As the military budget soars towards $1 trillion and beyond, it is always worth reviewing the money-eating programs powering its climb. The Pentagon and its corporate partners do their best to divert us, the taxpayers, from pondering how little defense we get for our defense dollar. But every so often a disaster becomes too egregious to conceal behind the protective cover of a bought-and-paid-for congress and servile mainstream media. Most people are now aware, for example, of the $1.7 trillion F-35 atrocity, or the pathetic saga of the Navy’s Little Crappy Ships. Fewer may learned the latest chapter in the decades-long fantasy of hypersonic weapons, one that stretches back to the days of Dyna-Soar, a ‘50s program that ran up a $1 billion tab (real money in those days) without ever leaving the drawing board.
On March 29, the air force announced that it is abandoning work on Lockheed’s Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW. This is, or was, a missile launched from a high flying bomber and boosted by an attached rocket motor to speeds five times the speed of sound or more. Discarding the rocket the missile glides at lightning speed to its target, all the while maneuvering unpredictably to confuse and evade enemy defenses.
Hopes for the weapon, potentially a $5.3 billion buy, ran high. As recently as March, 2020, Under-Secreary of Defense for Research and Development Michael D. Griffin stated that the day the weapon would enter service was "close at hand.” This happy news was relayed to President Trump, who boasted of the “super-duper missile, seventeen times faster than what [Russia and China] have right now. It’s just gotten the go-ahead."
ARRWs in the Ocean
Sad to say, none of this was true.
Over the next two years, the missile flunked multiple tests. Try as they might, Lockheed and the air force could not get the booster rocket engines to ignite. Test ARRWs rained down into the Pacific test range off Point Mugu, California. True, two tests in 2022 were reported as successful, meaning that the missiles did at least fly, though it is unclear how far they flew, and whether or not they maneuvered successfully. On March 13 this year they tried again. It was another failure, this one apparently so conclusive that within weeks Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, a former Raytheon executive, pulled the plug on the program. He was tight lipped about what had gone so wrong, saying only the test “was not a success. We did not get the data we needed.” But it must have been pretty bad.
Air force hypersonic efforts will now focus on an alternate approach, the High Altitude Cruise Missile (HACM) being developed by Raytheon, for which $380 million has been allocated in the coming year. Instead of the missile relying on a booster rocket to propel it to hypersonic speeds, the HACM will be powered throughout its flight by a “scramjet” engine.
If history is any guide, this will not yield a happier result. In a scramjet engine, air passes through the engine at supersonic speed and is ignited by the fuel to generate thrust. But the slightest perturbation in the airflow—as during maneuvers—leads to shockwave disruption in the smooth supersonic flow of air. This induces a sharp increase in pressure, and in extremis to the explosive breakup of the engine. This was the apparent reason for the almost instant failure of two out of the three tests of a previous attempt to develop a scramjet missile, the experimental X-51 “Waverider” prototypes earlier this century, leading to the cancellation of that project while attention turned to the now abandoned Lockheed program.
Lockheed Never Loses
Despite the ARRW debacle, all is not lost for Lockheed, of course. Notwithstanding the gliding hypersonic missiles’ untrammeled record of failure, both the Army and Navy are pouring money into their own versions. The Navy’s effort deserves particular attention, since it incorporates the admirals’ desperate efforts to find a use for one of the most egregious boondoggles in defense procurement history: the Zumwalt destroyer. Conceived and promoted as a “stealth” ship near invisible to radar, its cost overruns were so enormous that although the original plan called for thirty-two ships, the program was cut to just three, built at a cost of over $4 billion per ship. Its offensive armament originally consisted of two 155 mm cannons firing self-guiding projectiles with a range of some eighty miles. Unfortunately, it emerged that the shells for the guns would cost almost $1 million each. Even the admirals balked. The gun program was reluctantly abandoned, leaving the ships bereft of any offensive weaponry whatsoever.
The useless cannon turrets are now being torn out of the ships and replaced with launchers for the Intermediate-Range Conventional Prompt Strike system, which is in essence none other than our old friend, the boost-glide hypersonic missile. Lockheed has a $1.2 billion contract to develop the rocket, with the first test due in 2025. The auspices are not promising. At least the late lamented air force version began its flights at high altitude, born thither by an aircraft such as the B-52. Having much further to climb before the super-fast glider can be flung on its way, the sea-launched version requires a very powerful rocket indeed to reach the required height. As an official closely involved in weapons-testing programs joked to me recently: “You’d need something on the order of an ICBM to get that thing up there.”
In further testament to the hypnotic lure of hypersonics, the Navy also plans to instal the missiles in Virginia class submarines, thus giving them a strategic strike capability (albeit supposedly non-nuclear) to complement the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program bequeathed us by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.
U.S.S. Putin?
It would be only fair to name at least one of the projected hypersonic missile subs after the true begetter of the hypersonic money-pit: Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader kicked off the current frenzy in March, 2018, when he announced the deployment of Avangard, a boost-glide hypersonic missile “absolutely invulnerable to any air or missile defense system” Dutifully, the New York Times reported “Russia Deploys Hypersonic Weapon [that] flies at superfast speeds and can evade traditional missile defense systems.” In reality, Avangard was merely the renamed Albatross, a venerable Soviet system launched in the 1980s to maintain employment at the relevant missile plant in Rostov and which had repeatedly failed its tests. The original name indicates that someone in the Soviet military industrial complex had a sense of humor, and it seems a pity to let the idea go to waste. How about a U.S.S. Putin carrying Albatross missiles?