuverable hypersonics turns an aircraft carrier into an extremely expensive floating coffin.
For that you need a synthetic aperture radar and a highly maneuverable hypersonic missile. Aircraft carriers are surrounded by other ships and have air wings flying air patrols. If you paint an aircraft carrier with SAR you're likely to eat a couple AAMRAMs or SM-3s.
With a hypersonic missile it needs an explosion big enough to disable a carrier within its CEP radius. The most likely warhead capable of that would be nuclear. So you've just started a nuclear war with the United States.
Good luck finding an airborne SAR platform with a 2000km range. Hypersonic missiles against mobile targets is still a fantasy at this point. Aircraft carriers aren't known to just show up and drop anchor.
> US's blue water navy. (...) hypersonics turns an aircraft carrier
I actually started thinking about the carriers a couple of hours after I had made my comment, which is to say I think that you're of course pretty on point.
Hopefully that danger that you hint to will make the smart people still left in the US Military think twice or thrice when it comes to continuing the aircraft carriers policy, as they've become too big of a target and if the US will need space-based laser guns (or whatever it is that this article proposes) in order to defend them then something is most certainly amiss.
I don't think it is orthogonal. The US can pretty reliably shoot down ICBMs. Not perfectly, but well enough at this point that if in some extreme scenario Russia actually did launch a barrage of nuclear ICBMs, it wouldn't necessarily mean total destruction. If they can defeat the interceptors though, the risk of annihilation is greater. And it does seem smart to me to put significant effort into combating even small risks of annihilation. IE, don't rely on the second strike deterrent alone, as that may not be foolproof. (History shows it's come close before, plus you could imagine scenarios with an unstable and/or suicidal foreign leader with nothing left to lose.)
I mentioned that all that discussion ignored the nuclear dimension, that it is a totally diferent thing (for the sake of the argument/discussion being made).
However, it is not clear that the Russians have working maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicles. If they do, they may be too expensive and rare to actually deploy to the front lines.
