New Weapon of Tomorrow’s Battlefield Driven by Hypersonic Velocity

Abstract

Speed is the new stealth and earlier this week America's top nuclear commander described a grim scenario for U.S. forces facing off against hypersonic weapons. "We do not have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us," Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday March 20, 2018. Russian and Chinese are aggressively developing new weapons that travel at Mach 5 or higher, which is at least five times faster than speed of sound (hypersonic). These weapons travel in excess of 3,600 miles per hour (1 mile per second) and currently, no military possesses a credible defense. Finding, tracking and intercepting something that fast is unprecedented. Given that Russia and China have invested heavily in advanced defensive technologies that now hold most of our traditional forms of power projection at risk, this is a significant advantage-it is one that would impose major costs upon a defending nation. Recently, according to the director of the Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (ARCCTO), The Army will field a battery of truck-borne hypersonic missiles in 2023, with a contract award in August, the service's new three-star Program Executive Officer said. The service will also field a battery of 50-kilowatt lasers on Stryker armored vehicles by 2021, he said. A program to put a 100-plus-kilowatt laser on a heavy truck, however, is under review and may be combined with Air Force and/or Navy efforts to reach comparable power levels, Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood told reporters in his interview. In this white paper we are suggesting a new technology as a countermeasure against such an adversary measure and threat that is aggressively being pursued by these two nations, Russia and China both tactically and strategically. We also briefly discuss possible physics and science of aerodynamics involved with these vehicles traveling between range of 5 Mach and higher, where we discuss current status and future direction driven by phenomena of plasma aerodynamics thorough possibly, weakly ionized gases (WIG) program that was started by the former Soviet Republics under AJAX Vehicle and that was direct understanding of the role of plasmas in the performance of this vehicle.