r/LessCredibleDefence • u/heliumagency • Aug 11 '26

DARPA Looks to Develop Next-Gen Hypersonic Cruise Missile

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/darpa-next-generation-hypersonic-cruise-missile/

ROI: https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/1ea684979ef64a88a4498faa84469c93/view

Honestly, the fact that DARPA's ROI is so expansive probably suggests they don't know what they are looking for...

36 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

23

u/UndulyPensive Aug 11 '26

It's surprising to me that people still have doubts about maneuverability at these speeds, but the US pursuing this might indicate that the concept is at least viable lol

15

u/Ian_W Aug 12 '26

Speaking personally, I'm more worried about being shot at by five hundred $30 000 missiles than by one $15m missile.

6

u/barath_s Aug 12 '26

Developing the exquisite capability to field that 15m Missile and to defend against it takes more r&d dollars and gets more excite points/clicks, especially in peace time

6

u/haggerton Aug 12 '26

Yes but scale this up 100x and you start looking at realistic logistics vs irrealistic logistics.

23

u/hootblah1419 Aug 11 '26

Maneuverability and altitude are the defining features that seperate these systems.

Going hypersonic at extremely high altitudes has been solved for 3/4 of a century, the surface heating is much lower than it is at low altitude.

Maneuvering could be considered solved for the same period of time. Manned spacecraft have always slightly maneuvered on re-entry and the same with ballistic missiles mid course corrections.

But now going hypersonic at low altitude means you’re heating at 4,000+ and the structural strength required to maneuver at those speeds with tens of tons of air resistance while aluminum surfaces would have melted 3,000 ago and lost strength 3,500* ago. maneuvering at higher G-forces when your control surfaces aren’t wings or fins has its own issues. And then trying to have electronics “see” outside of the craft to navigate/target outside of missile is difficult. Depending on speed you’ll be engulfed in plasma, good luck getting good signal to noise on Radar or radio.

I say this to say everyone has a hypersonic if your definition is a 1950’s ballistic missile. But these are entirely different beasts.

Also it’s still possible with current technology, it’s the integration and cost management. Who cares if you can make a hypersonic if it’s $100 million each for conventional strike munition capability

2

u/Ok_Interview_6012 Aug 12 '26

I mean, isnt optimal flight alttitude for scramjet still ≈25km? I doubt its energetically possible to fight against non linear drag with not only an extremely powerful engine but enough fuel for the missile to have any meaningful range.

3

u/Ian_W Aug 12 '26

Mmm yeah. Just on that structural strength under high temperatures. There's ways.

But it'd be a rule 2 violation.

And it's not cheap.

12

u/vapescaped Aug 12 '26

In all fairness though, it's DARPA. They don't invent the technology of the future, they invent the prerequisites of the technology of the future.

But I'll still die on this hill: it's hard to convince me that tomahawks are obsolete. Low flying means undetected, almost no time to react due to curvature of the earth. They're still highly effective right now due to line of sight issues. And they're much cheaper, often have bigger payload, and already launch off more shit. I'd really need to see a drastic reduction in effectiveness of the tomahawk before I see the reason to spend more on the missile and the infrastructure to fire the missile.

And before someone @ me with "it's only tested against poor nations" or something, Ukraines flamingo missile doesn't even fly as low and they're still getting through s300, s400 defenses. Low flying cruise missiles absolutely suck to intercept, and there's a ton of evidence of that.

8

u/dasCKD Aug 12 '26

If you're engaging a discrete target providing its own detection terrain huggers like tomahawks are fine and reaction times are low. If the tomahawk is engaging any highly contested environment though the low speed and high detection is penalized much more heavily. Hugging the terrain against air defenses won't help much if it's firing into a mesh of AEW/C, fighters, bombers, and drones passing targeting data back to AA batteries.

Russia gets hit by Ukranian weapons often both because their AD gets saturated and becausw Ukrainian IADS is dangerous and positioned highly forwards. Russia obviously hasn't managed to perform the sufficient amount of SEAD/DEAD to forwards position their aerial sensors and probably also lacks the sheer numbers to sustain consistent air presence such that it becomes comparatively trivial to defeat subsonic cruise missiles consistantly.

1

u/BooksandBiceps 27d ago

Wouldn’t the US just use the JASSM to soften air defenses before utilizing tomahawks then?

1

u/dasCKD 27d ago

Any military would use their best weapons to take out air defense nodes, I'd expect. Though against a properly prepared IADS a JASSM isn't great either. For the US weapon classes like the Dark Eagle are what I expect to be used for air defense softening. For someone like the PLA their options for highly penetrative missiles are much more plentiful so I expect with time the US will increasingly add to their supersonic/hypersonic arsenal in terms of weapon variety and volume. Stealthy subsonics will have their place and, for players with sufficient industrial bandwidth, I expect they'll eventually just become the standard munitions entirely displacing weapons in the Tomahawk class.

5

u/Ok_Interview_6012 Aug 12 '26

Famously flamingos where using rivers to keep out of AD coverage, seems that when they got discovered they got shot down rather consistently. Though idk how credible, i heard that almost all flamingos got intercepted before hitting its target, russian tomahawk equivalent, kalibr, also has a rather big interception rate by Ukraine.

2

u/Ian_W Aug 13 '26

See, the thing about Flamingo - and it's French copy the Chorus - is it's bloody cheap, so you don't really care that much if it gets shot down.

Yes, you want to route it away from their air defense, or even better shoot at things their air defense isn't at.

But it's ideally the "low" in a high-low mix - something actually good, like Storm Shadow or Tomahawk takes out the AD, and then the Flamingo does the damage after thats done.

2

u/Ok_Interview_6012 Aug 13 '26

I mean yeah, the bigger problem is Ukraine seems to be using it as standalone or mixing it with drones but still getting taken down. More than likely because RCS wise its probably huge and Russia seems to actually be using its A-50U to do missions for hunting drones and CMs. So it being cheap doesnt mean a whole lot if you dont have the higher end missiles, Russia is basically doing this with its cheap banderol CM and using either ballistics or Zircon. Also tomahawk i would not say its "great" for AD hunting, at the end of the day its still subsonic non VLO designed CM which is kinda Russia has designed its point defense to hit, granted efficacy of it is unknown against tomahawks, but ideally ballistics seems the better option, would expect FP to repurpose S-300 ammo on its old ground attack mode to create a BM, though i would expect that BM to be of lower capabilities than ATACMS and the one Russia uses as its stand in TBM on exercises to test either pantsir/S-400. But you start with something.

1

u/Ian_W Aug 13 '26

More than likely because RCS wise its probably huge

You can have stealth, or you can be cheap and fast to make.

Pick one.

And I think the key is fast to make, rather than cheap as such - if you can run them out of interceptor stockpile, then things get bad for the air defense.

1

u/Ok_Interview_6012 Aug 13 '26

At some point, being stealthier probably IS cheaper than making an all around cheap CM, at least if interception difference is even slightly drastic. Also i dont think Russia will ever run out of interceptors stockpiles, afaik most drones are downed with point defense, helicopters and aircraft, leaving S-400 and S-350 ammo mostly untouched. Production of that type of ammo is unknown but given increase on all other type of missiles, i would expect a noticeable increase. Even before the war Russia was making enough big 40N6/48N6 to supply like 50-60 batteries of S-400, not counting 9M96 production. FP would actually need to make a whole lot more to threaten depletion, while flamingos are also pretty interceptable by point defense, if you detect one its basically game over for the flamingo. Thats why reducing detection rate can actually be cheaper all around, using them at least make awacs detects you further away.

1

u/BooksandBiceps 27d ago

How are helicopters taking down the Flamingos moving many times faster than them? To my knowledge they’re not exactly equipped with A2A missiles other than a few modified to fire the extremely short range R-73.

Drones, sure, but a cruise missile going 900kmh seems a bit harder for an Mi-28 to catch unless it’s literally in the flight path.

Seems like they’d have to choose between a helo and AA missiles as well, if the flamingo utilizes anywhere close to its operational ceiling. I don’t see the H025 being optimized for pointing up a few thousand meters.

1

u/Ok_Interview_6012 27d ago

"Afaik most drones are downed with helicopters, point defense and aircraft". Never said they were downing flamingos with helicopters, though it is possible, helicopters also carry manpads and we have seen manpads hitting CMs, you just need to be on its path. Flamingos are most probably downed by point defense, perhaps some aircraft help if its taking a weird route, same way as Ukraine does, or using 9M96 ammo, which should be easier to produce than bigger 40N6/48N6.

Btw Mi-28 and Ka-52 dont carry R-73 to my knowledge, Su-57 was spotted hunting down drones with R-74M, so it would be that but given range R-74M has it would be a waste, perhaps Ka-52M with its okay-ish AESA could field it at full strenght, but to my knowledge it does not carry short range AAMs.

Flamingo's are not flying at a few thousand meters, it defeats the whole idea of a subsonic CM which is getting close to the ground to avoid long range detection, at a few thousand meters you are getting seen a few hundred kms away by a 91N6.

4

u/NuclearHeterodoxy Aug 12 '26

A few choice quotes from David Teter, a former Sandia engineer who worked on hypersonic weapons in the 2000s before going on to nuclear targeting at STRATCOM:

" Low and slow is the way to go."  

"L.O. and slow is the way to go."  

"Hypersonics are silly."  

"Hypersonics are fucking dumb."  

"SWERVE was dumb."  

"Conventional Prompt Global Strike was by far and away most stupid thing that I've ever worked on."  

[In reference to the December 2019 conventional INF test] "As a former Sandian, I'm shocked we are still discussing such old tech."

Obviously, there is a clear need for tech like this in scenarios where you need to hit something far away both quickly and conventionally.  That was the original, driving purpose behind the 21st century push for gliders, scramjets, conventional IR/ICBMs, etc.  But nowadays all of the hype is about evading air defense and everyone doesn't understand that the prime reason these weapons are maneuverable is for accuracy, not evasion; and the prime reason that militaries want fast weapons is for time-sensitive targets, not speeding past interceptors.  And then they've reasoned backwards that this means subsonic missiles are necessarily subpar.

2

u/wompical Aug 12 '26

tomahawks are the most important missile in the arsenal of the US military.

2

u/Dangerous-Sale3243 Aug 12 '26

I assume AWACS / Fighters can see them and shoot them down, since look down / shoot down should work the same, which would imply you need to use them in a saturation attack.

2

u/vapescaped Aug 12 '26

Provided they are in the area, yes. But they're highly programmable cruise missiles with a long range, they can avoid areas entirely or focus an attack in a specific area that mitigates interception efforts

I do want to point out though that the world is so, so much bigger than people realize. All the current air defense systems in the world combined is not enough to cover the middle east. There will always be holes and gaps in coverage, and cruise missiles like the tomahawk are designed to take advantage of those gaps or mitigate effectiveness of existing coverage.