Could Hypersonic Threats Be Stopped With Particle Ammunition?
Hypersonic threats are more and more real. Defending against them is complicated and only a few of current anti-air systems have at least a chance to hit a hypersonic threat. Until we get effective systems, analysts propose we use their extreme hypersonic speeds against them.
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Hypersonic weapons are a dangerous threat to modern warfare. And there are hard to counter with current systems of anti-air defense. They are quick and maneuver very differently from conventional ballistic missiles. So, how do we effectively deal with the hypersonic threat?
An independent American think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) recently released the “Complex Air Defense: Countering the Hypersonic Missile Threat” news release. The release asks the American administration to invest more into defenses against hypersonic attacks and talks about interesting ways to defend us.
The authors base their ideas on the fact that current systems can’t handle hypersonic attacks because of their unique advantages. So, what if we focus on their unique disadvantages to deal with them? That sounds fair.
The authors studied many concepts. But the probably most interesting are means of area-wide kill mechanisms. These mechanisms abuse the fact that hypersonic attacks are very fast. And these aren’t sci-fi technologies for which we need to wait many years. They can be simple, brutal, and deadly.
One of these technologies is hypersonic flak. During the second world war, the German defended against the devastating attacks of the Allied forces using flak. Firing flak practically filled the air with clouds of shrapnel. This allowed the defense not to target individual aircraft but just to cover the sky with flak the attackers had to fly through.
The CSIS’s release describes hypersonic flak as particle ammunition that would similarly create a cloud of metal or even pyrotechnic particles that would stand in the way of the hypersonic attack. These particles could stay for dozens of minutes in the upper layer of the atmosphere.
Previous observations show that dust, rain, or similar materials in the atmosphere cause serious damage to hypersonic missiles. The authors are convinced that using this type of defense would most likely cause the attacker to use more conservative, heavier, or less powerful hypersonic systems.
As far as I know, the concept of hypersonic flak is purely theoretical and wasn’t tested. It isn’t a perfect solution but it could work.
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