This is the first time I've actually read somebody making that claim. Every other take on this topic has been that defenses against long range missiles are woefully inadequate and easily saturated by a low two digit number of missiles with MIRVs.
The US maintains a rather small inventory of interceptors because for the past few decades only small strikes by rogue nations or accidental launches by major powers have been considered likely threats, and a large number of interceptors jeopardizes mutually assured destruction, which has been a much more cost effective counter against large scale nuclear exchanges. But there's nothing saying the US needs to stick to the current number if the global geopolitical situation changes.
There's a lot more it to than that. These systems are not only absurdly expensive (Patriots [1] costs about $1 billion for the system, and $4 million for a missile - probably more nowadays on both accounts), but also entail extensive training, operational, repair, and general logistic issues. A single Patriot requires a skilled crew of ~90 to operate with a peak theoretic range of < 100 miles.
And the systems are not invincible. When Russia either damaged or destroyed one recently in Ukraine, it seems they did the most obvious strategy and simply drained its battery (which seemed to hold ~32 missiles) before going after the system itself. Finally I'd also add in manufacturing and other issues. The manufacturing of alot of these systems has major practical raw material constraints (to say nothing of the manufacturing itself) when you talk about doing things at truly large scale.
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That said, I agree this idea sounds more like a MIC money grab than anything else. You'd need a ridiculous number of these systems to provide sufficient coverage, it'd entail completely scrapping the Outer Space Treaty creating an overt weaponization race, and also create some really juicy targets for relatively cheap anti-satellite missile systems. The reality is that there is no such thing as a perfect defense because it's just so much easier, and cheaper, to create a +1 version of offense, in the scenario of a peer to peer battle.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/disastrous-us-approach-stra...
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-missile-defense/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/30/15713966/ballistic-missil...
https://www.extremetech.com/defense/182175-the-united-states...
https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/05/28/pentagon-hit...
https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/08/21/dod-tanks-re...
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-10/news/pentagon-seeks-...
https://missilethreat.csis.org/a-new-generation-of-homeland-...
It is assumed right now that the threat from Russia and China is met by the concept of mutually assured destruction, as neither Russia or China have a vast quantity of missile interceptors that could be truly relied upon to destroy hundreds of incoming US missiles. And the fact that US missiles can come from almost anywhere via submarine launch platforms.
Except it costs many times more to make an anti-ballistic-missile interceptor then the original ballistic missile.
There's a fundamental asymmetry here, because interceptors have to be extremely high performance to be useful but the launching missiles can be as cheap as possible as long as it can throw enough penetration aids into the approximate trajectory.
So regardless of how much is spent on such a program, any country could spend a small fraction to fully defeat it, maybe as little as 10%.
Attackers can choose where to attack. Defenders have to defend every city. For example, THAAD can protect about a 200km radius, so for every ICBM and SLBM, you need to add an additional missile to EVERY one of hundreds of sites.
They also need to all be kept ready at all times, replaced periodically etc.
That's ballistic warheads, add any maneuvering re-entry capability and ABM defences are complete joke. Luckily for the humanity, MAD is alive and well.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/ruaf-glide-bombs-u...
For example, using gliding bombs rather then missiles or dropping dumb bombs from overhead.
https://veteransbreakfastclub.org/scuds-vs-patriots-desert-s...
The North Korea case shows that the step from having one missile to having 100 is extremely short compared to going from having no missiles to having one missile.
A baseball analogy, an excellent, best in the world baseball batter will hit 4 out of every ten balls thrown at him. that is still an awful lot of balls that get through.
For real world numbers note how well Israel does against all the ballistic missiles thrown at them, also note that these are slow short range ballistic missiles.
They're artillery rockets [1][2]. Not maneuverable to my knowledge, but continuously (and noisily) accelerating.
> baseball batter will hit 4 out of every ten balls thrown at him
if you're talking about batting .400, that's 4 per 10 "at-bats", where each at-bat will on average consist of a multiple of balls thrown.
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Not that it means that what he says is necessarily untrue but you have to take it with a huge grain of salt. While definitely a subject expert, Tony Brunoula is approximately as far from a neutral party as one can be on this question.
[1] IIRC Ukrainians and US say there were 29 incoming missiles; Russians say there were 6 or may be 9 (unsure). Both numbers are probably made up, and truth is probably in the middle, 12 to 18 or so.
It also shot down Russian hypersonic missiles [1]. I don't know which variant [2] we sent Kyiv, but this is almost certainly an old PATRIOT battery taking out "cutting edge" Russian hypersonics.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/air-defence-systems-rep...
[2] https://www.armyrecognition.com/united_states_american_missi...
- The Patriot system is modular, there are pictures of the different parts on Wikipedia[0]. When Russia says they've destroyed a Patriot, what exactly have they hit? The radar? A launcher? Hitting one component of the system is not exactly the same as destroying the whole thing.
- Decoys are used during these attacks. Both Russia[1] and Ukraine[2] use them. Even if no one lies, I assume that the number of targets seen by the defenders will always be higher than the number of missiles launched.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/us/russia-ukraine-weapons...
This phrasing suggests that the only objective that Patriot had was to defend itself, which it failed. However, Patriot system in question was also tasked with defending a lot of critical objects in Kiyv, all of which have not been hit.
Any system can be saturated and overrun. To make an honest assessment, we need to know exactly how many Patriot systems were on the ground, and how many targets were they tasked to protect.
Its clearly a mostly unuseable trade chip of buying projected security for buying weapon exports. Which is okay, but for actual protection, look towards countries who actually use the equipment they have regularly in a warzone against a opponent similar to the expected opponent. Israel, turkey, other middle eastern countries, lots of african and some south american countries come to mind.
Everything else is.. a mixed bag
The key missing information here seems to be how many of these satellites would be required to have constant coverage of likely trajectories. This depends on the distance at which the laser remains effective. There would be no atmospheric scattering, but beam collimation is never perfect. It also depends on how fast the satellite can fire a new shot, as any warhead will be surrounded by decoys and other penetration aids. If this requires a large number of satellites, I am very sceptical. While Starlink has shown the possibility of creating large constellations, these sats would surely be much larger and more expensive. Really, Starlink makes me think something like BRILLIANT PEBBLES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) would be a more reasonable alternative.
Also, could an adversary surround the warhead with absorbent chaff as a countermeasure? Or simply an ablative shield, the warhead needs one anyway to get through the atmosphere.
Still, a very interesting read from a very interesting CEO.
From a layman's perspective, it seems like maybe DEWs should be looking at disrupting the extraordinarily delicate aerodynamics/hydrodynamics/plasmadynamics(?) of maneuvering Mach 5+ targets in atmosphere. Why do I say that? Well, if these things get consistent asymmetry in any part of their forward shock they'll spin themselves into bits, that's one. You can't shield the air with ablatives, that's second. Also, third, the sheath might be part of the communication/guidance system, so disrupting that it is good. Finally - somewhat related to second - tuning DEWs to interact with a plasma has TONS of possibilities, which helps to mitigate DEW's many many weaknesses over longer ranges. For the most part, I think DEWs will be short range wunderwaffen - particularly on the defensive end - but there's going to be niche cases.
Let's say raw energy content is 32MJ/L, and we have gasoline=>electricity losses of 50% and laser efficiency of 30%, so we expect a little more than 5MJ per shot.
If you can hit a 2m target moving at 5Km/s through 1000Km of space and atmosphere with 5MJ, how much energy can you put on a 1m target moving at 7m/s at a range of 500Km?
The difficulty in killing people from space will be targeting, and the limited availability of fuel and oxidator in space.
And don’t forget—-you have to fly up Tory Bruno each time to fire it.
But as a platform for assassination, it doesn’t seem so far fetched. The two main things I can think of that would make it difficult would be the much higher attenuation and scattering from the atmosphere, and the need for a different (telescope based?) target acquisition method.
Sending up a space laser seems particilarly absurd when one could send up 100(?) drone interceptors for the same cost with less R&D, especially when a drone constellation is far more resilient against anti satellite weapons.
And one way to avoid this is the other part of the hypersonic renaissance, which is the ability to dip down into the atmosphere.
It's incredible that 40 years after Reagan and the "Star Wars" defense plan, we finally have entities doing what seemed obvious even to high-schoolers at the time: just make the missiles zig-zag.
Kind of by definition if something is -sonic then it's in the atmosphere. There would be less scattering but there would definitely be some on the target end.
The gliders seem to spend the entirety of their trip in the upper atmosphere, though.
That would require a constant stream of chaff (it would get left behind pretty quickly without any thrust), and would need to be shot out in the opposite direction of travel (lowering the missile speed the entire time), and require the chaff and its launch mechanism to be part of the payload (increasing weight).
The easiest way for North Korea to nuke Tokyo is to just put the bomb on a legitimate seeming boat, and sail it over.
Maybe the boat will get through; maybe it won't. The ship might be intercepted before it reaches the target. Or security personnel with geiger counters can find it on the dock. And so on. From North Korea's perspective (or the USSR's during the Cold War, or Russia or China now), the uncertainty of the success of such an attack makes it very, very risky to actually deploy, except maybe in a situation where you're already losing the war (and in that scenario, the odds of a successful detection by the target are obviously that much higher).
A ballistic missile, by contrast, cannot be stopped except with great, great difficulty. That's why North Korea has built missiles for its nukes, and not a fleet of cargo ships and fishing boats.
But the main thing you want nuke for is as a deterrent. Get in a fight with us and we press the button. It's hard to imagine the sneaky boat trick working when North Korea is under blockade by the entire US and Japanese navies. And even if they run the blockade they're going to have trouble getting close to Tokyo.
Elon needs to talk less about peace with Russia and more about deploying weapon systems. He can make enough money from it to retire on Mars.
And just some rando with the closest to the original raw video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjxX2gqdlkQ
Objectively as possible it looks like ~30 Patriot missiles were fired (plausibly the whole 32 missile battery). The production rate of these by Lockheed Martin is 500 missiles, annual. Up to 550/year starting this year. They're apparently attempting to intercept somewhere between 2-6 Kinzhals fired, and it appears 1-2 of those Kinzhals (i.e. between 15-100%) got through and struck the Patriot battery and at least damaged it. That's around 3 weeks total annual production of Patriot missiles fired in 2 minutes at a handful of targets with at best partial success.
So it's both correct that Kinzhal is really just an air-launched SRBM not a hypersonic glide weapon, and that our existing missile defense looks at best barely capable of partially defending against very limited numbers of conventional SRBM.
Everyone else however can see them just fine.
So they might be able to maneuver (normal ballistic missiles can usually do last minute maneuvering too!), but without data it’s blind.
Maybe useful if already programmed with a decent random walk, but it doesn’t help it actively avoid something coming for it, and it doesn’t let it aim for moving targets that can adjust course.
Slower stuff doesn’t have this issue, but is of course slower.
This is the same reason why supercavitating torpedos seem really cool on paper, but are not actually all that useful or scary (unless nuclear tipped). Unless the blast radius is huge or the target is fundamentally fixed (a large building), you can just… move out of the way.
No, hypersonics are a legitimate new development, Russia just deceptively brands some of its low-tech arsenal.
Why ignore all of the article? If a hypersonic missile can be intercepted by a Patriot, then it stands to reason it wasn't truly maneuverable, i.e. it was ballistic!
People without clearances, working on a domain that is tangential but not the domain itself are probably more reliable, as they don't know truths that cannot be told, but they know enough to make informed guesses.
I take this article as informative but only for the general idea. The part about which country has what capabilities, I give absolutely no credence.
It’s a good article. But the reality is that the Russian missiles making headlines don’t meet the specs of the article. Ukraine is shooting them down just fine using decades old technology.
All we have in the footage to go on is a flash. No indication of what kind or how much damage was done in it.
The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (in Russian: Х-47М2 Кинжал, "Dagger", NATO reporting name Killjoy) is a Russian hypersonic air-launched ballistic missile
But since I didn't know the author, it took me to the last paragraph and his signature to notice he's actually trying to sell us on the idea of putting actual Death Ray satellites in space.
That's kind of cool too, but I'm sure it's a very bad idea to combine worldwide surveillance and killer lasers in space.
Military solid state lasers are finally getting powerful enough to be useful. Below 100KW, they weren't effective enough, and it took decades to get the power up. Northrop-Grumman delivered a 150KW laser to the Navy in 2021. Lockheed-Martin delivered a 300KW demo unit last year.[1] These are ground or sea based. Israel's Iron Beam system tried lasers, but below 100KW, and only useful against small rockets and drones. Since that's what their opposition shoots at them, it's useful.
Space-based lasers have lots of problems, from cooling to being big targets themselves. But they're a much less silly idea than they were in the 1980s.
We may be seeing the biggest reversal in war since late WWI - defense may be stronger than offense again. Historically, this has gone back and forth. In the era of castles, defense was stronger. Then came artillery. WWI started out with defense being stronger - nobody could advance against machine guns. Then came tanks and the beginnings of air power. Offense has usually been stronger since then. Now we're entering an era where nobody has air superiority. There's a mostly empty sky. If it flies, it dies. On the ground, tanks are now very vulnerable to man-portable weapons.
When defense is stronger, wars lead to bloody stalemates, like Ukraine. Nobody can force a decision. Battles are long, bloody and destructive. The winning side gets to own the ruins.
[1] https://newatlas.com/military/lockheed-martin-delivers-recor...
The danger here is everyone filling space with satellites as a means of defense. When the war starts, Kessler Syndrome kicks in, and everyone loses their defenses in a few days.
Ground based lasers may have less range, etc, but they can be hardened, protected, even hidden.
Imho, we'll see a day where every major city on the planet has a set of anti missile lasers.
Pretty sure once you’ve got that 300kW space laser up there someone is going to find an offensive use for it.
Mainstream discussion so far limited to the tactic/operation layer in farflung battle fields. More pertinent is strategic layer where this desperate race for ABM is due to offensive rocketry / long range conventional strikes is increasingly openning up CONUS for attack. Which is the biggest reversal against US primacy since Revolutionary war. US homefront being ground to existential halt because ABM can't prevent adversaries from blowing up US refineries will place vast constraints on US willingness to defend interests abroad. When homelands are mutually vunerable - something US hasn't had to factor into calculations - it becomes much harder for US specifically to unilaterally force decisions, something it would otherwise do with relative impunity when adversaries could not disrupt CONUS.
The article seems to talk about strategic hypersonic but I’ve mostly read about them for attacking ships and bases that are likely to have defenses. Ground point defenses might be cheaper than space constellation.
I think lasers have potential to change warfare. For example, naval warfare gets really weird if lasers can shoot down missiles and maybe even shells. Do they use torpedos?
This is also an essential component of a planetary asteroid defence system.
One could theoretically tune the power and wavelength of the beam such that it's highly destructive in space and the upper atmosphere, but mostly a nuisance on the ground.
See the movie "Real Genious" and have some popcorn.
It failed to reach orbit due to a faulty gimbal or gyroscope.
p.s. there's a joke in there for Marjorie Taylor Greene...
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.
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 (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.
50 nuclear or thermonuclear warheads? Quite a lot, actually.
I think this article has somewhat fallen into the imagined capabilities trap that US arms manufacturers were constantly in during the Cold War. They would see Soviet propaganda about their new invincible weapons system and do some math on what it would take to make it work and then try to design systems to counter that paper exercise. Then they get a sample of the real thing and it turns out the Soviets were outright lying about the capabilities and the counter they developed is ridiculous overkill.
Ukraine downs Russian hypersonic missile with US Patriot
Not saying its necessarily wrong now, but it was definitely very expensively wrong the last time.
Yes there are differences, but science and technology have moved on substantially. Just because it was wrong the last time does not mean it is going to be wrong this time.
Yeah, but (1) that’s orders of magnitude less than SDI, and (2) it actually did the thing.
(But yes, SDI had almost no chance of working at the time.)
I assume we're talking about either battery+solar cell or nuclear power on those satellites?
Also even on land with the diesel generator, I assume the generator is charging up batteries or super capacitors and not hooked up directly to the laser. Estimating a ~30 second laser discharge, only the most gigantic diesel generators can convert a gallon of diesel to electricity in half a minute.
Sure, but surely there will be a maximum total power storage that a satellite will have, and if that totals, say, 50 missile zaps, them don't you have the same problem that the enemy could send 51?
When 51 missiles are on their way, you don't have time to recharge from the sun.
And unlike the diesel generator you can't quickly add more power storage the week before when you see what the enemy is about to do.
That's not how it would be in a war. Their usage would be exactly zero, and then basically continuous. Not bursty at all - more like off, and then full on.
Energy for the space weapon would be a large problem.
> only the most gigantic diesel generators can convert a gallon of diesel to electricity in half a minute.
That's what they use - the generator is the size of an 18 wheeler.
Does anyone know why this is the case? Do mirrored surfaces trigger some sort of internal reflection which ends up absorbing more energy?
The SR71 was famously painted black as a mitigation for surface heating issues because the black paint conducted heat away from the areas the were really susceptible to ram-heating.
Perhaps reflective surfaces reflect some percentage of the incoming energy away, but thermally conductive surfaces conduct a larger percentage of that energy away and are able to safely sink it into some thermal mass.
I expect the counter will be more along the lines of having sufficient ablating material to block the laser - a small amount of extra armour probably has an outsize affect on survivability.
> Could platforms defend themselves? What if the warhead or missile was spinning, etc.? All those questions were answered. The only real barrier at the time was generating very high laser power levels in a way that was logistically practical in the field.
"When we were developing this technology in earnest for missile defense 15 years ago, there were many theories about how it could be defeated. People thought that mirrored surfaces might just reflect the beam. It turned out that reflective surfaces are actually more vulnerable. Would the range be far enough? Maybe the atmosphere would scatter the beam too much? Could platforms defend themselves? What if the warhead or missile was spinning, etc.? All those questions were answered. The only real barrier at the time was generating very high laser power levels in a way that was logistically practical in the field."
It addresses a lot of the same topics as this Medium article.
My grandfather helped design several missile systems and held patents on radar interferometry, he claimed repeatedly that laser systems would never work practically because all the enemy had to do was wait for a rainy or misty day.
He claimed the power requirements for DE skyrocketed to unrealistic levels almost immediately once you had to pierce water vapor.
The speed of light isn't infinite. Between a satellite seeing the latest maneuver, sending data to a ground station, and a laser burst reaching its target, you've got at least 20 ms and quite likely as much as 100 ms. For a 1 G maneuver that's still going to get you within 10 cm of your target, which is just fine; but a 10 G maneuver could make you miss entirely.
A larger advantage of lasers is probably the opportunity for multiple shots: If you miss with a kinetic interceptor, it's too late to launch another, but if your laser misses you'll know in a matter of seconds and you can try again as soon as your capacitors are recharged.
"If you think hypersonic is fast, that’s nothing compared to the speed of light."
For intercepting swarms of cheap drones? It's a great fit! Space-based lasers for intercepting ICBMs? Maybe? But true hypersonic weapons (which Kinzhal is not) fly only in air (after all, they use oxygen in it to fly), while being covered in a plasma shield which is really good at absorbing all kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
Meanwhile, with high enough laser power you get instabilities in air which act as a natural diverging lens for your beam, drastically reducing effective range of your system. Push power even further to compensate for it and you will get plasma, which does even better job at dispersing energy of your beam. So in the end, you get a very short range interception system with a minuscule time frame to perform interception of a hypersonic target.
> For this thesis, an atmospheric propagation code named ANCHOR (Atmospheric NPS Code for High Energy Laser Optical pRopagation) was developed and utilized to study the propagation of high energy lasers in various atmospheric conditions and for numerous laser configurations. The ANCHOR code accesses existing industry databases to obtain relevant optical properties for various atmospheres and then uses scaling laws to simulate laser propagation through the defined environments. ANCHOR accounts for the effects of atmospheric diffraction, turbulence, platform jitter and thermal blooming on the laser beam, and outputs on-target irradiance and power-in-the-bucket profiles for a wide range of laser wavelengths. Several known physical trends associated with laser propagation will be reproduced, and the results will be compared to the industry accepted propagation code Wavetrain. The results of ANCHOR studies will indicate that the 100 kW-class high energy laser can effectively engage slow-moving targets at ranges greater than five kilometers in clear weather by delivering enough energy to melt 0.1 liters of one millimeter-thick aluminum aircraft skin in five seconds. For hazy, turbulent, and rainy conditions, the laser can effectively engage targets from ranges closer than three kilometers, but reasonable dwell times are only achieved for ranges closer than two kilometers.
“Development of orbital weaponry was largely halted after the entry into force of the Outer Space Treaty and the SALT II treaty. These agreements prohibit weapons of mass destruction from being placed in space. As other weapons exist, notably those using kinetic bombardment, that would not violate these treaties, some private groups and government officials have proposed a Space Preservation Treaty which would ban the placement of any weaponry in outer space.”
Hence ULA CEO proposing giant space lasers™ which obviously will not be defense only in the long run. The same way the US "defense industry" has never defended.
And who is going to stop the Chinese from putting weapons into orbit? Heck they might've done it already and we'd be none the wiser.
A laser being able to destroy a low flying high speed missile hardend against those is probably also able to a lot more. Like destroy enemy planes. Or combatants. Or heads of states. Or pesky journalists/dissidents.
Allowing sth like this to be deployed, not sure if this can be allowed by eg other nation states. It certainly puts the status quo in disarray...
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
The author is otherwise correct: you can almost pinpoint the target soon after launch of a ballistic missile because of the way trajectories work. Ballistic missles go through three phases: launch, flight and re-entry. Modern ICBMs have a re-entry velocity as high as 7km/s (Mach ~20). Intercepts at that speed have, to my knowledge, an extremely poor record.
Another factor is that ICBMs can (and do) carry multiple warheads. These will separate at different points in the flight phase or re-entry phase to hit different targets. Detecting multiple warheads isn't necessarily easy either because they're unlikely to have the visible plume of a full-blown rocket engine and it's at such a distance that radar signature probably isn't sufficient to detect the warhead let alone plot the target sufficiently accurately for a kill vehicle to hit it.
The author is otherwise correct in that the real advantage of hypersonic missiles is targeting. The speed (Mach 5-10) makes intercept difficult and you won't know the target until it hits it really so good luck intercepting that.
Maybe top secret THAAD development has improved to the point where it can reliabily intercept ICBM warheads at scale but I'll believe it when I see it. Most ICBM defense relies on hitting the launch vehicle in the boost phase because that's when it's the slowest.
But wouldn't an attacker then first take out the DE satellite, and only after launch the missile?
Why is this? Definitely counterintuitive.
The author is with ULA, and is competing with Elon Musk's Starshield-- which if you read the various leaks (see Michael D. Griffin) it's pretty clear will be some sort of Brilliant Pebbles system. Biden has been snubbing Elon on this. I suspect it's one reason he has turned starkly political and we are now seeing Reagan Republicans announce there candidacy on Twitter.
But speed at that level is basically irrelevant for interception etc.
Other people use Hypersonic to mean able to manoeuvre at those speeds. A normal ICBM, especially the old ones, cannot do that. They follow a simple, predictable, course to their targets. In theory that makes it easier to hit them. Only no one can do that. People have done a respectable job of shooting down non-ICBMs. But ICBMs are 10-100 times faster, further away, higher, etc. And no one will use 1, they will use 1000 and it is dooms day unless you intercept 990 of those.
So all of this is really just a mix of honest ignorance (and confusing terms) and dishonest sensationalism...
The point of a hypersonic missile is to NOT follow a simple parabolic curve to the target. That is what hypersonic really means: able to manoeuvre at speeds about the speed of sound. That makes it harder to intercept. Only no one can intercept an ICBM anyway.
Interestingly this is why the first Hypersonic missile was actually build in the 1930s...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1sSy39CuU
Now it is not misunderstood anymore, in fact, it understands you more than you know.
Would be cool if we get to the point where we can ionise a very narrow column of air and then use it to deliver an electrical arc as directed artificial lightning! A la Loki's LIP-C: "Brian Gragg kicked his chair away and stood up from the gaming workstation. As the blinded strike team members writhed on the floor, crying out, Gragg moved calmly toward the burly team leader who had shouted at him. Gragg aimed a silver-capped index finger at the man—a lens at its very tip. Black fiber optic and electrical cables ran down the back of Gragg’s hand like veins, disappearing beneath his shirt. “The name is Loki, asshole.” A ruler-straight bolt of electricity cracked like a bullwhip from his fingertip into the man’s body armor, followed by a flickering series of bolts in quick succession—three a second. The team leader’s muscles jerked with each thunderclap. The smell of ozone filled the air." (Daniel Suarez)
The threat is very simple: I can hit any target you care about and there's nothing you can do about it. The flip side is that you only have a limited amount of these missiles and once they run out, the threat goes away. So the trick is to use enough of them to make the threat credible but keep around the remaining rockets to keep the threat credible to minimize loss of resources. That makes them more effective as a defensive weapon than as an offensive weapon.
A lot of modern wars are asymmetric where a technically advanced party with superior resources is worn down by a relatively unsophisticated enemy over time. Consider for example the British, Russian and US attempts to conquer Afghanistan. They each failed. The fallacy here is that committing a lot of resources is expensive and not long term sustainable economically. Once the will to continue fighting evaporates, you basically lose the fight. All the other side has to do is keep on fighting.
I do think that some of the Russian upper echelon actually believed what they were touting, but in a military environment where being a "yes man" serves you better (both for your career and possibly to avoid jail/punishment), you often exaggerate capabilities to get ahead, or just lie about current status which we're seeing play out in Ukraine.
The US also just avoided such tech in the past because it's so expensive, and stealth has just been better. That might change soon, but overwhelming with hundreds of missiles (and decoys) is currently much cheaper and more effective than using what the US would actually define as a "hypersonic missile." You could fire 50-100 missiles for the price of one true "hypersonic" one, and what if that missile fails? You just wasted $80M-$100M for nothing. Meanwhile a cruise/normal missile costs $1.5-5M. The US will eventually have them in their arsenal, but they will mostly never be used.