Bulletins and News Discussion from April 21st to April 27th, 2025 - JD Vance vs Pope Francis, No Items, Final Destination

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net · 7 days ago

Bulletins and News Discussion from April 21st to April 27th, 2025 - JD Vance vs Pope Francis, No Items, Final Destination

MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net · edit-2 16 hours ago

Big news in the announcement of the latest US Military budget plans, in a GOP proposal. It seems that after being on the receiving end of Iranian designed ballistic missiles, and with the rise of ballistic missile proliferation in Russia, China, India, North Korea, Israel, and even Pakistan, and with the death of the INF treaty that previously banned the development of these weapons for the USA and Russia, the US wants advanced Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle (MaRV) equipped ballistic missiles, including Anti Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBMs) and their area denial capabilities, for themselves. The US Army alone wants to spend over 800 million dollars (there are more expenses not in the screenshot) on the development and production of modern ballistic missile systems. This is a historic moment, and admission that these weapons are valuable battlefield assets (which I have been saying for years now), despite the distorted information from the cruise missile lobby. This cruise missile lobby in the US is being reigned in for the first time in over three decades (Pershing-II MaRV equipped ballistic missile was retired in 1991). ASBMs have acted as a very effective area denial weapon for Ansarallah/the Houthis in Yemen against US Navy warships and aircraft carriers, even without landing a single hit. The carriers don’t dare get within ASBM range.

Source, PDF file format

If anyone wants an example of some of the outlandish lies told by the cruise missile lobby in the USA over the past four plus decades, here’s an excerpt from the book “Lighting Bolts - First MaRV”:

excerpt, click here to expand

Our mid-January 1978 meeting with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was less helpful than Mike, Jack or I had hoped. Two subjects were on the agenda: (1) in-flight survivability of Pershing-II versus Tomahawk (GLCM) and (2) distribution of important targets in Warsaw Pact nations. The meeting began with a blunt declaration by a DIA senior analyst, who claimed, "Warsaw Pact radar systems would never see Tomahawk cruise missiles."He declared the radar cross section of the cruise missile, as seen from the forward hemisphere, was under 0.1 square meter (roughly one square foot), similar to the size of a “sparrow.” With no measured data but only analytic estimates, we contended the cross-section of Tomahawk was closer to a few square feet nose on, increased near the beam to over 10 square meters (i.e. about 100 square feet) and reduced somewhat through the rear hemisphere. The wings and tail surfaces would have a large radar cross section, particularly if the missile flexed or vibrated during flight. By contrast, experience with observable signatures of reentry vehicles suggested Pershing-II would have an order of magnitude smaller radar crosssection throughout its reentry trajectory.

This technical disagreement became heated and persisted through the meeting and until the end of the evaluation. DIA personnel insisted Soviet radars would never detect Tomahawk (i.e., even with multiple cross-range radars deployed). They claimed visual and thermal observable signatures would be even less likely to be seen because the cruise missile flew very low (<100-foot altitude) and high velocity (-550 mph).’ Upon return to San Diego, I enlisted Terry G. Smolin to help review the British experience in detecting and defending against 2,300 German V-1 buzz-bomb cruise missiles fired against London between 13 June 1944 and March 1945. British success in finding and intercepting the 25-foot long, 400 mph, V-1s was low in June 1944 but within five weeks of experiencing the threat, they redeployed antiaircraft artillery (AAA), added ground observers, developed aircraft interceptor search-and-attack tactics to engage the missiles. By the end of July 1944, they intercepted 60 percent of the V-is, and by March 1945, over 80 percent of the missiles were prevented from reaching targets.’ We concluded that Tomahawk would eventually be detectable and could be destroyed by advanced defensive systems. However, we noted that Tomahawk demanded a different type of defense than was needed to stop Pershing-II MARV.

Side note, this tracks with reported interception rates in Ukraine. Anywhere from 25-66% for cruise missiles, but only 4% for ballistic missiles. Even though war has changed in many ways since WW2, in some ways it’s still very similar.

As for why the focus worldwide is on MaRV capable ballistic missile systems and not hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), with HGV programmes being cancelled or making up only a small amount of a missile force compared to MaRVs for say China, here’s some required reading: Hypersonic weapons are mediocre. It’s time to stop wasting money on them..

Main problem HGVs have is that their launch is the exact same of that as ballistic missile, a rocket booster straight up into the sky, easily detectable by early warning satellites. However, because HGVs spend a lot more time gliding in the atmosphere with large amounts of drag, they take longer to reach their targets than ballistic missiles, which spend the majority of their flight exoatmospheric. Another problem is that this drag effectively limits HGV maneuverability, even a perfectly performed turn can result in an HGV losing 10% of its energy, on a single turn! Here are some slides from a UK MoD analysis of HGVs, showing just how limited the turn capabilities are. And these calculations are based on an impact velocity of Mach 2, not even close to hypersonic (Mach 5). If the constraint was charged from Mach 2 to Mach 5, the turn/divert capability would be much less! Remember, HGVs have no propulsion system once seperated from the rocket booster, they’re gliders.

Expect future hypersonic weapons development to be focused hypersonic cruise missiles well above Mach 5 like the Russian Zircon (there’s no point in creating a hypersonic cruise missile that’s barely hypersonic, see the US Navy cancellation of the HALO missile), and hypersonic boost vehicles (attaching some sort of rocket motor to the HGV) like Iran’s Fattah-2 concept, to negate the energy loss from pure gliding. I also expect we’ll see some copies of Iran’s Fattah-1 MaRV equipped ballistic missile. The Fattah-1 MaRV was the first MaRV to put a thrust vector control sustainer rocket motor on the MaRV itself, allowing for trajectory changes or corrections while exoatmospheric, and for improved glide phase performance with an additional source of energy.

The fact of the matter is that MaRV equipped ballistic missiles can outperform HGVs in many scenarios (which is why I go on about MaRVs being “game changing” weapons all the time), and even if a MaRV equipped ballistic missile is expensive, HGVs are far more expensive still.

Scarry [comrade/them]@hexbear.net · 9 hours ago

Love your posts, have been following them for a while 🫶

What is the reasoning for HGVs over MaRVs? To me, a layman, the MaRVs seem blatantly superior. Is the reason technological or simply capitalistic greed?

MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net · edit-2 8 hours ago

Flying low keeps the HGV under the engagement envelope of mid course interception systems like Arrow-3, SM-3, and high altitude terminal interception systems like THAAD. These systems have a minimum altitude of anywhere from 40-150km, in that they can’t intercept targets flying lower than that, they’re designed to intercept ballistic missiles in the mid course phase, when they’re exoatmospheric. Flying low also keeps the HGV out of the detection range of ground based early warning radars and even over the horizon radars to a certain extent, thanks to the curvature of the Earth and concepts such as “plasma stealth”. Then there’s also the improved maneuverability, but this comes at a cost to energy every time a maneuver is made. So there are scenarios where HGVs are superior to MaRVs. But does this justify the very high development costs, for these limited scenarios? That’s what the article I linked talks about, are these advantages worth it, especially when they have trade offs.

Losurdo_Enjoyer [he/him]@hexbear.net · 17 hours ago

how long do you think it will take them to successfully pivot?

MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net · edit-2 17 hours ago

There’s still nearly 5 billion allocated for cruise missiles, so they’ll still play a big role. The cruise missile lobby is still very strong, despite being reigned in a bit for the first time in over 30 years. As for hypersonic weapons, the money allocated is similar to that of ballistic missiles (between 800 million to a billion dollars), but it’s all for testing and development, no production costs (unlike ballistic missiles, which include production costs). So it looks like the hype on hypersonic weapons is dying down if they’re just giving them a bunch of research projects with no forseeable move to production in the short term.

As for how long it would take to pivot, the USA is the inventor of the MaRV equipped ballistic missile, the Pershing-II was the world’s first MaRV. The Martin in Lockheed Martin made it. So if the right amount of money is thrown at at it, it shouldn’t take long. The US Space Force for instance calls MaRV equipped ballistic missiles “legacy systems”. That tells me that they think it’ll be relatively easy to get up and running again. That could be hubris though, it’s quite a technical challenge to get these systems operating correctly, it’s literally rocket science.

Losurdo_Enjoyer [he/him]@hexbear.net · 17 hours ago

So if the right amount of money is thrown at at it,

not saying this is the case with respect to the military but i see people say this about reshoring industry when the problem isnt so much money as it is the time needed to regather the expertise needed to train people in industrial matters. how much does the same thing apply to the military, especially tech that they’ve abandoned for decades?

MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net · edit-2 16 hours ago

As for tech that’s been abandoned for decades, the US military’s actually working hypersonic weapons program, in the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon/“Dark Eagle”, fitted with the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body, is based on a 1980s project called SWERE (Sandia Winged Energetic Reentry Vehicle Experiment). SWERVE was/is kind of a hybrid of an HGV and a MaRV, and uses many of the same technologies a MaRV equipped ballistic missile would use. Lockheed Martin has been heavily involved in the manufacturing of it. So technology wise, everything is there to make ballistic missiles and re entry vehicles. The main question, if they actually pass this proposal and get past the initial production phase, is what will the production rates look like. For instance, the US only has 2 400 ATACMS missiles in it’s stockpiles, with half of those being expired. ATACMS entered service 34 years ago. The US only gave 50 ATACMS to Ukraine, with no plans for further deliveries. However, the US plans to replace ATACMS with PrSM, and Lockheed Martin just scored an almost 5 billion dollar contract for PrSM production, an indefinite quantity contract, but realistically between 1000-2000 missiles. The US plans to obtain around 200 PrSM missiles this year. As for the “Dark Eagle”, they only are looking at producing 300 total for now. So I think production numbers for the proposed medium range ballistic missiles will probably be between 300-1000 total, anti ship and land attack variants combined, with a focus on quality over quantity. As for the proposed long range systems in IRBM range, easily less than 100 I’d estimate. These contracts will be worth tens of billions of dollars if this gets off of the ground. Big if though.