Russian armed forces reportedly launched a hypersonic missile last month at a high-value target during Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. So we’ve seen one of the first uses of much-vaunted hypersonic weapons in a real-world scenario. Is this a big deal?
As far as military value is concerned, the Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missile, launched in March, the answer is probably not. Yet where propaganda and sending a message to potential adversaries in the West are concerned, the answer is probably yes.
Hypersonic missiles travel at speeds exceeding Mach 5, or 2,840 miles per hour. The Russian Kinzhal reportedly travels at Mach 12, or 9,216 miles per hour. That’s a little faster than two and a half miles per second.
The Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile has been deployed since 2017 or 2018, Western intelligence experts believe.
So why use it in the Ukraine invasion? Arguably this use of a hypersonic weapon had at least some military value. The Kinzhal destroyed a large underground warehouse of Ukrainian military missiles and aviation ammunition in the village of Delyatin, Ukraine, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. For a target like that, which at least temporarily could tamp-down Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian attacks, the hypersonic missile might have been a suitable choice.
Hypersonic missiles, in addition to their speed, can maneuver to avoid air defenses. It’s sheer kinetic energy of hitting an underground weapons bunker at close to a thousand miles per hour would inflict devastating damage even with no explosive warhead. Still, a land war is a strange place to see hypersonic weapons — at least for now. In these kinds of military operations, conventional weapons typically are up to the job.
Hypersonic weapons are being designed primarily as anti-ship missiles for high-value targets like aircraft carriers, fleet oilers, and missile cruisers. In a land war, a hypersonic missile would seem to be overkill. Developing a hypersonic weapon isn’t easy. Besides the obvious technological challenges of designing hypersonic propulsion, the successful use of hypersonic requires extremely rugged electronics for guidance and control that can withstand the extremes of shock and vibration from hypersonic missile launch. In addition, a hypersonic weapon traveling through the atmosphere generates tremendous amounts of heat — akin to a spacecraft re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere — so must use electronics that either can be cooled sufficiently or that are specially designed to survive temperature extremes.
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