Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Ask Peter Zeihan: Will Hypersonics Replace the Need for an Army?" video.

AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: Simple answer - NO, Peter's quite right that hypersonics are NOT replacing anything. They'll just be another weapon in the inventory. Longer answers below based on Peter's 3 main points. 1) Hypersonics are expensive: The Americans have flown a number of hypersonic vehicles deployed from jets at altitude. The X-43 flew twice at a cost of $230,000,000 or $115 million each. The X-51 flew 4 times for around $85 million each. When you look at what it took to get the SR-71 to fly at Mach 3.3 people think going over Mach 5 is just a matter of more bang. The reason the F-22 was so expensive to operate was because whenever it went fast it would burn the radar absorbent paint off. Going that fast is hard and its expensive. If it was easy and cheap we'd all be flying around in 2nd or 3rd generation Concordes. 2) Speed, fuel, payload: First to go twice as fast you need 4 times the energy before you even consider drag. Its called kinetic energy. So just going from Mach 1 to Mach 5 requires 25 times the energy. Go and look at the X-43 and look at how big the booster was just to get the X-43 model up to a speed where its SCRAM jet could start working. So yes Peter is very very right when he say s they need a lot of fuel and therefore have very small warheads. But they do arrive with a lot of kinetic energy and that does enhance the effectiveness especially when it had to penetrate things like several meters of reinforced concrete. 3) Air defense: One of the great myths about hypersonic missiles being promoted by idiots in the media and snakes in the military industrial complex who want nice juicy contracts is that hypersonic missiles are manoeuvrable. They are NOT that manoeuvrable as the pretty graphics like to show. At those speeds things go very straight and at best make some adjustments. A such they were always going to be vulnerable to systems that could detect them early enough. Back in WW2 flak shells weren't so much meant to hit planes they were meant to blast in front of the planes and then let the planes fly into the wall of shrapnel. If you look up the modern CIWS (see-wiz) systems they create a wall of metal for the missile to fly through. Go and look up how the Rheinmetall GDM-008 Millennium Gun and the Advanced Hit Efficiency And Destruction (AHEAD) ammunition air burst ammunition it fires works. There's videos here on YT showing it. Kh-47M2 Kinzhal was always going to be vulnerable to that method of defense if it could detect the Kinzhal early enough, which clearly the patriot can. ON AI selecting targets. This entire narrative of AI being actually think and reason is utter nonsense. AIs are just complex software algorithms that can mimic what a person can do but very fast especially when the task is data analysis or the task can be done as a data analysis task. If they can't get a car to drive down a street and NOT kill people crossing the street then they are nowhere near as the hype suggests. Go and see the reports on how many people the AI in Teslas have killed. PUT IT THIS WAY does anyone want weapons with software written by overrated clowns like the ones who did the software in the Boeing Max-8 that just decided to fly the planes into the ground. These are things are actually designed to strike and kill targets. I write real time software for industrial systems as a control system and automation engineer. I write software that reads information in real time from sensors and makes decisions based on that information. Sensors aren't perfect and they can give spurious data. that's what happened with the Max-8 and look what happened when their software didn't detect the anomaly. Most software people from outside my corner of the software world have NEVER DONE that type of software AND ITS DAMN HARD at times. Most who try to do it either take the easier jobs or they do something else. if the Tesla deaths, Boeing Max-8 and other accidents aren't enough to convince people that this stuff is very hard to do and very easy to get wrong then nothing ever will.
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@joelobryan1212 Sorry for the story but you'll get it at the end. In the last semester of doing my degree I needed to fill in with a couple of extra classes to be considered full time. One of those classes was Nautical Navigation hosted by the US Navy as part of the ROTC program. It was open to all students and they often had non-ROTC people do that class and I was the one that semester. I ended up having several interesting chats with the instructors. One of those conversations was about "Operation Nimble Archer" which was when the US Navy shelled a couple of Iranian Oil Platforms in the Red Sea for being used against commercial shipping during the Iran-Iraq War. It was reported the USN had fired an astronomical number of shells into those platforms. So I asked why didn't they simply press a button and fire a missile. One of my instructors simply said _"A missile costs at least $1 Million while 100+ artillery shells costs less. Besides the opportunity to have gun crews fire under real combat conditions is too good to pass up." Yeah I know that conversation was 35+ years ago and I might have the exact words a bit off but I remember that answer very distinctly.
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@NathanPK I absolutely agree. I actually have spent most of the last 20 years in Australia's mining industry. I went looking for experience when it turned out we might be going back to the moon to mine Helium-3 AND YES I know. One day one of the people I was working with told me how Logistics was going to become EVEN BIGGER and more important. He'd done logistics for many years and explained how logistics people were going to become some of the most important people in any and every company. That was circa 2010 and before Amazon, which is basically a logistics company, had become what it has become. In hindsight if you ga back to consider what went wrong with the invasion of Iraq, it had a lot to do with logistics. If you look at the massive disruption of COVID, it had a lot to do with logistics. Its odd how you remember those odd conversations that never seemed important at the time suddenly seem important years later.
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@marcob.7801 Yep there's some great quotes about the cost of war going a long way back. Here's one from 2,400 years ago. “War is a matter not so much of arms as of money.” - Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
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@louisgiokas2206 Further to that. I have been writing industrial code for 30+ years. Its completely different to the code for a PC or the internet. In that sort of work you are reading real world data from sensors in real time and responding to that information in real time. I've seen a lot of people from other fields try and FAIL. The difference in programming for data processing and programming for real time real world is radically different. The only other people I know who do that sort of stuff work on things like avionics and medical systems where they are also dealing with real world sensor input and responding to it. The channel Real Engineering did a great video explaining respirators early on in the COVID pandemic when there were lots of people from all sorts of backgrounds slapping together all sorts of stuff to construct makeshift respirators. He pointed out some fundamentals that I understood because of the similarities and I could easily see why these people (however well meaning) were going to kill people with makeshift respirators. I think this is a major problem with the AI people. They're very smart, very clever but they have almost zero experience outside of their field. As such they're going to get stuff WRONG and in the real world getting stuff wrong kills people. Its NOT X-box or Playstation where there's do overs and resets. Its real people.
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@louisgiokas2206 Your example sounds like that probe they sent to Phobos the moon of mars where they got metric and Imperial mixed up. The big problem that IT people have when the come into control systems is they are taught and trained to think that global variables are WRONG because you can have multiple software blocks writing to the same data variable which for analytics is a disaster. Unfortunately all almost all control system programming is done with Global variables and that's because the sensors and actuators are connected by wires and those wires are connected to a specific addresses. PLUS a massive amount of our work is BIT logic as in things that are either ON or OFF. PLUS and I can't stress this enough when we turn ON or OFF a BIT in a word it can have damn serious consequences. That bit might be a software interlock that prevents something in the real world turning ON or OFF or it can be an actual device in the field like a valve or electric motor that suddenly starts or moves. IT people can be extremely dangerous in my field because they just don't get that when they do something real things in the real world MOVE.
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@cavaleer thanks. I'm actually very upset with the Australian government being sucked into to spending billions of dollars on sci-fi fantasy stuff that I have known for 35+ years is BS. I actually put up a proposal to the government for an AU$720 Million civilian space program focused on water and land management. I got told there wasn't enough money for anything like that. They then gave the RAAF AU7 Billion with a 'B' for "Space Defense" including soft satellite kill technologies - as in a revitalised Ronald Regan/Donald Trump Star Wars/Space Force system. 🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂
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@SeruraRenge11 Yeah - have you asked Elon about that???? I think he calls it the Tesla-ille or Teslille??? I think its being made in the same lab as the Tesla-bot???
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@dylanthomas12321 Please STOP believing the crap and nonsense you keep being told in the media. They are NOT engineers. MOST if not all of what they say is produced for them by special interests. Often its from think tanks who are funded by the military contractors who want the contracts to "do stuff." Its the portrayal of what these hypersonic gliders can do that annoys me as its so misleading and the only intent is to get some juicy contract. There's incredible amounts of money in weapons development contracts. things don't even need to work they just need to have the appearance they might work to get the development contracts. How do you think those "gliders' get to that height and get to those speeds? They're just a development of what's been available since the 1950s when the first ICBMs were made available. All those gliders are is an upgraded version of those systems. Its just told to the public as something new and fantastic. The first warheads from ICBMS were guided during the final stages of flight. They have manoeuvring but its nowhere near the ducking, dipping and weaving shown in the graphics. This notion of doing that at speeds above Mach 5 is simply nonsense. To glide you need air thick enough to glide and manoeuvre. If you have air you also have drag and at Mach 5 that means a lot of heat from air friction. the problems just mount and mount once you start going supersonic and particularly after Mach 2. Its difficult to explain how extraordinary the SR-71 really was without a series of lectures and it only went Mach 3.3. The Russians tried to match its speed with the Mig 25 and for it to go that sort of speed it wrecked the engines. It was something the Russians kept secret for many years. At full speed they threw the engines away afterwards and in some cases the entire aircraft. These guys want to go faster than Mach 5. Think of it this way. Just as lift and drag are functions of velocity squared (v²), the difficulties of supersonic flight are a function of the Mach number squared (M²). Mach 1 is hard Mach 2 is 4 times harder ... Mach 5 is 25 times harder and it just gets worse after that.
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@kilpatrickkirksimmons5016 Yep you have it right. At those speeds they fly straight and very little else. To any pilot who's done aerobatics its not dissimilar to rolling-g. I've done aerobatics and there's upper speed limits to things like flick rolls or you can rip the wings off. There's an old story about the SR71 the day it broke the transatlantic record. The story I heard was it was going so fast that as it went past Britain it just kept gong and was 1/2 way to Russia before it made the turn back to Britain. How far it really went is debatable but the fact it couldn't simply turn around at Mach 3+ should tell people heaps. These are the sorts of things that drive engineers and scientists crazy all the time. The media no longer care about facts - its all narrative.
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@Redmanticore And for the record NOBODY uses sensors to recognise things like uniforms they use vision systems AND since you clearly don't know the difference between sensors and vision systems then its obvious you're NOT and engineer and haven't a damn clue what you're talking about. Ask questions why these things wont happen don't tell people who do know this stuff garbage - WE ARE TIRED OF IT.
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