Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Unpacking the China-Russia alliance" video.

@obligatoryusername7239 Since all three nations are furiously investing in this technology, you're not going to get ANYTHING in the open literature WRT hyper-sonics. But some essentials are so obvious that they can be laid out here. 1) The throw-weight atop any ICBM is drastically reduced. Your money goes towards a glide-craft instead of detonations. This is obvious even from the limited sketches released to the Press. 2) It's not a mature technology. Red China claims to have a Big Jump. 3) It bleeds energy/range by operating at fantastic speed within the atmosphere. A hypersonic warhead -- as sketched -- can't have intercontinental range. If you think about it, EVERY ICBM is hypersonic. What is new is the capacity to REALLY twist and turn -- within the atmosphere -- during final penetration. This can already be done if the trajectory is that of a traditional ICBM. But, a traditional drop spends so little time in the atmosphere there's not much time to put 'English' on the ball. What's being pitched is a warhead that can be notionally aimed at Denver and then - at the last second - deviated all the way to Austin. A) What's the purpose of that? Either way it's an ICBM strike and Hell is to follow. B) You've thrown 90% of your warhead away as now it's dedicated to 'skip-aiming.' No. The ONLY thing that makes sense is that your hypersonic warhead comes in undetectably. By the time the victim discovers the strike, he's already strategically castrated. In broad terms, hypersonic warheads are destabilizing. They entirely take away decision time from any national leader. This was the fatal strategic escalation loop that gave Europe World War One. Each player didn't know how to NOT escalate. In the Cold War at least the adversaries were half-a-world apart. With Russia and Red China -- they are glaring across the world's longest common border. And, BTW, the two super-powers nearly blew up the planet REPEATEDLY during the Cold War. False attack indicators had the Soviets all keyed up more than once. Yeah', they almost launched humanity into war over a technical malfunction! Red China is the triggering power. She is busting through all of the arms limitation treaties signed by Moscow and Washington. ( With a focus on cruise missiles. These are inherently stealthy and cause limitless paranoia when the stakes rise. ) As it stands, Xi has Red China moving against EVERY SINGLE NEIGHBOR. These dust-ups are merely tune-ups for Global Atomic War... which is the end game for Xi's grand strategy. If interviewed, Xi would claim that he's going to finesse things. Adolf thought that HE was going to finesse the British and the French. Bin Laden thought HE was going to finesse the Americans, too.
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@obligatoryusername7239 Japan can never get away with smashing the USN at Pearl Harbor -- but they did so because they THOUGHT they could. They thought they could even though the IJN's best man on America advised that such a gambit would surely bring a dire reaction. The USSR is too big to attack -- but Adolf plunged in, anyway. The more you know, the crazier his thinking was. Experts at each hand were telling Adolf that 1) Moscow's too far. 2) The Russians are not French. 3) You can't win a mechanized war when you're not an oil power. Just because a campaign is crazy, suicidal, pointless - and pretty obviously so - does not mean that a tyrant will forgo the pleasure. Red China no longer has collective leadership. It's being run by a TYRANT. The president of EVERYTHING is what the locals call him. As for Taiwan, before Xi opened his big yap, Taiwan had already become bound to Red China. Taiwan WAS Red China's avenue into the High Tech world. That door has swung shut. The global chip shortage was entirely engineered by Xi. The chip manufacturers are in clover -- right now. Like Tokyo in 1941, Xi proposes to attack the nations that are FOUNDATIONAL to his economy, his authority. [ Japan was living on American oil and American scrap steel at that time. Her battleships were formed from melted Model-T cars. Yup! ] Red China's High Tech was coming directly out of Taiwan! Yup. Now Beijing is scrambling to replace the chips in it horde... before the stash runs out. I'm led to believe that Red China only has about fifteen months supply of 'super-chips' on hand. This stash is what is reported as the global shortage. BTW, Xi has managed to flip-out every other mass consumer of said chips -- which means all of NATO + Japan + Korea.
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@obligatoryusername7239 Which is my point. Hyper-sonic warheads ONLY make sense if you're going to stab the other guy with atomics straight off the bat. They make absolutely ZERO sense versus America. Hypersonic technology is inherently range limited. That's why America was the last of the three to take it seriously as a strategic asset. Right now the Pentagon is merely mirroring Beijing and Moscow. By investing LARGE in hyper-sonic warheads, both nations are telling the world that they don't accept M.A.D. doctrine at all. Hypersonics DEMAND first use doctrine. As a second strike weapon one wonders if they can work at all.
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@sunrisings292 You need to study the history of ICBMs. Hyper-sonics are RANGE LIMITED. To have them is to cut your ICBM throw weight by 2/3 -- and generally force your ICBMs to be re-rated as IRBMs. BTW, the Pentagon is ALREADY deterred -- that's what M.A.D. means. Hyper-sonics BREAK DOWN M.A.D. They are an explicit attempt to craft a weapon that is both first-use-only AND which would eliminate the "MUTUALLY ASSURED" from M.A.D. With them, the guy that pulls the trigger first would seem to be able to walk away from the event in pretty good shape. For both Russia and Red China, their strategic assets are virtually right-over-the-border from each other. They were sited to terrify the USA -- not each other. Woops!
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Red China REALLY wants Siberia back. That's a fact. Taiwan is just an excuse to build out the PLA and PLAN and PLAAF.
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@Patch801 Especially so if you're Elon Musk. But the physics do not change. A hypersonic glide vehicle takes the place of three or four equivalent conventional warheads. THAT'S the equation. What makes hypersonics attractive to the tyrannical powers: the sneak attack. An ICBM follows a ballistic trajectory -- which means they go very, very high before come down very, very fast. With a hypersonic attack, the launcher goes horizontal in the upper atmosphere -- low enough that it's not obvious to the enemy. Then the glide vehicle is expected to evade terminal detection until it's too late -- and then boom! The enemy's own atomic assets are destroyed. The few weapons left are wholly insufficient as an atomic counter-force against a wholly prepared aggressor. The USSR on June 22, 1941 and the USA on December 7, 1941 both found out how badly things can go after a sneak attack. Since both the Russians and Red Chinese have mobile strategic launchers, nothing stops either power from rolling their stuff mighty close to their targets: especially the command and control nodes where the generals are. None of the above applies for either power against the USA. It's just too far away. Hypersonics = an atomic tipped knife fight. Note that both nations are going full tilt with such weaponry. The blather about using them against America is just that: blather. They don't bring any additional military utility against such a distant power.
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@Patch801 Counter-posters just don't get the physics: hypersonics are terminal phase warheads mounted on very conventional ICBM launchers. Gliding through the upper atmosphere costs LOTS of energy/speed -- and range. Gliding also entirely removes the gambit of decoys. ICBM mounted decoys are now universal. They weigh practically nothing, but so spoof enemy radars that the target has no reaction time. The descent from outer space to Earth is so fast (25+ Mach) that it's impossible to pick out the actual warhead from the clutter until it's too late. When you run the numbers, such a terminal phase vehicle takes away 2/3 of your throw weight. At first, hypersonics were pitched as a way to stop anti-missile defense against ICBMs. But it was quickly realized that there's no counter to ICBM decoys. However, hypersonics make perfect sense for Red China and Russia -- against each other. They are adjoining authoritarian states run by tyrants. Perfect, then. Hypersonics are -- in theory -- supposed to work against the USN. But they won't. Let's list the counter-tactics certain to be used by the USN: 1) Sail away. It'd be child's play to sail out of the range of Red China's new toys. 2) Conduct submarine warfare -- while the surface fleet gears up for war. 3) Spoof Red China's overhead assets. The Americans are past masters of electronic spoofing. I'll leave it at that. More generally, Beijing can't ship any oil anywhere without the USN's assent... nor anything else, either. It owns the World Ocean. An all out attack against the USN = global atomic war. Ships can sail. Cities and industries can't. The USN is merely going to repeat 1941-1945. The enemy's economy will be utterly gutted. Then, when the enemy is helpless, the surface fleet will approach to deliver the final strokes... probably just a surrender ceremony. Navies destroy economies. They starve your industries and your bellies. BTW, it really will take an atomic warhead to destroy an American super carrier.
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@eldoctorvidegaray7186 Such a terminal warhead wastes 3/4 of the ICBM's payload. A conventional MIRV would destroy four-times as many targets and be quite unstoppable. So any hyper-sonic terminal warhead is a big step backwards if the target is the US. Hyper-sonics DO make perfect sense as a first strike weapon against Red China by Moscow or vice versa. It's impossible to miss the fact that both Red China and Russia raced each other with these warheads -- whereas the US stood by scratching its collective head for years. Lastly, the US finally got on board with hyper-sonics -- with a conventional warhead -- and an air breathing engine -- launched from a B-52 -- to achieve a different purpose: zapping the bin Laden's of this world. The original scheme, of using an ICBM launched from a USN sub, was nixed because it was all too easily mistaken for a full-on ICBM strike -- since an American strategic missile sub has MIRV warheads. The American hyper-sonic missile is not at all technologically equivalent to Russian or Red Chinese terminal packages. The aerospace technological lead the US has over Russia and Red China is becoming large.
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@rubbersoul3144 You are no engineer, that's for sure. The Pentagon doesn't even have hyper-sonics for it's ICBMs on its agenda. Of course, a MIRV is hyper-sonic in the first place.
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The PLAN is NOT a blue water navy. It's still trying to get past the first line of islands that encircle it to the east and south. What Putin is doing is trying to aim Red China towards fighting Japan, USA, Australia and India. The latter being pretty strange as India is the CRITICAL financial supporter of Moscow. But it's RUSSIA that is Beijing's primary strategic target. Going after Japan and America guarantees failure. Whereas, Siberia is directly adjacent. It's no wonder that Red China considers itself to be a Polar Nation. (!) Its propaganda arm is already forgetting Vladivostok's name. (!) The so-called alliance is the perfect pretext for Beijing to spy on Russia.
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