How to defeat Hypersonic threats?

Well lasers have been mentioned because increasing the speed of the interceptor to the speed of light makes the calculations easier for the intercept and a shift in trajectory by the target wont effect a laser beam already on its way to the target... forget what you see in Hollywood movies... a laser beam travelling 1,000km will be 100m across... 100km is 10m... general divergence of lasers is about 1mm per metre...

Of course another option could be to direct a beam of intense energy that pretty much destroys the contents of the threat so it will keep coming but will lose guidance and the propulsion system would fail too.

The Russians have a huge advantage in having hypersonic weapons they can now test their air defence systems and work out tactics or strategies and of course new weapons and systems to defeat them... a basic one would be an enormous chaff and flare cloud next to the target that the incoming missile thinks is a bigger ship and will hit that instead of your actual ship...

Its the only sensible option, but the accursed Seppostani Continuum won't consider it for a pico-second.

Yeah... sadly stop being a is not in their playbook I am afraid...

So are you are saying Hypersonic projectiles/missiles can be intercepted or are you saying they cannot be intercepted by DEW/Laser ?

What I am saying is that DEW/Laser would be the most practical means of interception because it eliminates the effect of the target being able to manouver, but DEW and Lasers are no where near where they would need to be to be effective even at 20m let alone 200m or 2km or greater distances.

Right now laser systems dazzle optical systems...

The only way to intercept a hypersonic missile right now would be an air burst nuke detonated roughly in the path of the incoming weapon... which is not practical or attractive.

Radars can easily detect them too based on the speed itself....algorithms are probably simpler?

Would be the same... there would just be less time, and much of the time there would be no interception solution.

Very simply to intercept something you put your interceptor into the path of the incoming target at a time it is going to be there too... with a purely ballistic target like an old ICBM warhead, because of its high speed the interception point will be a long way ahead of its current position and will be calculated based on where your interception missiles are located and how long it takes for them to get to the interception point.

If you make it a tennis game... the ball comes over the net in a fairly predictable way assuming no spin on the ball, so the tennis player sees the ball coming and moves their feet so that as the ball comes past it is within easy reach... a slow lob means lots of time... an ace means you didn't get it.

Now imagine the compound problem of a very very fast ball that limits how far you can move your feet or even stretch out the tennis racket, but that it can change its direction several times on its way over the net... and the tennis racket stays the same size, but you have 20 players... but the net is 2,000km wide...

They are not saying they have no defence against manouvering hypersonic missiles for shits and giggles.

Ofcourse if the strike missiles are close to the defense zone then reaction time would indeed be a challenge even for advanced radars.

Actually it really does not matter how far away you detect the target... that is not important... with a standard ballistic weapon early detection means you can get ready and calculate a fairly accurate and precise track for the target, which you can use to plot interception points for all your ground and air based interceptors.

Ironically the first real defence for hypersonic manouvering threats would be hypersonic manouvering SAMs based on the border and intended to chase threats down from behind where fractions of miliseconds means a miss by several metres in a head on intercept, but from behind would not be an issue as the closing speed might be rather small.

Most issues with tracking are related to scanning speed... a search radar that spins 360 degrees... perhaps at say 12 rpm... by the time it comes around and scans a hypersonic target has likely moved so far it would treat the two blips as two different objects and not calculate a trajectory for them, and for most tracking radar the target is covering so much distance so quickly by the time it is in range it is too late...

Just look at Soviet ships... they had supersonic anti ship missiles... they had about 8 different types of them in the late 1970s while the US had Tomahawk and Harpoon.

US ships got a Phalanx system or maybe two for a really big ship, while Soviet Corvettes often had two... frigates and destroyers had 4-6 and cruisers had a dozen including twin gun mounts with guided missiles too...

I rather suspect with their training and experience with hypersonic threats they will develop defences faster too.

Makes sense but what about hypersonic SAMs but more in point defense role? Not sure if the missile manouver's a lot as they get closer to the target? Wont it deviate from the target if it does that? Ofcourse it may be pointless for nukes coming in but that removes all chips from the table....

The idea of a point defence hypersonic SAM is that you can make a SAM with a similar speed or higher speed than the incoming threat... you might have them at your border area but they would be no good for actually defending your border... the idea would be to launch them as the threats go past, so they would climb and chase down the incoming threat from behind... it means instead of a 3km/s threat being attacked by a 3.01km/s missile having a closing speed of just over 6km/s, that you have the slightly faster missile catch up to the threat at a few metres per second instead of a few kilometres per second... but then the problem would be how to defeat the target because kinetic impact wont be so effective.

Obviously a ship at sea would not be able to use such weapons if the threat is trying to hit it and not some other ship or target...

Radar tracking I don't think is the issue, radars track much faster satelites with no great issue, ABM systems by definition have to be capable of high-precision tracking these kind of speeds also.

You need a high scan rate... the old 6 scan rotations per minute is not fast enough to keep track... electronic scanning a dozen times or more a second should be fine.

Do you know of any such up coming hypersonic manouvering SAM ? Is it even possible for a SAM to manoeuvre at hypersonic speed ?

How would a SAM hit a target if it cannot manouver?

Hypersonic is generally accepted as being faster than mach 5, which at about 320m/s x 5 is about 1.6km/s.

Even the latest model of Pantsir has a solid rocket booster that accelerates it up to 1.75km/s, so it is hypersonic too for a few seconds.

Much larger longer range SAMs are also hypersonic and also manouver.

The new ones I am talking about will have motors... scramjet motors, so they will have full throttle control all the way to the target, instead of current rocket powered missiles that rapidly burn high energy fuel and then slow burn fuel to overcome drag and extend range.

Scramjet powered missiles will be much more capable and retain speed much better over much greater distances.

By hitting the target at a pre determined point that has already been calculated.

Even assuming a ballistic target with a very predictable flight path, a SAMs intercept course wont be precise or accurate enough for a kill on its own.

Generally the SAM system will have tracked the target and calculated a flight path for the target... knowing the speed of the SAM and the location it can calculate an intercept point based on the targets trajectory and how long the SAM would take to reach it. After the SAM has launched the incoming warhead... say a Scud... might have changed flight path ever so slightly... just a minor course correction to keep it on its point of aim... a new intercept path will be calculated and the outgoing SAM will change flight path to the new interception point.
Lets say the SAM is a TVM S-300P, so the missile turns on its radar and looks for radar emissions reflecting off the target from the tracking radar of the SAM site which might be 50km away. The SAMs radar is much closer to the target so is much more accurate and precise in determining the location of the target and its movements in time so that information is passed back to the SAM site and flight corrections are sent to the missile to ensure the SAM passes as close to the target as possible.

The smart fusing inside the missile means that as the target is about to blast by the detonator sets off the main charge and 150kgs of HE and Fragments are directed at a point in space where the target is calculated to be when the fragments from the warhead blow through... shattering the target because the flight speed of the target plus the explosion accelerated speed of the fragments and the flight speed of the SAM warhead would all be added to create an enormous amount of kinetic energy.

That aside what I was saying is how can a SAM hit a target at hypersonic speed if it has to manoeuvre ? IOW, if it manoeuvre's it will lose its hypersonic speed.

Normally SAMs operating at hypersonic speed are rocket propelled so lots of hard manouvering will create drag and result in serious loss of speed... but I am talking about new SAMs using scramjet engines that are powered and can retain and regain lost speed in the terminal phase of the engagement.

Once it gets close the time to manouver is reduced so side thrusting rockets are often used in the terminal phase to get an explosive as close to the target as possible, but with hypersonic speed weapons or targets you still might need to solve the enormous remaining gap between your target and your interceptor with a really big megaton plus nuke warhead.

Future developments and testing with hypersonic missiles(targets and interceptors) might find better solutions, but for now it is just not practical to stop them with given defences.

Note it is not the speed that is the problem... S-500 is designed to hit targets moving at 7km/s which is twice as fast as Kinzhal and Zircon... S-400 can hit targets moving at 4.8km/s which is about mach 15 or so, but tracking and intercepting manouvering targets is the problem because they move so fast but the interception point also moves too fast to reliably get an interceptor there in time.

Imagine the tennis ball game scenario... the other guy has hit the ball hard and it is coming towards you rapidly... but relatively straight so you have time to move your body into position and you use your arm to compensate for any variation so even if it curves a little you still should be able to get to it and hit it back... now imagine 5m short of your position it turns 30 % back the way you came from so your momentum and your racket are moving one way but you need to move the opposite way instantly to reach the ball but there simply is not time to stop and turn and go back the way you came in the time it will take for the ball to fly past you.

With SAMs of course you could just launch another SAM for each flight path correction but it can change paths up and down and left and right... it can also speed up or slow down... if it slows down your missile will have to turn towards the incoming threat because your interceptor will get to the interception point before the target will otherwise... and if it then speeds up the intercepting missile might not be able to turn and catch up because the incoming target is moving much faster than most SAMs so the target might blow past the intercept point before the SAM gets there and the SAM can't catch up, though it might turn and chase the target... a Mach 4-5 SAM chasing a Mach 9-10 hypersonic missile is a waste of a missile.

The large Soviet and Russian Anti ship missiles are big and have space for electronics and can detect radar so it will have an idea where SAMs are and skirt around them... which on its own will generate enough manouvering to make interception hard... it doesn't need to see SAMs coming up to intercept it... just tracking radar from the ground or the incoming SAMs themselves will tell it where it needs to avoid flying near... and compound that with the fact that hypersonic missiles with Scramjet engines will likely be operating at altitudes of 40km or higher where AMRAAM and Patriot are not much use most of the time. THAAD might reach but would still not be in any great position to intercept the targets.

Putin sees Russias situation as the first country with viable hypersonic weapons... they need to develop defences from such systems because it is only a matter of time before other countries have such capacities too:

http://tass.com/defense/1058038

I think the real deal with hypersonics
isn't a nuke warhead

its a "kinetic" warhead .... with no explosives .... from the sheer velocity of a high mass "hit"
the Americans don't want to "destroy" Russia
they want its energy wealth ....

Russia wants hypersonic missiles to penetrate US Navy air defences so they can sink their carriers.

America wants hypersonic missiles to use them as global murderbots so a nuke warhead would be counter productive because they would need to find a reason to justify using nukes to use them...

so they want to hit key facilities with non-explosive "kinetic energy" strikes ....
kill the inhabitants and the faciilties are still standing ....

Kinetic weapon strikes very seriously localise the damage, but there will still be damaged buildings... rather a lot less than if HE warheads or nuke warheads had been used of course...

It is an ICBM launched weapon, which just means they don't need UCAV basing permission around the world for their murder plots and coups.

I suspect the Russians will demand such weapons are counted as nukes so their location will be restricted...

And that is what is important... training can't just be about shooting down the incoming missiles... ballistic and cruise missiles... it also has to be about responding to the attacks by destroying the attackers... otherwise they will just keep attacking till they sneak a few shots through...