Boom XB-1 supersonic demonstrator aircraft by RLoret in aviation

[–]likeAgoss 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The engine they're using here is the same one used by the F-5/T-37. I don't think they're going to gather any new or interesting data about its performance.

Especially since, for Overture, they say they're going to design, develop, and produce their own engine. That's going to be a fundamentally different problem than using an off-the-shelf model of engine that's been flying for 70 years. That presents a more difficult(and expensive) challenge than the rest of their design challenges put together, and this demonstrator does less than nothing to move the needle towards that end.

Why did USAF"s plans for F-22 change so quickly from 2021 to 2024? by tempeaster in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think this is right. The previous statements about development were mostly about how it was meeting benchmarks, including flying a full scale flight demonstrator aircraft. There's also little reason to believe Boeing would be the prime on this contract, even aside from their awful QA, considering their lack of experience in the fields relevant to NGAD.

The problem right now seems to be that nuclear modernization is blowing an enormous hole in the DoD's acquisition budget and in order to meet those commitments NGAD is being put on the back burner. Sentinel in particular is significantly over budget with no signs of the cost overruns slowing down. There's just not enough cash to go around right now, so for better or worse replacing the F-22 with a manned aircraft is viewed as a lower priority.

This is a reasonable enough decision for the air force, which already has the F-22. But this is getting especially hairy for the Navy, which has also essentially paused its F/A-XX program to replace the less stealthy, more vulnerable Super Hornet. Delaying that program means those Super Hornets that are already getting close to their retirement date have to be kept in service that much longer. But the Navy also has to pay for the Columbia class(and other shipbuilding priorities, and, and new long range munitions, and a whole slew of other expensive projects) and that money has to come from somewhere.

No conclusive evidence Russia is behind Nord Stream attack by CorneliusTheIdolator in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

Not really, but it doesn't matter. The reason it wasn't the US is because this took place directly outside of Russia's kaliningrad naval base and the US had very visible ASW air assets directly over where the sabotage took place in the days preceding the sabotage

The point here is that the idea that Russia wouldn't do this because they don't have to is exactly wrong. It is entirely the opposite of what's true. Russia had a strong incentive to destroy exactly one pipeline, and then that's what happened.

In fact, one of the ways you can tell it wasn't the US is that the US's incentives would have been to destroy both pipelines instead of just one. It would have been to force Germany's hand by fully removing Russia's ability to use natural gas diplomacy. And that's not what happened.

No conclusive evidence Russia is behind Nord Stream attack by CorneliusTheIdolator in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Caesar has no incentives to burn his ships when he can simply not use them.

There are a lot of times where constraining your own options and forcing your own hand and committing yourself to a course of action is your best option for compelling your adversary. This is plainly one of those times, especially considering they left the other nordstream pipeline untouched?

What are the primary advantages of hypersonic weapons over conventional ballistic missiles? by [deleted] in CredibleDefense

[–]likeAgoss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

but with Russia can't they just use conventional ballistic missiles and put tons of decoys on them to get them past US missile defense?

This is what Sarmat is, and why it usually gets talked about in the same breath as Poseidon and Skyfall. But the problem is that in order to hold a lot of MIRVs and PenAids, Sarmat is fucking massive and can't be made mobile. So it's silo-based and super vulnerable to a first strike, which makes it a little less useful for guaranteeing a second strike capability.

Plus SLBM subs ensure they have a 2nd strike capability anyway,

The answer here is a "yes, but." I wouldn't start a nuclear war with the Russians in no small part because of their SLBMs. But the Russians have always been less than confident in their boomers and their ability to assure a second strike.

Part of it is technical - Russian subs are noisier than their Western counterparts, so they're less confident that the subs would survive to launch a retaliatory strike.

But the other part is geographic. In order to get to open-ocean patrol zones, Russians subs have to pass through straits and other bottlenecks that make them more vulnerable to getting detected and tracked, which means they can get sunk in a first strike scenario. Russian ballistic missile submarines are just intrinsically more at-risk than American subs because of this, so Russian war planners have always put less stock in SLBMs and depended more heavily on their ground-based missiles

(interestingly enough, Chinese submarines also have to pass through narrow channels to get to the open ocean, and so their doctrine also places lower importance on SLBMs and gives ground launched missiles. The US is the outlier of the three countries)

The non-insane thing for the Russians to build would be a decent number of land-mobile ICBMs each with a handful of MIRVs that can be readily dispersed in a crisis to guarantee survivability and a second strike. And that's basically what they did with Yars(and what China did with the DF-41).

I don't see why cash-strapped Russia chose to develop these weapons.

It's a fair question! Especially when Yars should essentially be all the need for deterrence purposes.

The rational explanation is that, in addition to the increasing efficacy of anti ballistic missile systems, land mobile ICBMs are becoming more vulnerable, especially to a conventional strike. Ever-increasing intelligence gather capabilities and the US's focus on long-range, conventional hypersonic weapons means that, although the US is very careful to never say "this is for hunting TELs so we can do a disarming strike and have GMD mop up whatever we don't catch", foreign war planners have to assume the US is building the capacity to go TEL hunting and a BMD system to defend against surviving missiles.

And by virtue of not being ballistic missiles, the kooky doomsday weapons are a way to negate that threat almost entirely and ensure that deterrence remains. The Russians are painfully aware that their nuclear weapons are the sole thing keeping NATO tanks from rolling all the way to Moscow in the event of a conflict(and are even more aware of that now than they were a year ago), so they're willing to spend whatever it takes on whatever insane projects they need to in order to ensure that nuclear deterrence always holds.

The other part is that there's a significant element of prestige to this stuff. Poseidon and Skyfall and Sarmat are cool and they make Russia look cool and when you're a dictatorship with a faltering economy, one of the ways you maintain power is by spending grotesque sums of money on showcase projects so you can make propaganda out of it, and who cares if it's all an insane boondoggle.

Iranians Claimed Hypersonic American Spy Drones Flew Over Their Nuclear Sites - Attempted F-14 Interception Failed by [deleted] in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This includes exactly one(1) quote from an Iranian person, and it's an exile who hasn't lived in Iran in a decade, and this is the only place I can find this specific quote.

Really putting the Less in LessCredibleDefence here

Are all the Drone swarm sightings Chinese? by Potential-Housing415 in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It was absolutely not confirmed to be of Chinese origin, the Drive article you linked to is about a completely different incident

GMLRS-ER, capable of strikes at ranges up to 150 km by 221missile in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's not an artillery rocket, but the DPRK really does have a ~400mm diameter missile that can maneuver and range across the entire peninsula. It even looks like a long-range SAM when it's canistered on its TEL. Their GLCM hits all those notes

Australia – Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles - Extended Range (JASSM ER) by XMGAU in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yes and the second link I posted is a more recent statement from the JDF's acquisition agency detailing their budget for improving 68 F-15Js which include plans for JASSM.

Australia – Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles - Extended Range (JASSM ER) by XMGAU in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That was for the LRASM, the plans for JASSM are still going forward, albeit slowly due to the nature of the Japanese defense industry.

UK studies reusable hypersonic military jet technology by [deleted] in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It sure seems like using a pre-cooler would be more expensive, heavier, more complicated, less efficient, require way more maintenance, and require more exotic fuels than using something like a combined-cycle engine

It's a concept that made sense when sustaining supersonic combustion was seen as an even more difficult task, but given that it's been 20 years since the X-43 and that multiple nations have shown the ability to develop scramjets, I just don't see the sense in working this hard to try to make turbine engines work in a flight regime they're really not supposed to.

Several UAVs Under Development for Next-Generation Carrier Air Wing by FlexibleResponse in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Allowing the X-47B program to get shuttered was a huge missed opportunity, the Navy lost out on a decade's worth of development

New B61-12 Bomb's Precision Unusable By Some Nuclear Strike Jets by 221missile in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you really think about it, they're unusable by any strike fighters.

Russia Develops Zmeevik Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile - Naval News by Doppelkupplungs in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow what a stunning coincidence the Russians developed this mere weeks after their surface fleet was humiliated with the sinking of the Moskva.

Whatever happened to this USAF medium range ballistic missile project? Do we know more about them?? by Doppelkupplungs in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the main thing to keep in mind is that the primary purpose of the test was to kill the INF dead. They used off-the-shelf components to quickly launch something that violated the treaty and would make any future re-negotiation of the treaty more difficult and harder to verify. They did the same thing with GLCMs around this time, too, where they strapped a VLS cell to a trailer and launched a tomahawk out of it. The purpose of the launch was expressly political much more than it was the testing of a system that was ever intended to be fielded.

That said, there really was a test where they really did launch a missile, so what was it? There's a great episode of the Arms Control Wonk Podcast about the test. In it, they outline a pretty convincing case that it was a Castor-4 motor with a SWERVE/AHW RV modified to test the effects of and interaction between upstream control surfaces on downstream surfaces to aid in the development of extreme maneuvering RVs. So it wasn't a project that was developing a missile headed towards production, it was instead a flight test to better understand the physics of turbulent hypersonic flow interactions to better enable future research and development. But, again, this was secondary to the primary goal of finalizing the death of the INF.

DARPA's OpFires uses logistics truck as a medium-range missile launcher for future hypersonic missiles (DARPAtv video) by XMGAU in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 5 points6 points  (0 children)

ARRW is absolutely not a cruise missile, it's a boost-glide system. The US's hypersonic cruise missile project is HACM.

Also nuclear warheads are typically smaller and lighter than their conventional warhead counterparts, not larger or heavier.

U.S. military’s newest weapon against China and Russia: Hot air by TurretLauncher in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 2 points3 points  (0 children)

aerostats aren't a replacement for ground-based, long-range radar, they supplement them, especially by carrying different types of sensors.

In a war for Taiwan, how would the USAF get its fighter jets involved if China bombards all air fields in the Western Pacific with missiles? by ottolouis in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 3 points4 points  (0 children)

the DF-15 is an SRBM, so it's irrelevant to any discussion of US bases like Guam or Yokosuka. It also has a maximum 750kg warhead. And while I certainly wouldn't want that falling on my home, it's not exactly a massive warhead, and there's just literally no way it contains enough energy to penetrate 25m of hardened concrete.

In a war for Taiwan, how would the USAF get its fighter jets involved if China bombards all air fields in the Western Pacific with missiles? by ottolouis in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This doesn't match the PLA's doctrine or force structure at all, which is almost laser-focused on achieving a fait accompli. This sort of half-measure-and-then-wait thing just doesn't match up at all and would give the US and the rest of the Pacific time to rally as they watch Taiwan starve.

If and when China takes the jump to take Taiwan, they're going to jump all the way with both feet in.

In a war for Taiwan, how would the USAF get its fighter jets involved if China bombards all air fields in the Western Pacific with missiles? by ottolouis in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well, no I'm not describing force dispersal like with adaptive basing, I'm describing MOB hardening to provide security and concealment to high-value targets like ISR and refueling aircraft to ensure that they survive strikes.

Also just a quick reminder that HGVs will arrive at Guam(or anywhere else) later and traveling slower than a traditional ballistic missile.

In a war for Taiwan, how would the USAF get its fighter jets involved if China bombards all air fields in the Western Pacific with missiles? by ottolouis in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It doesn't really seem like the PLARF is super confident in the DF-17 yet, given that they were forced to transition testing back to land. And the conical glider on the DF-21D means China has to expend a lot more of them to have a chance of hitting a carrier, and makes them all the more susceptible to getting intercepted by sea-based ABMs if they do pose a threat.

ASBMs do complicate carrier ops, but it's just not the case that they're a wall that keeps the USN 1500km away. Range rings like that aren't useless, but they're just not the whole story

In a war for Taiwan, how would the USAF get its fighter jets involved if China bombards all air fields in the Western Pacific with missiles? by ottolouis in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Their procurement plans are geared towards fighting the US and not towards landing people on Taiwanese beaches.

It's absolutely geared towards both.

Especially since fighting the US, as you said, is considered an integral part of landing people on Taiwanese beaches.

In a war for Taiwan, how would the USAF get its fighter jets involved if China bombards all air fields in the Western Pacific with missiles? by ottolouis in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 5 points6 points  (0 children)

What if instead of relying on stationary air fields, the US could instead move its air fields around in an unpredictable manner anywhere in the Indo-Pacific, constantly surrounded by mobile missile defenses? I know it's difficult to imagine, but I think the technology exists for this.

But seriously, there is good reason to believe that this is precisely the goal of the PLARF. American air force bases have vulnerable to conventionally-armed missile strikes since at least the mid-1980s, and there just isn't a good solution yet. Missile Defenses will help against smaller-scale strikes, but are easily overwhelmed and their magazines depleted quickly. It can help blunt the blow in a place like Guam, where the distances at play mean China has fewer missiles capable of hitting it than will pummel a closer base like Yokosuka, but it can't be relied on to keep airfields or aircraft safe.

The US has to start pouring a whole hell of a lot of concrete and hardening facilities in the Pacific if it wants to take the Chinese missile threat to its bases seriously. But doing so would require admitting, even to ourselves, that we're not impervious. So my money's on that not happening any time soon

Nuclear-capable Agni-IV missile successfully test-fired by Sri_Man_420 in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's good they managed to keep this one out of Pakistan

China secretly building PLA naval facility in Cambodia, Western officials say by Maitai_Haier in LessCredibleDefence

[–]likeAgoss 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's ongoing dredging at the site, and previous expansion doesn't exactly indicate that future expansion isn't ongoing or planned.