The US Air Force will not receive the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missiles this year, according to the military portal Breaking Defense. The US Congress has halved spending on the US Air Force’s hypersonic missile development program
The Pentagon previously requested $161 million to purchase 12 Lockheed Martin AGM-183A missiles. However, the bill approved by Congress provides for only $80 million. Legislators explained their stinginess with unsuccessful tests of ARRW, and they propose to direct the allocated funds to search for the causes of these failures.
Last year, the US Air Force, as we wrote, tried three times to launch an ARRW missile from a B-52 bomber. On April 5, the rocket failed to separate from the plane’s wing. On July 28, the rocket separated, but its engine did not turn on. And on December 15, an Air Force spokesman said, “The launch sequence was aborted prior to separation [of the missile] due to an unknown problem.”
The ARRW missile is an analogue of the Russian Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic missile system, which was put on experimental combat duty on December 1, 2017. On December 21 last year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, at an expanded meeting of the board of the Ministry of Defense with the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, announced that the first aviation regiment of MiG-31K fighters with hypersonic Kinzhal missiles had been formed.
Thus, the most advanced American hypersonic project ARRW is hopelessly behind the Russian Kinzhal complex. The US military reacted to this most obvious failure for everyone exactly like a fox from Krylov’s famous fable. In January of this year, US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that hypersonic weapons could be a useful addition to the US arsenal, but the high cost of hypersonic weapons raises questions about the extent to which the US military needs them.
“Hypersonic weapons have a couple of characteristics they have high speed, they can overcome the defense, it is difficult to determine the direction of their movement, at least in comparison with conventional ballistic missiles.
But they are also very expensive compared to conventional weapons. So we are looking into this very carefully and deciding how to proceed”.
the minister said. Earlier, former US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that hypersonic weapons are “at the top of the US Army’s task list and unprecedented human and financial resources have been directed to its development.” However, against the background of the failure of the tests, ARRW has to put on a good face for a bad game and assure the public that hypersonic grapes are green. And what is left for congressmen to do? So they cut the appetites of developers of hypersonic missiles by half. The bill will go to the Senate, but there is no doubt that the senators will approve it. US Air Force Secretary Kendall admitted that success in testing hypersonic missiles is not to be expected in the near future.
Analysts of the US Congressional Research Service agree with him, who, in their report dated October 19, 2021, draw a disappointing conclusion: in the field of creating hypersonic weapons in the coming years, there is no way to close the gap with Russia and China. Why, then, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States found itself lagging behind in the development of the most promising and formidable weapons of our time?
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report provides a clear and unambiguous answer to this question. It is all the fault of “immature technologies” in the field of hypersonic weapons, as well as “conflict of interest and waste of resources”, which makes it impossible to create American hypersonic weapons for at least the next decade. And how not to be a conflict of interest and a waste of money, if in the United States, as stated in the report of the auditors of the State Department, there are already as many as 70 (!!!) programs for the development of hypersonic weapons and none of them have any real results.
Based on the results of unsuccessful tests of the ARRW hypersonic missile, it can be concluded that the Americans have problems with the creation of ramjet engines for hypersonic missiles and materials that can withstand ultra-high temperatures. “Immature technologies” in engine building and materials science cannot be brought to mind either in a year or two. That is why the auditors of the State Department pushed back the promising horizon for the creation of hypersonic weapons for a ten-year period. But this, in my opinion, is an overly optimistic assessment of the capabilities of American military corporations. When the necessary technologies are not available, this means that there is no corresponding scientific school, and at least two or three generations of efforts by the scientific community are needed to create such a school.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, just three decades have passed, during which the US military rested on the laurels of the winners in the Cold War and mastered billions of dollars in budgets for the creation of useless stealth destroyers of the Zamvolt class, unseaworthy littoral ships, for crazy projects of railguns and ultra-long guns. Not only developments in the field of hypersound were ignored, but even the creation of new modern tanks and self-propelled artillery. On the other hand, gigantic aircraft carriers were built, which are suitable only for a war with Middle Eastern partisans. In all major military conflicts, such as, for example, Operation Desert Storm, the main contribution to the destruction of enemy military facilities was made by ground aviation based on numerous US military bases. The contribution of naval aviation was no more than 10 percent. Why then do we need new giant aircraft carriers?
The correct answer is: for the superprofits of the American military-industrial complex and the Pentagon that joined it. Serious American politicians are well aware of the perniciousness of this state of affairs. To stop the waste of billions of dollars on ineffective and often pointless weapons programs and to shorten the bureaucrats of the “deep state”, the Army Futures Command (AFC) was created in 2018. Nevertheless, Future Command did not achieve any success in reforming the US war machine, as the commander of the AFC, General Mike Murray, admitted.
The key point: there is no noticeable progress in the creation of the most formidable weapon of our time – hypersonic missiles. That is why the US and NATO do not want to fight Russia. Even one hypersonic missile, which no Western missile defense system is able to intercept, can turn any metropolis of America and Europe into radioactive dust. Imagine what an entire MiG-31K air regiment carrying Kinzhal missiles can do with our “strategic partners”. The Americans have already imagined this.
Vladimir Prokhvatilov, VIEW