At that speed, IT DOESN’T NEED A WARHEAD!.............
Rods from God
the physics of atmospheric flight prevent these weapons from ever going fast enough to substantially outpace ICBMs, and that it would be relatively easy to detect a hypersonic missile launch with the right satellite.
All this is true. Without propulsion, I dont see how the glider can add anything significant to the missile for range.
Take your average ballistics calculator. A bullet with a ballistic coefficient of 1.0 (which is way better than any bullet I know of) launched at 4600 ft/sec (~mach 6) at 15000' altitude, is already down to ~3400 ft/sec after only 1 nautical mile (2000 yards).
Using a different calculator, at 25000' altitude starting at 5000 ft/sec you are still at only 700 ft/sec after 10000 yards. (5 NM)
The lower you go the greater the drag force. The higher you go, the easier to see and track.
... but it probably needs some sort of integrated targeting & sensor network. The weakness with long-range weapons is always the inaccuracy of your targeting data. The problem with high speed weaponry is that the margin of error is exceedingly small. Miss that last turn in toward the target by a fraction of a degree and you literally miss by miles.