Hypersonic Vehicles - Game Changers for Future Warfare?

Abstract

Hypersonic technologies offer potential solutions and applications that could have a strong impact on doctrine and conduct of future military operations. Different applications are conceivable for hypersonic flight vehicles in order to enable new or advanced military capabilities. Most obvious is the rapid delivery of weapons. Serving the ‘speed is life’ tenet, high speed would allow for rapid regional or global strikes against time critical targets from standoff distances, while keeping the launch platform out of highly contested areas. As adversaries push out the boundaries of contested areas with advanced Anti-Access/Area-Denial (A2/AD) capabilities involving most modern Integrated Air Defence Systems (IADS), hypersonic flight counters the trend and allows greater standoff operations for first strike. In addition, the extreme speed of hypersonic penetrating systems makes kinetic intercept by the adversary very difficult. This essay is based on a presentation given on behalf of the Applied Vehicle Technology (AVT) Panel at the 2016 NATO Science & Technology Symposium on ‘The Future of Warfare’, a collaborative venture between the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO) and Allied Command Transformation (ACT).1 The remainder of the article will be split into two parts. The first part will provide an introduction to hypersonic flight, the current achievements in related research, experiments, and the further science and technology challenges concerning hypersonic vehicle development. The second part will explore the feasibility, benefits, and timeline projection of potential future military applications, concluded by a summary and remaining considerations