In the future, this is how we might go about killing people.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Air Force tested a prototype hypersonic aircraft. The unmanned craft was dropped like a bomb from the wing of a B-52 bomber, and then ignited a rocket and roared away, heading toward expected speeds of Mach 6 — six times the speed of sound. Full results from the test are expected soon, but if the craft, dubbed the X-51 Waverider, was able to reach Mach 6, it would have been going fast enough to travel from New York City to London in an hour. Scientists had hoped for a flight lasting five minutes, after which the Waverider would crash into the Pacific Ocean.
Despite the comparisons to commercial air travel, Waveriders are unlikely to ever be hauling business executives and tourists from airport to airport. Even the Concordes, supersonic passenger aircraft that were still essentially a traditional plane, couldn’t be made cost effective (especially after the fleet’s only crash in 2000) to operate and were retired in 2003. Besides, imagine a business flight where the first step is being strapped to a B-52 and dropped.
No, the Waverider technology, while scientifically interesting, will only have one real practical application in the medium-term, assuming the technology is successful at all. Waveriders won’t ever get us to EuroDisney in barely an hour, but it may yield cruise missiles fast enough to give the U.S. and its allies a non-nuclear rapid strike capability.
Right now, if America wants to bomb a target somewhere in the world, it has a few different options. It can fire cruise missiles from Navy warships or submarines. It can launch airstrikes from a nearby friendly airbase using fighter jets, or it can send in similar jets from an aircraft carrier deployed to the region. It can use long-range bombers to fire cruise missiles or go right in and bomb the target the old fashioned way. Increasingly, a drone might be sent to fire a small missile at a discrete target. All of these methods can be counted upon to destroy the target — the Americans have the tools and the talent to make sure they hit what they’re aiming at, even if that means hitting the same target with multiple attacks. Better safe than sorry.
But what the U.S. does not always have is time. Aircraft carriers need time to sail into position; you cannot have a cruise-missile-toting submarine everywhere at once. Even bombers need time to cover the distance from their base to their launching point. Usually, this isn’t a problem. The target gets destroyed eventually.
But there is a need for rapid-strike capability, because sometimes, minutes and seconds do count. For example, imagine if the U.S. had gotten reliable intelligence that a dangerous individual — someone like a bin Laden — was in a specific location, but wouldn’t be staying long. Unless you happened to have a bomber circling somewhere nearby, by the time an attack could hit that target, it would almost certainly be too late.
Or, for a more pressing concern, imagine what would happen if U.S. and allied monitoring stations detected that Iran, North Korea or Syria was preparing to fire long-range missiles, possibly armed with weapons of mass destruction. You’d want those missiles destroyed immediately, but they may be launched before the attack could be carried out.
Currently, if faced with such a situation, the U.S. has only one realistic and reliable means of rapidly reacting and destroying the target — a nuclear strike. Ballistic missiles, launched from land-based silos or submarines, can hit anywhere in the world in roughly 30 minutes. But since the use of nuclear weapons is the ultimate military option, it’s also the least likely to be used. Even if the situation rises to the level where a nuclear strike is warranted, such a decision could not be taken lightly. That means delays that could render the speed of a ballistic missile irrelevant. Decision-making time counts just as much as travel time.
That’s where something like the Waverider would come in. Hypersonic cruise missiles, stationed aboard naval vessels or bombers scattered across the globe in proximity to likely conflict zones, would give the U.S. the means to hit targets with non-nuclear warheads fast enough to make a difference.
Hypersonic missiles still need a lot of work. It will be years before they are advanced and reliable enough to be militarily useful. But that’s still far sooner than they’ll be used to haul passengers or cargo. Getting where you need to go faster is great. But killing the right people quickly is even better.