Posted on 10/13/2020 9:29:29 PM PDT by bitt
An Air Force Global Strike Command official has given us an indication of how fast the Air Force’s new Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon will fly.
The U.S. Air Force says the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle warhead in its forthcoming AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon hypersonic missile will fly at an average speed of between 5,000 and 6,000 miles per hour. This would be roughly between Mach 6.5 and Mach 8. At that speed, it will take only 10 to 12 minutes to strike targets 1,000 miles away. Air Force Major General Andrew Gebara, Air Force Global Strike Command’s (AFGSC) Director of Strategic Plans, Programs, and Requirements, disclosed the information in an interview with Air Force Magazine.
Expected to be the first hypersonic weapon to become operational with the U.S. military, the Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon, or ARRW, which is pronounced “arrow,” will be carried by the command’s B-52H strategic bombers.
“This thing is going to be able to go, in 10-12 minutes, almost 1,000 miles,” Gebara said in the interview, which you can read in full here. “It’s amazing.”
This appears to be the first time that the Air Force has officially commented on ARRW’s speed with any specificity. Before now, it was understood that the weapon would be capable of hypersonic speeds, which are simply defined as anything above Mach 5.
To attain hypersonic speeds, the missile consists of a solid-fuel rocket booster, fitted with pop-out tail fins, and an unpowered boost-glide vehicle. After being propelled to a specific speed and altitude atop the rocket booster, the wedge-shaped boost-glide vehicle continues to its target at hypersonic speed.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedrive.com ...
I just replied to a freep mail on this very comment. The Chicoms murdered nearly a quarter of a million Americans with their Wuhanic Plague and got away with it.
I remember horwitzer-based nuclear artillery shells back when I was stationed aim Germany in the last 1980’s. We called them “Special Weapons”. Schwäbisch Gmünd has a battalion...
well 1000 miles in 10 minutes is 6000 mph
in 12 minutes, 5000 mph
so between mach 6.5 and mach 8, roughly
Bye Bye Pyongyang, Peking/Shanghai/Wuhan labs, Teheran, Erdogan, Assad, and other pesky commies, Islamists, and fascists.
Know how large, how heavy a RDS-220 Tsar Bomba would be? Need to loft 30 tons, a 26 foot long by 7 foot diameter cylinder. Could it be made lighter, smaller, less heavy than a six decade old design?
There are other tricks involving two or more smaller devices interacting through a coordinated detonation, toward focusing more energy at a desired location. Or alternatively, a shaped energy distribution of a single detonation.
“However, you also need to take into consideration that China has a HUGE population of single men who will never, ever be married thanks to their one-child policy”. This is not a problem. Chinese men will simply marry women from other countries in Asia. I expect bars in the Philippines are loaded with Chinese men now.
The technology is not new and it wasn’t deployed for the reason of a common sense.
ICBM-based deterrent generally allows a 20-40 minutes to verify false alarms and involves a strict procedure to approve the counter-strike.
With the proliferation of the hypersonic missiles I suspect some expect to get an upper hand in thisbsetup but the reality would be scrapping the existing procedures and shifting the responsibility to O-5s in charge of early warning.
If this insanity is to continue I predict WWIII in a few years max.
Um... were you intending to reply to someone else?
I don’t get the reference to the large yellow house?
Actually, this is just the model A version.
We needed to get this out there quickly. Key capability. Renders several things obsolete. China’s expensive navy to name one. Currently an unstoppable weapon. That is why people twitch so much on any news.
That’s Nancy Pelosi’s mansion in SF.
~10m CEP for a hypersonic missile?
That’s really impressive.
It’s ~10M CEP for an ICBM, actually. Which is a bit more impressive than a Pershing’s 30M, but is accomplished by the general advancement of technology over the intervening 40 years.
Reminiscent of an SR-71 engine with fins.
Which shouldn’t be surprising.
Kelly Johnson was a genius.
Making that turn has to be quite a trick.
< insert video and articles of Dems attacking Reagan for Star Wars missile defense being impossible>
Pretty sure it’s not a particularly sharp turn, yeah, but there’s nobody on board and an awful lot of modern *consumer* electronics can take 30+ G turns with ease. A modern SSD can take a 1500G turn, for example.
We’re not the only one to come up with workable ABM systems,
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Russia has had theirs since the 1960s
Yup. We canned most of ours in the 70s until the current BMD program.
This is their current one around Moscow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_system
Note that their spec for the system was to be able to stop up to 35 Pershing IIs. And given the recent real world performance demonstrations of Russian missiles of all kinds actually doing what they were claimed to be able to do, I suspect this one works as advertised too.
Backpack nukes at Detachment A?
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Some of them where earmarked for use on Det M and some others - gone before the Russians overran them
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