Complex Air Defense: Countering the Hypersonic Missile Threat

[Music] welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online welcome everyone my name is seth jones i'm senior vice president and director of the international security program here at the center for strategic and international studies i'm happy today to introduce our missile defense project's new report on countering hypersonic weapons hypersonic weapons of various kinds have been in the news for some time in defense media and wider and we've heard many reports about russian and china china building and testing hypersonic weapons and and how the u.s has been lagging behind secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense just last week had a meeting with a number of ceos to talk about the importance of hypersonic strike and defense and the state of the industrial base to support hypersonic strike and defense capabilities the u.s has begun to develop its own hypersonic weapons with numerous programs spread across services but less frequently discussed is the broader subject of hypersonic defense and that's what we're going to be talking about today how do we defend against these high-speed maneuvering threats how is hypersonic defense different and similar to other kinds of air and missile defenses is it even possible to answer these questions we're pleased to have a a panel of experts here our conversation today will be moderated by mr steve trimble defense editor at aviation week magazine who writes a significant amount about hypersonic missiles we have a great group of individuals we have miss kelly saylor is an analyst for advanced technology and global security at the congressional research service dr jillian bussey is director of the joint hypersonic transition office jhto at the pentagon's office of the under secretary of defense for research and engineering mr stan stefira is the chief architect at the missile defense agency dr mark lewis is the executive director of ndia's emerging technologies institute and dr tom carrico is a senior fellow in isp and my colleague and the director of our missile defense project and tom will summarize the report he co-authored with masao dahlgren which is titled complex air defense which is a way to frame the hypersonic defense problem i also want to say that csis is grateful the for the co-sponsors of this report raytheon technologies and lockheed martin i'm looking forward to hearing our panelists talk through this problem set and with that i'll hand it over to you steve thanks it's four and a half years later and i think we've now gotten a pretty good understanding of what the initial architecture for dod's hypersonic defense capability will be on the interceptor side it starts with a glide phase interceptor program the options there include the sm-3 or a derivative of that and the thaad also a derivative of that as well as probably others there's the c-based terminal program with the sm-6 adapted for this role and darpa is involved with the glide breaker program which they describe generally as a critical enabling technology for hypersonic defense now if you dive deep into the budget documents it's actually identified as an advanced form of a direct divert and attitude control system the missile defense agency has also commissioned raytheon to set up a high-powered microwave test bed where they are where they're developing a capability to project microwaves at extreme range right extreme power and very long range as they describe it on the sensor side there's a lot of activity with the space development agency working on a constellation in low earth orbit called the tracking layer with a medium field of view sensor infrared that would cue what the missile defense agency is working on with the hypersonic ballistic tracking space sensor with a medium field of view sensor for actual target quality tracking of hypersonic objects uh more recently in the summer the space force said they had started working on a similar capability not in low earth orbit but in medium earth orbit with millennium space systems signed up which is a boeing company to work on that capability and then you know obviously the over the overhead persistent infrared program is in development which could provide at least a queuing capability uh at that level at high earth orbit so why are we doing this and what capabilities are necessary are these the only ones that we need do we need others is this sufficient is it redundant these are some of the questions that we can answer today thanks uh you know to the 70-page very detailed report that tom carrico and his staff has has published today that i encourage you to read and uh and also thanks to this very distinguished panel of experts uh where we can discuss those details even further uh please as you're as you're listening to this opening uh to all these opening remarks start thinking about your questions uh which we can uh present to to the panel a bit later so with that tom you can start all right well thank you uh steve and thanks uh to all the panelists uh for uh for being here today uh again i'm tom carrico and happy to to summarize the report uh co-authored with my csi's colleague uh missal dahlgren but uh the entire missile defense project team absolutely contributed to this to this project so the last national defense strategy identified long-term strategic competition with our near peers as the central challenge of our time and advanced missile threats present a represent a key problem for power projection and a military dimension of that strategic competition now in one way or another access to strategic theaters requires us to counter these missile threats passive defense and attack operations are a big part of that but for the things we can't move or hide we will need active defense now about a century ago some military planners had it as an article of faith that the bombers would always get through then it was the icbms that would always get through but air defenses and then ballistic missile defenses have at least limited and constrained those perceptions but now it's the so-called hypersonic missile that in its more breathless depictions we are told we'll always get through open some leading newspapers of record today and you'll find hypersonic missiles dramatically described as unstoppable but are they really i guess the contention of this report is that hypersonic defense is a difficult but ultimately tractable problem relative to the legacy ballistic missile defense system these new threats will require considerable change to be sure to include different defense designs new sensing interceptor capabilities different concepts and doctrinal and organizational changes as well as modified policy expectations for the defended asset list much of which is already underway so what is this threat exactly that we're talking about here well in some respects it's all footnotes to to werner von braun air force historian richard hallian points out that the word hypersonic is an american invention a rough translation from the german for high supersonic and you see here an image from a captured nazi document depicting a boost glide weapon from the 1940s so today's hypersonic gliders may be a kind of poster child for the emergence of a new missile age but in another sense they were activating today the potential for aerospace flight that was foreseen from the very early days of the missile age now the high supersonic or hypersonic flight regime beginning around mach 5 corresponds to a set of aerodynamic and thermal phenomena that a vehicle undergoes in that regime this report emphasizes at some length that hypersonic is an attribute not a particular thing for several reasons for one thing the relationship to the speed of sound underscores that this is an atmospheric phenomenon and a focus on the characteristics or the attributes of hypersonic flight is also to emphasize that the hypersonic threat spectrum is not confined to boost glide vehicles to scramjet type cruise muscles remarves there may yet be other possible delivery systems and types fobs space planes and hypersonic trucks among them that partake of high-speed maneuvering characteristics and sustained hypersonic flight in other words the threat's only going to get more diverse and so we need to focus on the characteristics not just one or two types of things the penchant to call everything a hypersonic makes things a little more convoluted and in some ways underestimates the scope of the challenge nevertheless the attributes of hypersonic missiles represent a broader trend in advanced missile rate away from purely ballistic trajectories and toward lower more maneuverable and more uh and less predictable flight it's not just about the speed the more circuitous routes may in fact take longer than a simple ballistic flight but how we approach hypersonic missile defense and the characteristics of hypersonic missile threats will shape the broader missile defense enterprise conversely giving up on hypersonic defense could ultimately result in capitulation for the active missile defense mission finally focusing on the characteristics of atmospheric hypersonic flight points to how we might reformulate the active defense mission as with other air defense threats it's going to require a more limited defended asset list but also as it turns out every feature that makes hypersonic missiles attractive also comes with a cost they bring a different set of vulnerabilities for a defender to exploit and the vocabulary of air defense is different than that of bmd it may be impossible to impose costs upon and shape the character of the threat now as seth said in the opening the offense side of the house is getting a lot more attention this is a relative breakdown in terms of the publicly available budget numbers of offense versus defense again there's a lot that we we can't see here but this is in relative terms uh the kind of uh trade-off you see here in this depiction uh above all the challenge for sensors this is a notional mock-up of a of a 360 radar on guam and the degree to which a low-flying hypersonic glider might under fly what the curvature of the earth limits in terms of sensors this of course also poses a big challenge for the command and control and this is what makes space sensors the single most important program element for the hypersonic defense architecture and this depiction here of course shows that they can't hide uh from elevated elevated sensors of course the sensor challenge uh for hypersonic threats is different than that of of ballistics as this notional depiction illustrates uh looking down upon clutter there is a ir our signature that can be brought up but it's a different challenge and that that's why we have to go get a different kind of sensor architecture but also translates to the uh to the interceptor side of the house and today's interceptors may not be sufficiently agile and haven't sufficient divert to cover the full possible place where maneuvering vehicles of one kind or another may be and that's why you see a movement on a glide phase interceptor that has greater divert capability it flies out further whether that is hit to kill or whether that is blast frag and its effector remains to be determined but these just depict that kind of that kind of option for the current the current program but again the suggestion here is that perhaps we can understand something or appreciate something by framing it in terms of complex air defense hypersonic weapons are fast but they don't quite turn on a dime and if high speed maneuverability is a key feature and attribute it's also a potential weakness the heat and drag imposes limits on their ability to maneuver and they expend energy in doing so and this this suggests that there may be things that can be done to either encourage maneuver and even in the absence of a space sensor layer forward-based uh sensors four-based radars even at the surface uh can do a lot of good yeah you know uh if you want a new idea read an old book as they say uh this is a this is a depiction of uh of a balloon apron uh that was used outside london in both world war one and world war ii the idea being if we could uh aerostats attached to steel nets that would force a german aircraft higher could it be circumvented absolutely did it have an effect on german mission planning according to the germans it did it could be circumvented but it imposed a cost think of this as a part of a layered defense to affect enemy missile planning and channel the threat and because that maneuverability is possible on these threats perhaps there's things that we can do in our defense design to affect their seeming unstoppability but because this is an air defense challenge there's also other failure modes that perhaps are worthy of exploring so again the space sensor layer the glide phase interceptor those are the single most important things to continue now but beca because of the regime in which it is because of the stressing thermal and aerodynamic uh aspects of that there may be other things whether it be blast frag particulates or high powered microwaves that are ways to compensate for the uh for the error budget for the uncertainty of where it may uh end up and so this is a depiction of something like that that area-wide effects as it were be it on the directed energy side or something else because this is a different threat this is also a way to think differently about layered defense and so perhaps different kinds of effectors imposing upon the the design cadence that and the uh increasing the the tolerances within adversary design uh that they don't know which kind of effect they they need to contend with this is also not something that the united states can do alone this is something we must do with numerous allies and partners australia is depicted here that's wumera test range next to a comparable picture of new jersey it's a very large test range and of course the u.s industrial base the uh production of various offensive and defensive uh systems are currently limited by certain wind tunnel uh and other tps bottlenecks there's also been a boom and bust cycle uh in the the workforce all these kinds of things are are well known i just want to leave you with this right here that as indicated before uh the hypersonic missile threat is not a thing it's it's an attribute or a set of attributes that is increasingly coming to characterize the broader spectrum of advanced missile rate in this respect uh how we approach the hypersonic missile threat is going to define i think shape and properly should shape uh the emergence of the mds out of the bmds this is not going to be any one particular silver bullet that fixes this this problem it's going to be a number of different things going to be necessary to to deal with it and i also want to reiterate those policy expectations uh we don't compete in strategic competition with unlimited resources we're going to have to be very selective in terms of what we truly defend that goes for hypersonic missiles that also goes for cruise missiles and the like but but again because there is this increasing diversity of threats arriving in and through the atmosphere framing the problem as complex air defense i suspect will be increasingly useful so again thank you steve for moderating and i'm going to turn it back to you and for a discussion among the panelists thanks all right well i think uh each of our panelists has some opening remarks uh to begin with and is the order which i see sorry kelly starts thank you okay well thanks steve um it's a pleasure to be here today and to see people in real life today i'm just going to give us a quick overview of some of the issues related to the complex air threat before my co-panelists dive into some of the details and i just wanted to briefly start with the threat picture because again this is talking about complex air threats as seth alluded to in addition to ballistic missiles china and russia are believed to have fielded operational hypersonic glide vehicles in around the 2019 to 2020 time frame both countries have stated that the reason that they are developing hypersonic weapons is because of u.s missile defense because they are concerned that their nuclear deterrent has been compromised by the development of missile defense this leaving aside the fact that both countries likely could already penetrate u.s missile defenses if they were to launch a salvo missiles that would overwhelm our interceptors but all things being equal hypersonic weapons are more challenging to defend against than traditional missiles and that's due to a combination of speed maneuverability and altitude of flight so hypersonic weapons and ballistic missiles do both travel at hypersonic speeds but ballistic missiles are traveling along this predictable parabolic trajectory whereas hypersonic weapons are able to maneuver throughout their course of flight it can make it challenging to determine what their intended target is hypersonic weapons also fly at a lower altitude than ballistic missiles and as tom was sort of showing us in in his opening remarks that means that they can under fly the line of sight detection capabilities of ground-based radars it's also challenging to detect them using our existing space-based sensor architecture i think a former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering mike griffin has said previously that hypersonic weapons are 10 to 20 times dimmer than most weapons that we would generally track with existing architecture and so it's really again that combination of speed maneuverability and flight altitude that is increasing the challenges of defending against them the united states is of course defending against them per the 2017 ndaa mda is the executive agent for missile defense they have been since that time exploring a number of options for missile defense they have examined white papers on everything from hypervelocity projectiles directed energy weapons kinetic interceptors electronic attack systems they've looked at looked at some of the longer term options before more recently turning to the glide phase interceptor program which which they believe is intended to give us some level of hypersonic intercept capability by around the mid to late 2020s and as steve mentioned darpa is of course also working on glide breaker which is a technology development program that could potentially give some capability for long range intercept in addition to the kinetic interceptors the fy 22 ndaa did grant nba the authority to begin budgeting for some of the directed energy weapon testing so they are able to look at high-powered microwaves dod is also looking at using laser weapons to potentially intercept ballistic and hypersonic weapons that is certainly a longer term solution their their dod direct energy roadmap states that that's probably um something that we might not have until around the 2030 timeline at the very earliest potentially much later than that now in terms of dollars for these programs the budget for hypersonic defense is comparatively modest this is exactly what tom was mentioning earlier so mda's request in fy 2022 was 248 million dollars darpa requested an additional 7 million dollars for glide breaker but if we look at dod's requests for offensive weapons that's around 3.8 billion dollars so in terms of the hypersonic space writ large certainly the bulk of the funding is going towards that offensive side of the house there are also some some enablers worth mentioning it's the tracking satellites that are in that sda is developing those are intended to cue the mda's hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor and that's to provide more precise target quality data so that you could actually develop a fire solution that would allow you to intercept that weapon i'm sure that stan has some stuff to share on that later and then i'll wrap up with a couple of considerations for policy makers here because there is a diversity of opinion with regard to the cost the technological maturity and really even the necessity of hypersonic missile defense and a lot of that is hinging on where people believe that or what people believe the strategic implications of hypersonic missiles are so for example there are some analysts that believe that the strategic implications of hypersonic weapons are minimal that china and russia and other countries potentially already have the ability to penetrate u.s missile defenses that they have been deterred from doing so and therefore the there is not a urgent need to develop missile defenses those analysts also generally argue that that hypersonic defenses are unaffordable that the technology development costs are too high when we compare those with other defense priorities on the other side there are there are analysts that argue the exact opposite and tommy misawa's report does a great job of sort of spelling out that perspective and those those analysts will argue that that there are actually significant strategic implications for the development of hypersonic weapons that um that hypersonic defenses will actually increase deterrence because that gives you a credible capability to deny an adversary's attack and therefore missile defense is vital to defending the us homeland to protecting forward-based troops and that it's really an essential part of preserving american national security this report also lays out an argument for how we might develop an architecture that would would leverage existing systems such that we could provide missile defense in a cost affordable manner so there are really at least two different perspectives probably combinations in between that that are going to come to the attention of policy makers and that they're going to need to to weigh as they're considering sort of future investments and uh defense capabilities so i'll stop there thanks all right uh who's next go for it all right uh thank you for having me here today um it's really great to be doing this from an actual place instead of my office at home on zoom so i appreciate that um i'm going to echo a couple of kelly's comments um in terms of why hypersonic defense is hard so that we can kind of understand some of the opportunities some of the technology challenges and then finally some of the synergies between offense and defense so hypersonics they allow an adversary to penetrate our an opponent's air and missile defense systems by combining the best attributes of ballistic and cruise missiles i think kelly touched on a few of those you know ballistic missiles um travel very fast whereas cruise missiles they're maneuverable they're unpredictable because they fly in the atmosphere so that gets it two of the three primary challenges associated with hypersonics maneuverability and speed the third altitude i would say is really happenstance just based on the physics of flying at high speeds in the atmosphere you the requirements for achieving lift and minimizing drag and heating force hypersonic systems to operate in what is typically called the the near space regime which is between 20 and 60 kilometers where hypersonics usually flies 20-100 is near space by the way the chinese appear to be approaching hypersonics as a domain like land and sea that they can exploit and see the significance of this altitude regime by often using the terms near space and hypersonics interchangeably so i agree with tom it's not a thing it's an attribute and and some might argue that it's also a domain by the way you can take a look at some of their military writings and some of the papers that they've published particularly at 2017 at the awa conference in china there's a number of papers by an institute called the beijing institute for near space vehicles on hypersonic live vehicles by the way near space can also be very very slow but it's a domain that they they want to dominate the same as land abc what altitude gets you and why it's important is it gets you liftover drag which gets you maneuverability altitude gets you control authority and then it also gets you heating so it results in different technologies in terms of what you need for ballistic missile defense so typically divert attitude control systems for ballistic missile defense but then for cruise missile defense you're using aerodynamic forces control surfaces so hypersonics you know forces you really in that sweet spot of where traditional air and missile defenses lie so you need to you know have a mix of technologies or you know a new approach to missile defense as someone who spent most of their time in the hypersonics weapons world um we don't we don't envy the missile defense agency with the task that they have um but my office the jso is here to help as much as we can in supporting the relevant s t one thing i will note um that there's two things that i think make this task easier with the exception of aircraft they all come down and they tend to come down in the same way so terminal defense for hypersonics can look a lot like that for supersonic but that's not sufficient because we're expecting to see a large number of missiles coming at us so we need a layered defense system because we have too many threats to deal with to depend on a terminal defense but there's also advantages to dealing with a hypersonic threat earlier in trajectories in the terminal phase yeah it can maneuver and it should be in order to avoid those terminal defenses but in the mid-course phase maneuvers come at a cost to range they come at a cost of survivability in terms of the the heating that that's improved on the vehicle and they're typically less stressful during the glide because of those those heating and structural constraints because of the lower dense atmosphere and thermal stresses impose or sometimes because of the limitations of maintaining adequate airflow to a cruise missile engine so hypersonics uh definitely shifts towards near competition near pure competition as being offensive dominant which of course has a whole host of implications for stability and the likelihood for conflict i'm not going to get into that but i think kelly alluded to that a little bit essentially this means it's a lot easier to attack than it is to defend against such an attack so despite the obvious threat as a department we've chosen to focus on offense first because a good offense is the best defense and offense is a lot easier so going into some of the key technologies and technical challenges and then opportunities so the jho we've been focusing on a couple of technologies to support missile defense applications so infrared window technologies and rf antenna technologies so you need to be able to develop materials that allow the right spectral energy to pass through while protecting the seeker from stressing thermal environments aero optics you need to understand sources of optical distortion for ir sensors such as ablation or erosion on windows and what the hypersonic airflow looks like over that window having enough divert capability for containment through either on-demand propulsion or a high lift over drag interceptor you need high temperature materials and manufacturing for directed energy we need to understand what the kill mechanisms are and the effect that they have on materials and vehicle response and control other areas of importance that i i know that mda is looking at over the rise in radars we talked about earlier how hypersonics fly below the radar horizon proliferating leo with ir sensors very important low latency communications for beyond line of sight engagements fusing and blast fragmentation warheads solid dax for naval launch systems systems that require a combination of aero and dax control for higher altitudes for glide phase intercept optimized battle management decision making that's a particularly a challenging area predicted intercept points can we predict where the target is can we predict maneuvers anything that we can do to reduce the three to one g requirement for interceptors and close the kill chain that's a very hard aspect of hypersonic defense having enough maneuverability to get that three to one over match which presents opportunities perhaps for ai and machine learning and then finally on jet interactions for systems that have dax you know those jets can impinge on the vehicle they can interact with each other you need to understand what effect that has on your interceptor so what are the opportunities for offense in some of these investments that we can make in missile defense well what has the maneuverability altitude reach and speed to hypersonic missile hypersonic missile so concepts for defense that can be used to advance often so there are concepts that can be used to advance offensive designs the seekers and guidance are are different the booster may be different but the fundamental aero vehicle can be the same and we've seen a number of proposals using what could be an offensive strike weapon used as an interceptor and vice versa targets mda is really at the forefront of thinking about what future high percent weapon concepts and designs will be because they need to get ahead of the threat and design targets that that interceptors under development today are facing um back you know in 2030 what are those expected threats look like long-range kill chains so a proliferating leo for ir detection and comms for missile defense the offensive strike community needs long-range kill chains as well and so we can leverage that infrastructure we can leverage that architecture materials on manufacturing we have a lot of the same challenges there so my office has been investing in materials and manufacturing relevant to both offensive strike and defense in fact some of our key offensive strike investments are funded through mda because mda has a need for them signature management reduction as we understand the signatures of threat hypersonic vehicles that informs our own designs as well and and what we can do to reduce those signatures and then finally work on characterizing lethality to direct an energy that is something that we're working together on because we need to understand what that looks like in case our adversaries are developing those threats as well so with that i'll turn it over to my next panel member uh stan please sure thanks thanks for inviting me today it's happy to be out here this morning the weather's great here i was on colorado springs last week and had had some big meetings out there and got snowed out one of those days so it's great not to have snow here today um and so i'm happy to talk about what we're doing here at the missile defense agency as far as uh hypersonic defense as kelly mentioned uh congress designated uh missile defense agency as the executive agent for hyper countering hypersonic threats in the uh fy 17 ndaa and we've been working with other dod organizations uh to to develop that technologies and the capabilities to do that uh nba really uses uh uh categorizes hypersonic threats uh in three ways we look at hypersonic uh maneuvering reentry vehicles hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles so when we're talking about hypersonic threats we look at all those together as we're developing our architectures and and like uh like tom uh talked about in uh advanced integra uh integrated air missile defense we we consider cons uh countering hypersonic threats as part of an integrated air and missile defense uh architecture uh md has a number of ongoing activities to increase our knowledge and reduce technology risk uh as a encountering hypersonic threats we're working with academia and industry as well as conducting analysis and executing tests as uh as jillian talked about on both the offensive side and using offensive uh technology as to help us as we do our defensive work we believe countering hypersonic defense uh hypersonic threats is feasible we've looked at it you know as a as as steve mentioned as tom's talked about yeah these threats uh hypersonic threats are are fast uh but we've engaged fast first before ballistic threats are just just another class of hypersonic threats and as julian talked about and and kelly uh it's it's speed and maneuver we look at speed and maneuver that's the key there and maybe these are things that we can use to our advantage when we're looking at uh defensive architectures we've we've re our recommended architecture for countering threats includes elevated infrared sensors integrated command and control and battle management and communications and layered defenses with effectors in both the glide and terminal phases of flight when we look at this we look at it from a detect can control and engage framework uh you know i need to detect the threat first i mean i need to use all the sensors capabilities i have to detect that threat because i need to since it's maneuvering i need to know where he's at i need to be able to pass that data to the right guys to be able to engage it and then i need to have effectors out there to be able to do that be they kinetic or non-kinetic effectors if as as we as we uh look at um the the different capabilities that that we're talking about we we're using as i mentioned we're using l we're looking at elevated infrared sensors to do the necessary uh detection to provide that continuing tracking mda's uh developing a prototype system uh to be launched in 23 that as as steve mentioned the hypersonic ballistic space tracking sensor that capability will provide as far control quality data the data that we're looking at to get down to the effectors so that we can get the effector up so that's in the basket so that it can engage those threats when it gets near them uh we also agree that and we've also looked at as our analysis has shown that engaging in slayers is important we need to be able to engage that throughout throughout its phases of fight we want to challenge the hypersonic threats in the glide phase uh the guide phase of flight as jillian mentioned there's a cost to be imposed there the threats are trying to conserve energy uh we we believe that uh using uh kinetic and non-connect capabilities uh in the glide phase we can affect the uh the hypersonic uh threat and then should that threat not be gotten in the guide phase we do we do have terminal capabilities the sea based terminal program provides an initial terminal defense to counter hypersonic threats certainly additional improvements are scheduled as you go in there and as you engage in the guide phase uh it makes the terminal defense that much easier uh to be able to engage those threats and so really that's that that's a overview from my perspective of what we're doing at the at mda as far as developing an architecture to handle those threats and we'll be happy to talk about that on the panel thank you and mark so thanks steve so so the the disadvantage or slash advantage of being the last speaker is a lot of my points have already been covered but that's a good thing so i actually want to start out i want to start by congratulating csis on this report um so this morning as i was walking to my office i bumped into ndia's president ceo general hall carlyle who i think many in the audience will know hawk was air force four star general he command in the pacific and he commanded the air combat command certainly knows as well or better than any other person on the planet the potential threat that we are facing as a nation as these capabilities are being developed and i mentioned i was going to be in this panel he said well what did you think of the report and i kind of said you know it's so good i wish i had written it so so so tom again congratulations to the team um i think there are a couple of takeaways um i want to start out with the first sentence in this report because i think it's really important because the first sentence and i'm going to read it defending against hypersonic missiles is strategically necessary yes technologically possible yes fiscally affordable but it will not be easy and i think that captures why this is such an important important report and such an important effort hypersonics is in fact hard to defend against that's why we're interested in hypersonics that's why our peer competitors are interested in hypersonics it's ultimately about survivability and also getting inside an opponent's ooda loop observe orient the side and act that's what it does as i like to point out a vehicle that's traveling at hypersonic speeds is traveling at least a mile per second so every second it takes for you to identify every second it takes you to track every second it takes for you to decide that's a mile that that thing has traveled one minute at 60 miles 2 minutes 120 miles at least at a minimum possibly more so that's why these are such challenging threats that's also why we as a nation need to be pursuing hypersonics um i've sometimes been asked the question is the united states simply pursuing this technology because peer competitors are pursuing it no i argue we would have been pursuing this anyway we should have been pursuing this anyway uh just as we pursued stealth this is arguably the american way of war is built on technological superiority so this is a capability that we would want regardless of what peer competitors are doing however the peer competitors are imposing a timeline as was mentioned they've already gone in some cases the deployment the chinese were very happy to show us some of their capabilities as they they did a military parade in 2019. uh vladimir putin himself has bragged about some of the russian capabilities so we know there's a timeline there is a race and whether or not we choose to participate in that race we've got competitors who are who are who are already marching to the finish line so that's that's part of the imperative um i'll also point out you know often i'm asked the question so so why do we why do we want hypersonics and and i like to turn that question around which is why wouldn't we want this capability i can offer some some explanations why we wouldn't want a hypersonic capability of if it's too expensive so cost is important if it reduces if the price of speed maneuverability is a reduction of other attributes for example range then it then that factors in the trade-offs but but i'm actually convinced that i think our our competitors have also figured out that they can have the attributes of hypersonics that can have the benefits without a significant significant financial impact they will not be contrary to common belief i don't think they'll be that much more expensive especially when the cost of effects are considered so i'm going to come back to this report and why i think it's so important um in 2016 a couple of us on this panel were involved in a report of the national academies from the air force studies board that looked at defending against hypersonic systems and it was a report that i i gosh i've been on so many reports there's so many panels and been involved with so many of those sorts of activities that one really seemed to resonate more than almost any other one that i've i've been involved in um i i checked yesterday and it had as as as of yesterday it had almost 5400 downloads which is remarkable for national academies report usually it's a couple of hundred maybe a thousand uh by the way a lot of those downloads were in our pure competitors locations so the national academies actually gives you a board a a map that shows you where it's being downloaded but i think back to that effort so we began that effort we actually started that effort in 2013 and then we started it in 2015 and there were at the time there were a few notable events so remember we visited one of the defense laboratories this would have been this would have been late 2015 so we visited a defense laboratory and they we they we met with their internal committee that was addressing defense against hypersonics and at first we were really impressed that this laboratory actually had a committee that was considering this until the committee admitted that they had only been formulated a week before we arrived and they were formulated in response to the fact that we'd ask them questions about how are you defending against so they weren't even really thinking about it similar experience at the time we had a this is again 2015 time frame we had a a briefing with the missile defense agency and much to mda's credit their leadership came and spoke to us and said this is a part of the mission we think we should own but time did not own it and so now i fast forward to where we are today first the missile defense agency owns the mission and is pursuing it aggressively although we can argue whether it's sufficient resources but this is a mission that they're taking very seriously two working in close conjunction with the space development agency to handle what i think is the important first part of defense which is seeing and tracking the target if you don't see it how do you stop it so that's absolutely critical and and again i think we see the work of the hptss as being the that first important step so clearly a lot has changed i want to come back to some of the other great aspects of this report so one things that i really that are truly resonated with is and and tom mentioned it in his opening comments as well hypersonics isn't just one thing you know i'll often be in in in discussions where people say oh we'll we'll defend against the hypersonic or they're going to launch the hypersonic it's it's not a hypersonic hypersonic is an adjective and it applies to a wide range of of weapons and and systems which this report correctly points out it also points out that there are some weapons that we should be more concerned about than others um from my my own perspective it's really the tactical systems that i worry about the most it's the things that can you know hold our air bases at risk things that can hold our aircraft carriers and our surface ships at risk those are the ones that i think are the real impactful systems because those are the ones that allow a potential adversary to use a tactical system but have strategic implications imagine a hypersonic missile swarm that could sink an aircraft carrier that's really quite a capability and that leads to us asking the question are we willing to risk an aircraft carrier say in a potential scenario it also would allow a pure competitor to control the narrative plant doubt in the minds of some of our allies would the united states risk an aircraft carrier for example risk and air base because of the the being held at risk by by a hypersonic attack so if i do a priority order and what i want to defend against um tactical really comes out first and and i think that's important that we pay attention to that um the end of the summer there was a fair amount of reporting on uh on an alleged uh uh chinese launch of of a fractional orbital bombardment system and immediately i heard people saying oh my gosh we need to figure out ways to defend against it i wonder if that is a little bit of a watch my right hand while my left hand does something important right and the left hand i think in this case are the tactical systems and so so tom to the the to the extent that you highlight that in this report i think absolutely critical um let me let me wrap up with with uh resonant again with some of the comments that are made you know jillian's comment about the best defense may in fact be a strong offense and and we can't lose sight of that these two sides of the coin are indeed very very much coupled if nothing else we need to learn how to defend against these systems by developing our own offensive systems that will give us the knowledge that we need to defend against them but also it is possible that at the end of the day the only defense we have is taking out a hypersonic launch system or launch capability with our own hypersonic uh weapon system so we cannot lose sight for the sight of that and then finally i'll emphasize that one of the one of the most most startling elements of what our peer competitors are doing is that they're clearly investing for the long haul um we see that in their investments in their workforce and their universities in their test capabilities and that's important for us as well and so the work that for example the joint hypersonic transition office is doing in investing in workforce the work that the test research manager resource management center is doing and investing on new test capabilities we need to be in this for the long haul as well this can't be a few years effort we deploy a couple of systems and then we move on because this is the future of warfare and we need to be in this race so steve let me stop there all right um well first of all thank you the panel and tom uh you know i've been writing about hypersonic defense for a few years but this is um you know the most in-depth discussion i've seen uh certainly available in the public domain um so i appreciate that um now in regards to the report uh well i i and i should say uh plea please keep the questions coming in i've seen them and uh we're gonna get to those in just a few minutes but i do have a couple questions i really have to throw it at you guys um one of the uh really interesting arguments i thought in the report is that uh it because it sort of widens the aperture uh with hypersonic defense uh with all these other capabilities and these very sophisticated and sometimes even creative types systems you mentioned one with a fractional orbital bombardment system sort of coming back you know what used to be the russian capability now the chinese demonstration you know there's other things you keep saying you know the combination of uh drone and uav and the sort of ambiguity of that even with like the chinese wz8 and uh and so forth and then there's new propulsion concepts like rotating detonating rotating detonation engines solid fuel ram jets uh i mean there's just um just plethora of things and that the argument the report is that this should that as as this architecture develops for this new thing of hypersonic defense that this should drive uh a rethink of of how we approach uh the missile defense architecture in general including for ballistics so uh uh stan if you know what do you think about that that argument in the report and how is that uh manifesting itself uh if at all in the mda strategy well thanks for the question when we when we look at i'll i'll say that uh over the last year we've been uh looking at uh defending a lot of different assets uh guam per se has been in the in in the news uh missile defense agency's been at the forefront looking at that uh with the department and we as we've looked at that uh along with hypersonics what what i think we've come to discover is our adversaries are are looking for that asymmetric advantage they're looking at different capabilities and how they can use them i think what we've what we've uh come out with is that we can we need to look at all those we can't we can't uh ignore one or the other because our adversaries will use that capability as a way to to to create a hole so that they can they can have a they can get their uh their capabilities through their their their their will through and so as as as we've been looking at the architecture we know that we need to make sure that the architecture is flexible we need to make sure that um that as we look at it we're we're looking at both uh ballistic hypersonic cruise missile defense how do we integrate those architecture together we're working with the department as we go forward is to make sure that we're looking at that whole spectrum and how do we do that um i i won't say that you know you're not gonna have a silver bullet and say this one thing is gonna solve all those problems i think it's a number of different capabilities but you need to leverage uh the sensors that you have the command control system that you have and then the effectors that you have out there and be able to command that across the battle space to make sure that you can handle those threats and i think that's that's what we're looking at as we as we look in the future these kind of threats anybody else want to contribute there uh tom oh sure uh yeah so um i i'd say i really like how um tom in in the report kind of laid out the different types of hypersonic weapons and and kind of you know what really is a hypersonic weapon and what's you know maneuvering reentry vehicle or an arrow ballistic when i was involved with the intelligence community we got ourselves wraps around the axle so many times trying to to bend things and there are reasons why things needed to be binned but mostly it was because you know we were concerned that um if if mda for example was developing an architecture or interceptors based on you know one type of threat and rather than the spectrum of threats or or characterizing a threat okay this is a hypersonic weapon and the category is too broad that you they would not be able to adequately address the threat so we we were always um you know making sure to understand the nuances and the differences and you know we're seeing particularly from china that like i said they they see it as a domain so yes you have live vehicles you have cruise missiles but you have things that you know can mix both um if you go back to the 1990s at one of the russian um air shows they they showed um a glide vehicle with a scramjet underneath and so these concepts aren't new you can look at their papers they have gliding scramjet vehicles they have glide vehicles with scramjets they have glide vehicles with liquid rockets solid rocket propulsion there's a whole host of propulsion systems that they're they're working on you know you just you go to that 2017 conference and there's so many papers on many different propulsion systems so i think um you know when we look at defending against these threats we we need to understand really the the nuances and why these are different from a classification and an identification tracking standpoint as well as an intercept standpoint and design our struct our architecture and our interceptors i guess to be agnostic to the the type of system that it is um and i will say kind of going back a couple of years um i i thought it was important to have clarity in terms of you know what is really a hypersonic weapon and what's not because um if you go back seven years or so you know the df-26 was a a big thing and we are just starting to think about hypersonics and just starting to think about the defense challenge and everybody would glom on to the shiny object that was the df-26 and and and try and you know characterize that and the threats against it while ignoring that the glide vehicles and the cruise missiles have very different challenges and we're going to require different solutions so i'll just say briefly first of all return the complement your 2016 report that mark i think you're the executive director of and jillian you're a part of one thing i really liked about it is that the title said high-speed maneuverable threats right so often in this space i feel like i'm standing with jargon yelling stop you know we need when we need that we're talking about specific delivery systems we're talking about specific things say what you mean right as opposed to calling it this out the other thing and so what you've just described there and jillian you just highlighted the mixing of a scramjet thing with a glider i mean and this is why we spend a good bit of time on the report you know talking about the mixing and matching because if we don't get it right conceptually in terms of framing the problem now right that's going to us in terms of developing the solution by understanding the problem so it is fundamentally a spectrum and i like the word agnostic in terms of thinking about that a lot there's i mean lots of things the full diversity of this of this missile renaissance that you know julian when you're talking about the the the you know high atmosphere domain for instance i mean i think about the the inter-service rivalries in the 1950s about whether the air force gets to own the aerospace domain well guess what now we have the space force versus the air force so those fights may yet you know be hashed out and so figuring out this spectrum um and appreciating the the enormous diversity yet to come i think is one reason why it's important to focus on mark did you want to yeah so so tommy i uh absolutely spot on and i i've actually often wondered if our competitors use our bureaucratic uh stove pipes against us you know put a put a scramjet on a glider and then was it a cruise missile that's or is it is it a glide vehicle and and and i i i just i suspect they are we we need to get past that um uh you know to the points that were previously made and i think an excellent point in this report um it needs to be a layered defense um you you quoted uh dick callion in in your opening comments and the italian is has actually likened this threat uh philosophically to the kamikaze threat and the way we defeated the kamikaze threat with was indeed with a layered defense and i think that this the same thing applies here we need multiple it can't be a single solution it has to be adaptable that's the perfect segue for the question i was going to ask next which is the sort of level of effort that we're talking about here as we talk about broadening this capability from i mean in a way a silver bullet solution that is a gbi ground-based interceptor or thaad or sm-3 for a very specific threat set to this you know very more flexible architecture with new sensors in this in space multiple different constellations it seems multiple different interceptors on the ground high power microwaves uh you know you see that ov1 slide with a a couple of gpis you know degrading the threat as it comes in you know then hyper microwave shooting it with electrons and then finally a you know an sm-6 or something uh getting it in the terminal phase uh so i mean you know we've spent all this time and all this money to create what we have today um in comparison to something like that to an sm-3 or thaad type system what kind of level of effort is going to be required to bring this about sorry stan if i can pick on you again well certainly it's it's as we said it's not it's not going to be easy it's going to be a challenge you know as i said uh detect control engage is where we're looking at for as far as the architecture so you do need to see it we do need to have a capability to see these uh threats as they uh as they maneuver and glide to be able to do that so you need to have those capabilities there as well um that we we have command and control capabilities we believe we can leverage command and control capabilities that we have to be able to get data to where it needs to go and then and then as we're talking about this is a kind of a different regime it's kind of the regime in the seam if you ask me we know how to hit we engage things that we have capabilities engaged in a thick atmosphere we have capabilities to engage things in space but this near space is that in between layer that you know you keep it's not easy to transition between the two so how how do you develop your your capabilities either the kinetic interceptors or not connecticut receptors to do that um you know i i think the level of ever right now is kind of on par with what we we need to be doing we need need to keep advancing and then as as we have done in the missile defense agency we spiral the capabilities we we develop a capability and we increase that capability as we go out and make it better to be able to handle those threats anybody else want to i just want to chime in i want to remind that you know the missile defense agency is also a science agency and they're actually doing some phenomenal work i know sherry feth and her folks in the s t office are doing uh incredible work on developing sensor technology and things that will enable the capabilities that stan just alluded to so you have to actually look beyond the programmatic investments to look across the broad range of of activities uh across the whole department to really get a full sense of what's being invested all right um well um i just have a couple more questions um you know so we've talked a lot about hypersonic light vehicles there's a lot of things going on with hypersonic cruise missiles uh you know russia's got at least three or maybe even four different programs that i'm aware of um you know not including even brahmos what they're doing with india with brahmos ii france has a new scramjet-powered cruise missile for their nuclear deterrent you see these things popping up everywhere south korea just announced theirs a couple of months ago so what is being done about that how much of this hypersonic glide vehicle architecture can apply to that how much is going to be new just specifically to deal with that particular threat well so so from from from our perspective as i mentioned before that we look at hypersonic threats we look at all of them we look at the maneuvering ballistic the uh glide vehicle and cruise missile there as we develop the architecture we want an architecture that can be able to handle all those you know when you say christmas a lot of people think of when you say cruise missile people immediately go to subsonic cruise missiles cruise missiles are flying low in the atmosphere uh hard to detect uh these hypersonic cruise missiles don't do that they can't fly in that thick atmosphere because of the heating because they're going so fast so they have to fly higher so what by doing that and they'll still be heated as as are the other systems uh again we should be we we want to be able to detect them uh with uh our sensor capability be that overhead sensors over the ryzen sensors whatever sensors that we can get on them terrestrial sensors if they're in the area we want to be able to find them and and and send the data across the network using whatever uh com layer that we that we need to get the data to the right effector that be able to do that and then use the right effector against that it be that uh high power microwaves in the in in in a mid defense uh a glide phase interceptor or terminal interceptors uh depending on where the threat's going so i think i think when we look at the architecture what we're trying to do with the architecture we're trying to make sure it's flexible enough to be able to handle all those different kind of capabilities and be able to plug in those different effectors to be able to handle the different uh regimes that they're going to need to operate in well and jillian i know ghto has funded uh offensive uh scramjet powered capabilities with scifire with high five high flight two um you know do any of those technologies you know can you harvest them to apply to the defensive system uh i i think some and maybe maybe not for a first generation system but um i i could imagine you know eventually a scramjet powered interceptor so the very very original high-fly um was designed as a as an anti-air well yeah anti-missile defense interceptor yeah missile defense interceptor so but you know they you know changed it and eventually became a strike weapon um yeah i could also imagine that you could have a hypersonic vehicle that's carrying sub-munitions those submunitions they don't have to hit things on the ground um they could hit things in the air um and then i i guess also just to get back and then i think there's some other you're just understanding the basic arrow maybe some of the materials um maybe some of the manufacturing maybe some of the guidance algorithms or some of the secret development you know if you're particular if you're doing an ir seeker maybe some of the window and antenna materials but kind of getting back to the idea of you know hypersonic cruise missile versus hyperline glide vehicle for reasons i don't really understand for some reason ballistic missile threats always seem to get more attention than cruise missile threats and i had a manager who who once kind of um you know said you know advanced conventional weapons are weapons of actual destruction you know they they are actually used um and yet for some reason we always seem to pay way more attention to the glide vehicles and so it always i always get a little frustrated years ago when i sort of see mda talk about just the glide vehicles and never really acknowledge the cruise missiles which are a very real threat and there are some differences about them but i am happy to see that mda is capturing those differences and is looking at technologies that can be applied to both because the danger is that you look at a hypersonic glide vehicle and you say well that's higher that's faster so if we got that covered we got the cruise missiles covered and that's not true because the cruise missiles they fly you know in the deeper atmosphere so if you had an interceptor that you know came over the top then it's going to have a harder time getting down or if you have a sensor system that's looking that has a floor that's designed for the glide vehicles you might miss the cruise missiles because they are dimmer and they are you know lower in the atmosphere so there's some nuances and there's some differences that need to be accounted for but from what i've seen from mda they are accounting for them well kelly i should ask you about congressional views there's been certainly some reporting by me and others about where the funding is for hypersonic defense and you know but you know what's the feeling in congress about where the funding levels are right now and where they're going yeah i think if we look at legislation that congress has passed um in addition to establishing mda as the executive agent in the fy 17 ndia that nda also directed mda to establish the program of record for hypersonic defense and that account has been plused up by congress every single year since fy 2019. last year i think they plus 70 million this year they plussed it up 62 million dollars both authorizers and appropriators support a 62 million dollar plus up which was mda's unfunded priority list request for for glide breaker so i think if we predict the future based on past trajectory i think uh there's likely to be continued congressional support for hypersonic defense all right well let me uh get to some of the questions from the audience um to start out with uh this one comes from tony capacio at bloomberg and he addresses it to director bussey but i'm very interested in some other um uh comments here especially yours uh dr lewis uh this is both the d-o-t and e-d-o-t and e in its annual report and the pentagon ig in a report last week have raised serious questions about dod's ability to adequately operationally test hypersonic weapons and defenses against adversary weapons what's the transition office's overall response to both [Laughter] so i i don't have a response i i don't think i've even seen that report yet but i you know i do understand that um flight testing hypersonic systems and you know flight testing defenses against hypersonic systems is certainly more challenging and you know i do understand that certainly from the research development acquisition standpoint that we we have capacity and and throughput issues um and you know we have capability issues when it comes to our next generation systems so i i guess perhaps i'm not surprised that they have that assessment but um i can't really come in any uh response at all i i haven't seen the the report either um certainly from from our perspective we we do a lot of testing and we have a pretty robust testing program we've uh as we as as part of the whole hypersonic effort we've we've canvassed uh the department academia uh country looking for uh capabilities to do testing as well make sure we we categorize those and as we talk with our international partners we look at them as well and discuss guess guess those aspects with them as well so i you know certainly you know as we develop capabilities we certainly want to have a robust testing program and that's what we'll do mark so first hi tony um i'm i'm going to argue that our test infrastructure is frankly right now inadequate um it's one of the things that's limiting our advances our developments on the offensive side as well as the defensive side and and it's inadequate across the board so for example wind tunnels i mean at the same time the chinese were building up their wind tunnel capability and they were freely bragging about it you can go to youtube and they've got videos of their wind tunnels we were shutting down wind tunnels at about the same rate that they were building new wind tunnels all right we're trying to reverse that trend trmc is actively involved but still we're in a situation there we've got programs climbing all over each other to get time in a wind tunnel and and why has that become bad because imagine you get your slot in the wind tunnel you've got maybe your one week of testing something goes awry you lose a day of testing you need more time sorry you can't have that there's another program coming in or you see something interesting in the data and you want to do some more tests sorry it's booked up for the next four months you're going to have to come back then and that believes two years right so that's on the wind tunnel now ground is even worse so we find ourselves competing with so many other programs and i'm sorry flight is even worse we find ourselves competing with so many other flight programs when we try to do hypersonic testing and and it's the same situation you get your slot to test if you miss that slot for any reason you're not ready in the day of the test sorry it's going to be months before you can test again i'll take it one step further we don't write we do not have right now a way to have repeated access into the hypersonic flight test regime that's something that we need we need reusable systems that allow us to enter the hypersonic flight test envelope come back let us look at things that we just tested let us trade things out swap them out and fly them again we had that in the 1960s with the x-15 rocket plane we don't have that today and that's one of the things that's slowing us down i'll just add that that tracks very much with the congressional perspective that i'm seeing coming out of recent ndaas and sas committee report on the fy22 ndia explicitly called out their concern about inadequate ground infrastructure um and so i think you know they've been trying to push for an acceleration of testing and there there's been numerous statements about how this is insufficient to at least meet the program goals as stated by nda the services industry etc and my my colleague guy norris i had did some great coverage you know 10 years ago with x51 and just the the challenge it took using a b-52 as that platform and trying to get that that launch speed correct with with the you know the kind of analog uh controls thrust controls is i mean takes quite a bit of effort just to do that uh so it's a very creaky infrastructure as you said it is and you know the b52 is a great example the youngest b-52 in the fleet is actually older than i am which is quite old and and you know they're practically uh singing incantations and burning incense just to get all eight engines started on the the test vehicle just to get it off the ground so we need to make that more robust huh i'd like to see those uh on youtube it's metaphorical though yeah uh well there's a really good question here about uh something we haven't talked a lot about uh today it's c2 bmc um you know will it be critical for processing a volley of hypersonic threats will you leverage the existing c2 bmc we have at i think a shrever with 100 missile defense brigade at least for the national or bmds or do you have to create a new command and control system well the the the idea is to use c2bmc cqbmc is a good command and control system that's out there we have c2bmc deployed in a number of places across the world it's not just for homeland defense the regions have c2bmc as well both in ucom centcom and indo pacom uh i have cqbmc and you know it's there's there's suites that support each of the regional combatant commands um certainly as we get into hypersonic threats we'll need to make sure that there'll be certain some modifications necessary to c2pmc to be able to to be able to pass do that command and control but we view that c2bmc is going to be critical to be able to do that command control function that i talked about in some respects i mean this is the whole jad c2 conversation right it's because you want to have multi-service multi-domains coming in going out and it just happens that that's one of the things that's been doing the the joint and multi-domain thing before it was cool well we've been talking a lot about the interceptors i have a question about the sensors and the architecture that is optimal uh for that and just what your opinions are because a couple years ago i mean i we were told it's proliferated low earth orbit that's the way to go need 50 satellites to create the stereoscopic image and and use that uh optical links transmitting the data back and forth um but you know recently we've seen uh space force invest in medium earth orbit and the report calls that out as a as a possibility strong possibility or at least a good possibility but what's the thinking now about what what the right sensor architecture should be as well i should also mention that the report also proposes uh this airborne layer um that is uh not necessarily dedicated to hypersonic defense but feeds into it so well so so from our perspective you know from from as we develop the architecture i want to use any sensors i can get you know we just don't see we will never have enough sensors to do what we need to do so so we've been working closely with sda and the space force as we've developed this architecture we work with them on the report where we're going to work with them on what do we need to do next after hbtss demonstrations and what how that architecture is going to look at look like in the future we've looked at other sensors as well we know that terrestrial sensors can provide us some data as as we do that as well you know we've modified some of our sensors to be able to provide us hypersonic data we know that the aegis weapon system can do that as well we've seen it in tests to be able to provide us data and close the fire control loop as well and so so um we're we're confident in in the sensor architecture that we're looking at as i said we need to look at it all we need to we need to figure out what's out there be able to bring that in c2bmc's a good capability because that's what it does it brings in all those different sensors to be able to provide us that integrated fire control data that we can get down to those effectors uh another question is coming from voice of america on uh north korea and i thought that might be an interesting way of looking at a sort of a very specific application considering that you know there was a hypersonic light vehicle test back in september that never actually reached hypersonic speed or so we've been told um there was a more recent test with what appeared to be more something more like a maneuvering reentry vehicle with hypersonic speed but obviously just in that terminal phase of maneuver um so um you know to the extent uh members of this panel can comment on it um what is our capability against something like that uh today uh the marv threat in particular uh or some sort of nascent uh hgv threat from a rogue state um say for example north korea on the korean peninsula i'm gonna answer this by way of going back to frankly some of the things julian was talking about in terms of the aeroballistics and things like that i mean you just referenced well maybe it was they called it a hypersonic thing but maybe it wasn't i mean at some point i think these guys are trolling us uh you know because our penchant for calling everything hypersonic and getting up and hot and bothered about it they think they can scare us you know that folks have been testing maneuverable depressed trajectories shape trajectories what have you for a while now including what the you know this colloquially called the kim sander kind of a iskander looking thing kn23 or whatever they they call it but um so so there are lots and lots of less predictable quasi-ballistic things out there and do they stress sure because they fundamentally stress the lack of certainty about what your predicted impact point is going to be so again i see these things on the spectrum i don't see it as a as a single thing but this is why and we kind of tie this back to steve to your earlier question about kind of the scope of effort and all that sort of thing as stan said we don't have the luxury of just picking one thing or the other we have to assume that they're going to attack us wherever in whatever constructed way suits them best we have to contend with all that we have to assume that the stressors that the the characteristics are only going to continue to get to get worse we want to get out there and glide phase with multiple layers and multiple simultaneous effects but we have to get we have to assume that we need terminal uh terminal effects as well because we're not going to be able to predict it even even in glide as well so so i again i see i see those particular things i think we need to stay focused and we keep keep our heads here um uh that those things aren't particularly new again these things have been around for since the dawn of missile age uh so a question has come in what is the single most important technological or industrial capability advance we need to make in 2022 to acceler accelerate progress in uh it says missile defense but hypersonic defense in this case capabilities all right single most um i i would say that everything we're doing in terms of the interceptors the strike weapons isn't going to make a difference unless we have sufficient quantities so having a dozen hypersonic missiles um regardless of whether they're really hypersonic or not um that isn't going to scare anyone um so i think the the biggest technological or industrial capability we can invest in would be to increase our production rates particularly of the thermal protection systems and added manufa thermal protection systems for glide vehicles and additive manufacturing for cruise missile engines i think those are the long pulls in the tent when it comes to production those are the things that take the longest if we can reduce the production time and increase the cap the capacity and and you know double triple quadruple those production numbers i think that's how we'll really make a difference and that those investments i i think need to start now um in order for them to be there when we're ready with a program of record or to start cranking out real numbers you know can we can we expect any of those investments in the near future i'm always optimistic i i don't know if those investments are what they need to be but it's a i would expect it would be a pretty big number okay uh just the observation that the the pb 22 on that front was a good sign i don't just mean for jhto but you know it wasn't like the the trend line went down right this was a new administration and i i i know you mentioned or and seth mentioned that meeting of the ceos and the sec deaf and devsec deaf last week but i mean that those kind of things spell to me continuity of effort as opposed to discontinuity and the recurrence of the you know bounce back and forth uh fang that's been a problem in the past yeah so i was gonna if i could quote richard hallian for a third time so so dick was the one who i think first pointed out this 15-year periodicity of hypersonics and i know when i was in the pentagon we were stepping up our hypersonic efforts i i was getting questions from industry well is it real this time and i'd say yes this time it is real but to echo tom's comment um i think the most important story coming out now is when the new administration came in they stayed the course you know the the 22 budget was something that we had put in place when i was in the building and we were kind of waiting with baited breath to see if it if it held and indeed it did um i'd like to see increased funding in a few areas i think the ghdo should have its budget doubled you can't say that i can say that um you know we we need to continue pressing in a number of fronts but by and large as a nation it's pretty clear we're continuing to move forward in this area um i'm also curious on the allies and partners side where they uh can contribute uh to this this type of effort i mean there's there's several different levels of that there's uh industrial contribution uh australia is already on the offensive side of that um there's ip that they can bring stuff that they're doing that we don't have um there's indigenous you know importing what we have or developing their own uh and then just basing allowing us to put our stuff where they are um you know so uh to the to the extent what what is in that in that area what is necessary and what is being done well well from our perspective i know that um we engage with our with our allies we've engaged with a number of them on on different technology efforts we're we're actually actively going out there and talking about things that that they're interested in things that we're interested in to make sure we get mutual benefit out of that as we go into talk with our allies certainly we're looking for opportunities to be able to partner with them on different either technologies or capabilities we know that we're going to operate in a coalition we're always going to operate in a coalition environment and so so to be able to be better integrated with them as well and make sure that we're we're doing that integration uh efforts uh agencies looking at that as well as when we talk to these guys and when we do testing uh with that with our allies can we expect to see a sci-fi you know like thing on the defensive side or would that even be of interest it's hard to say what i'm really interested in in terms of well at least with australia is um they're the world experts in high frequency radars and they have invested in a number of technologies there they they they understand the phenomenologies i think there's a lot we can leverage there to have a diverse set of sensors to look at the threat and i i think in in general what we can expect to see on the missile defense side is engagements like that you know use of their their test range it's a it's a great place to to test counters against hypersonics and just with our allies in in general in addition to basing um there's always the concern that whenever we develop whatever architecture we have needs to be interoperable and that our allies need to be able to use it as well because frankly if we're going to go into the indo pacom region and there's a conflict we're not going to be fighting by ourselves we're going to have multiple allies there they're going to be operating systems they're going to be communicating across it and so everybody needs to be able to use the same system so i'm i'm not really seeing um i haven't seen the a strong desire or you know for a um a joint you know from scratch missile program but there's certainly all these other opportunities i would just point out i mean one reason we really highlight the international cooperation thing you see so much i think interest among australia and japan uh europeans kind of get the nose under the tent on the strike side uh and then you know there's there's reports out there on the on the defense side as well i would highlight about a month ago about japan i mean they're kind of inching towards it right trying to figure that out figure out what what the right uh place is there but i mean i i guess my prediction here is that of course they're going to get involved they're going to want to get involved and probably not much longer for the simple fairly basic straightforward reason that at the end of the day these are missiles right and as these things mature and proliferate we're not going to call them you know fancy acronyms hypersonic to say that we're just going to call them missiles if they truly proliferate and so anybody who's interested in the act of defense mission is going to come around to having to be concerned with the active hypersonic defense mission if the trends continue the way they are well one of the things i really enjoyed in the report was reading all the different things that you could do against a hypersonic glide vehicle uh things i'd never even thought of the dust defense was uh i thought really interesting it reminded me of the old kamikaze approach where you know you just put up a wall of lead in the sky and let it fly into it um you know but um i do have some questions about that you know uh how big is this like you know cloud of particulates that you sort of explode in the air where does it go after after it uh does its job against the hypersonic threat or if it if it does uh does it get sucked into turbine engines and how do you manage that um so anyways any thoughts about that and what this is about is throwing up concepts that are that are designed as i said earlier to compensate for the uncertainty problem designed to to to compensate for the uh for the error budget uh as it were and so uh could be blast frag it could be uh particulates it could be uh like i said like different kinds of directed energy uh but the threat's getting harder uh we're gonna have to keep pushing in this direction i think mark may have some things to say about this but these are aerodynamic objects uh one of the reasons that hypersonic flight sustained hypersonic flight that doesn't end catastrophically has been challenging is to managing that and so how can we monkey with the the delicate flow problems that are happening at those high speeds and i i interested to to impose costs this is an opportunity to impose costs on the bad guys uh with as many different problems as possible is there any um do you see dust defense fitting into the missile defense architecture [Laughter] certainly certainly uh we're looking at we're looking at a lot of different capabilities uh connecticut non-kinetic uh and also near-term and far term as we look at it we what can we get out there quickly to the warfighter as fast as we can we're looking for capabilities like that we're also uh testing and evaluating capabilities that are more long-term uh to be able to handle this threat as it evolves in the future so so yeah could death's defense be there i i don't know it's it's certainly an option uh as well as is high-powered microwaves directed energy and and connect build vehicles we're looking at all that stuff to see what what makes the best sense as part of the architecture but we want to be able to make an architecture again flexible enough that i can take any of that stuff and be able to plug it into the architecture to be able to handle the threat and in layers because again it comes down to layers how do i layer that defense so that i can i can i can weed out the threats so that i make the the end game uh easier to handle like we did in world war ii at the kamikazes which i think is a great example well another uh example like that in the report is the modular warhead concept uh that you know could have submunitions could have a kill vehicle could have a sensor it could have an hpm payload uh you know um you know i guess uh you know how far out is that kind of capability uh or and is it uh from a government perspective uh you know in your experience is it desirable so i i would say we are interested in asymmetric defenses so you know things that impose the cost on the adversary rather than you know result in a significant cost to us because defense is expensive it's these missiles where interceptors were and the whole you know architecture is going to cost more than it costs for them to launch their system particularly if um you know they could just overwhelm us with a number of short range or medium range ballistic missiles that aren't maneuvering so i think you know if if dust solutions um can provide that you know that cost benefit um i i think we're interested um but you know as the s t person i have a number of thoughts and questions in my mind you know it depends on how you would employ this if you know the way you employ it um could you really have a significant impact on um command and control or how we actually use it you know there's a lot of technical you know kind of niche technical areas that would need to be thought out and analyzed um if we were to go down that route but it's i think there's certainly interest just because it has the potential to be asymmetric sure trade a low-cost solution on our on our side that cost them however i will point out the most expensive weapon is the weapon that results in you're losing so so we have to pay there are times when we are actually going to have to invest in the expensive weapon because it it will prevent us from losing an even more expensive asset or possibly the engagement well i think you know today we covered um a lot of ground on the interceptor side sensors c2 bmc and just this whole idea of of how the threat is evolving and um what needs to be done and how to do it so there's going to be a lot more uh written and talked about on this topic i'm sure in the future so it's good to have this uh this discussion today uh thank you thanks everybody for joining i think we just have a few seconds left before they turn us off but it's been it's been a great discussion thank you [Music] you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 200,700

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: Tn-C4uMWnyY

Length: 91min 0sec (5460 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022