While RUSSIA, China and the United States continue to invest in important projects to develop a hypersonic capacity, which now seems destined to completely change the perception of the time needed to travel long distances, "European countries have not invested sufficiently in hypersonic technological research and they are not present in this historical change, risking to “go out of history”.
This is the authoritative opinion of General PASQUALE PREZIOSA - president of the Eurispes Security Observatory, former Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force, published on Airpress "The real game is on hypersonic capacity"
(by Pasquale Preziosa)
Hypersonic is a great game changer in the new international (dis) order, the effects of which will soon manifest in the three traditional military domains with major changes in military planning, doctrinal and tactical planning for the US, China and Russia. Unfortunately, Europe remains on the sidelines
Imagining the directions that the global order will take in the future is difficult, but considering where we were after World War II and where we have arrived today will help us understand both the order to come and (and that's what matters most) the modality of the change will be peaceful or violent. The future of the global order is anchored in technological advances and the economic power of the great powers, as well as the governance of international relations. Technology has always had great influence not only on the economic power of nations, but also on military strategies, acting as a catalyst in international relations. In the past, nuclear technology applied to armaments and followed by the balance of terror characterized the period of the Cold War.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the high technology linked to the US anti-missile system represented the "tipping point" for the balance of power between the great world powers, effectively reducing the nuclear deterrence capabilities of the adversaries. The development in recent years of the new hypersonic technology, capable of evading the US anti-missile capability (there is no anti-missile system capable of intercepting a hypersonic missile), is accelerating the times of global geostrategic change in favor of the great powers that already have developed and matured the new technology. All fixed and mobile military sites, on land and at sea, equipped with important defense systems and considered effective until the advent of the new technology, are today to be considered vulnerable to hypersonic weapons.
Defense capabilities from hypersonic weapons have not yet been developed and this gives primacy only to countries in possession of such weapons: hypersonic gives states both deterrent and coercive power. With the use of hypersonic means and armaments it is possible to travel enormous spaces in very short times: a speed Mach 10 is equivalent to 12.250 kilometers per hour; the distance between Rome and Moscow in about eleven minutes. Such speeds were previously unimaginable in the atmosphere due to the absence of specific materials resistant to high temperatures and "air breathing" aircraft engines capable of generating thrust beyond Mach 5. The dominance of technology in the hypersonic field has been declared by the Russians and by the Chinese, while the US is now in the phase of recovering the manifest technological gap, which has weakened the second American strategic offset based above all on the sophisticated anti-missile system that had characterized the great Western deterrence of the last decades.
The United States had already launched studies for the third strategic offset in 2014, but China and Russia were faster in reaching technological maturity in the specific sector. President Putin recently claimed that Russia holds the leadership in the hypersonic field; in this regard it presented the new arsenal based on the hypersonic Zircon missile (Mach 9, or up to a thousand kilometers per hour) and the Avangard strategic system (over Mach 20). He also claimed to have contrast media for hypersonic weapons.
Russia was keen to reiterate that it has achieved very high levels of national security, never achieved before. China has already carried out the first tests on hypersonic aircraft in the Gobi desert and has long since completed the tests for the Jiageng 1 aircraft, developed by Xiamen university after ten years of studies and designs.
It has adopted the "waverider" design, similar to the American Boeing X-51 project (Mach 5.1 or 5400 km / h) and last year the Peking University already tested an "I-Plane" for speed in the wind tunnel up to Mach 7. In the United States, Raytheon is developing new hypersonic missiles with the “Hypersonic air-breathing weapon” concept, together with Air Force and DARPA.
European countries have not invested sufficiently in hypersonic technological research and are not present in this historical change, risking to "go out of history". The hypersonic has revitalized the arms race linked to nuclear power, previously slowed down by the US anti-missile system which has now become insufficient for the fight. Not only that: the high speeds involved have made a whole series of structures insufficient, including the current command and control systems based on the Ooda cycle (Observe, orient, decide, act) and the traditional surveillance systems based on fourth grade technology. generation. On the other hand, they enhanced the military observation-reconnaissance linked to the satellite field in orbit Leo and the use of the entire height of the atmosphere up to the Kármán line.
The speeds associated with hypersonic will now characterize the development of new weapon systems to counter the new threat, the reduced predictable reaction times will most likely require the extensive use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and the cloud. The hypersonic is therefore fully involving the two new military domains, namely space and cyber, with an increase in levels of complexity that require more tolerance for taking risks. The new strategic deterrence and the next levels of conflict in symmetrical contexts will be based on the combination of cyber-war, space-war and hypersonic capabilities, where countries with resilient satellite observation capabilities in Leo orbit and able to develop the best algorithms will prevail. in the cyber field to make the most of hypersonic capabilities.