9 ms·

This bodes very poorly for any nation that falls behind in the AI race. Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to

This bodes very poorly for any nation that falls behind in the AI race. Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing. A nation could develop world-class AI planes and they'd be absolutely useless against a hypersonic missile fired from mainland China or a Russian submarine, nor would they be any use against a guerilla army in Afghanistan or Iraq that doesn't have the capability to fight in the air or that has 30 year old planes that can be shot down with 50 year old tech. War has changed; making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time.

gloriana 5y ago
This is true. But the barrier to using over-the-horizon weapons like icbm / hypersonic is much greater than say drone attacks or fighter jet bombs. Have over-the-horizon weapons ever been used? No. But drone attacks and fighter jet activities are daily occurrences because they can be used with little repercussions.
- regularfry 5y ago
  Over-the-horizon weapons absolutely have been used. Frequently, repeatedly, and (allegedly) effectively. Tomahawks count, unless they're retrospectively reclassified as drones.
fnord77 5y ago
> A nation could develop world-class AI planes... such a nation would probably already have nuclear weapons. Any nation capable of hypersonic skip glide weapons also probably has nukes. So this hypothetical attack wouldn't be happening. At least w/ non-nuclear weapons.
atlasunshrugged 5y ago
Can you extrapolate on this? In my understanding in recent conflicts (e.g. Armenia and Azerbaijan) and currently in Ethiopia, drones (okay, we're not talking about fighter jets here but still, autonomous or near autonomous aerial systems) have played critical roles in eliminating air defenses, heavy weaponry, etc. and in future conflicts now that parties on all sides know how important the use of such drones are, will be deploying their own drones as countermeasures.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  Not the guy you are asking, and won't cite due to time constraints, but here is the tldr. In Vietnam, one nation had a dream. It dreamt of MIG-21s falling out of the sky before they even saw the US fighter. That fighter was the F-4 and it did not get a cannon. It did not get a cannon, because its missiles were so advanced that it did not need one - it would spot the MIG-21/19 and shoot it out of the sky before the lighter, more agile plane (with an inferior radar) got close. Except that didn't happen. Some blame lack of approval-to-fire on target that isn't visually identified, but the reality is that the tech wasn't there. Now it is. Most fighter-to-fighter kills now are radar beyond-visual-range "BVR" kills. Heavier, less maneuverable fighters with more speed, altitude, and radar range can take out lighter ones. The SU-27 can take out the MIG-29. The F-15 can take out the F-16, etc. Now drones. Drones are mainly a joke when the big boys come to play. The aforementioned SU-27 and F-15 CAN detect and CAN take out most drones. Things like Bayraktars are great against insurgents. Not so much against an advanced military. Note that most drones in service now are used as spotters and ground attack. They are VERY slow, but are high-altitude. And, no one ruled out EW when it comes to large-scale conflict. Ukraine, 2008 Georgia, Arm/Azer don't count. edit: For the guy below talking about ICBMs - no one is talking ICBMs. Google AIM-120 AMRAAM and AESA radar. Not trolling, just faster to tell you what to Google than try to summarize.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Except a country with shitload of drones will send 100 of them for a cost of 1 F35 from field runways no satellite can find, and bomb your airstrips. Even if you react in time, and shoot down a dozen, result doesn't change.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Current F-35A unit cost is $78M. Which model of drone costs $780K and has the same range? In reality cruise missiles will be used for most strikes against fixed targets like runways. Even those cost like $2M each.
      - 5y ago
onepointsixC 5y ago
I think you're taking the example of dogfighting a little too literal when it can be easily applicable in all sorts of different ways. Let's take your Hypersonic missiles. The largest difficulty with intercepting such weapons is not their speed, they travel slower than traditional ballistic missiles, but their terminal maneuvering which tries to dodge any interceptors. AI powered interceptors could be a game changer in improving the likelihood of those extremely expensive and limited quantity stand off weapons from reaching their intended targets. And having a slight edge in your interceptor AI vs say the terminal guidance AI could produce overwhelming advantages. > War has changed; making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time. This has been declared a great many times and yet has been also disproven just as many. Just because a M1A1 Abrams tanks and F-117 Nighthawks Stealth Bombers wouldn't have won the Vietnam War doesn't mean they weren't a significant contributors to winning the Gulf War. For better or worse airpower will continue to be the deliver method of most warheads onto foreheads. The hypersonic's which you suggest that are making them obsolete are very costly and very limited in total payload capacity compared to the amount which can be delivered by air. There's a reason why Russian and China are not discontinuing investments into new fighter jets and bomber programs just because they have hypersonics.
- typon 5y ago
  How is winning a war against a decrepit nation's badly run military proof of any weapons system's superiority?
  - onepointsixC 5y ago
    Your belief that the Iraqi armed forces of 1991 were decrepit and badly run is the proof of just how superior those weapons were, along with the accompanying tactics and doctrine. Before the conflict the overwhelming victory for the Coalition of Willing was not so clear. The Iraqi army was battle hardened and tested after a near decade long war against Iran. They had the third largest army in the world, which was trained in Soviet doctrine, armed with potent and modern weapon systems. Their integrated air defense system was state of the art combination of the most modern Soviet and European systems that were redundantly layered and hardened. America, along with its allies, fought them and won in spite of being geographically on the other side of the planet. The exceptional difficulty of achieving that is impossible over state.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing. AI would dramatically reduce the cost of planes and it would eliminate the cost of pilots altogether. If you don't need a pilot then the economics of building planes completely change--you can throw lots of cheaper planes at the enemy and accept that a certain number of them won't come back. I think that will also change the psychology of AI sorties. If a cheap Russian drone downs a cheap US drone, it will probably feel more like "Russians believed to be behind US government hack" than "Russians shot down a US fighter plane". The latter is a lot more of a casus belli than the former.
- nradov 5y ago
  No the construction economics are still mostly the same. UCAVs with the range and capacity to replace manned tactical aircraft are only marginally cheaper. MQ-25 unit cost is in the $150M range. No country can afford to build a lot of them. The small, cheap "swarming" drones have very limited range and endurance. Useful in some limited scenarios but only if you can first find a way to deliver them to the target area
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I posit that the costs will continue to decrease as mindshifts change--right now (or more precisely, around the time these drones were designed and purchased) we think about drones as being "unmanned planes" and planes are supposed to be big, reliable, and expensive and the military procedures and culture is calibrated to minimize losses of these planes. As expectations change, I think costs will decline as well which will feed back into a change of expectations (time will tell). Regarding "delivering them to the target area", it's pretty easy to conceive of a larger transport craft managing delivery.
    - nradov 5y ago
      What's your point? We already have that. Large bombers are used to deliver cruise missiles close enough to the target area. Cruise missiles are drones by another name. But they're hardly cheap. In fact they're getting more expensive.
1980phipsi 5y ago
You would need sufficient hypersonic missiles to knock out the offensive capability of the target.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing. People have been claiming that over-the-horizon missiles will obsolete dog-fighting since before the Vietnam war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_F6D_Missileer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_F6D_Missileer > Through the later part of the 1950s and into the 1960s, military air planners increasingly believed that future air combat would be carried out almost entirely by long-range missile fire. This changed the basic requirements for a fighter design considerably. The pilots would be expected to fight primarily through their radar and fire control systems, hopefully never even seeing their opponent. Because of this, the emphasis was on "head down" combat and an all-round view was considered unimportant.... Not saying that won't eventually be true, but it doesn't mean it will be true any time soon. The lesson is to preserve the capability until it's actually been proven to no longer be needed.
- nradov 5y ago
  If you look at the actual data from the past couple decades, far more aircraft were destroyed by SAMs or cruise missiles (on the ground) than in BVR or WVR combat. Dogfights haven't been a significant factor for a long time.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > If you look at the actual data from the past couple decades, far more aircraft were destroyed by SAMs or cruise missiles (on the ground) than in BVR or WVR combat. Dogfights haven't been a significant factor for a long time. Data can only tell you so much. For instance, according to the data, nuclear weapons haven't destroyed any enemy equipment in the last 80 years, but you'd be going too far to infer from that conventional weapons have made them militarily obsolete.
    - stouset 5y ago
      The difference is that nobody is avoiding WVR dogfights just so they can get shot down by a missile in BVR or a SAM. Nobody is getting within range of a dogfight nowadays because these other weapons are so extraordinarily dominant. > The lesson is to preserve the capability until it's actually been proven to no longer be needed. And yet when faced with evidence of this, your immediate response is "data can only tell you so much".
credit_guy 5y ago
> The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. I am not so sure. Fundamentally, bullets are cheaper than missiles. A single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile comes at $400k, about the price of a brand new Cessna. A fixed wing drone under $100k is not inconceivable (drones don't have to support pilots, so all sorts of failure modes are acceptable, as opposed to what's ok for a Cessna). It would be within the capabilities of many nations' armed forces to send swarms of thousands of such drones. Shooting them down with missiles will be both expensive and impractical. The only realistic way to defend against swarms of cheap drones is to use your own cheap(ish) drones that can out-dogfigth them.
- bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
  I'm not sure that these drone 'swarms' are going to have enough of a payload to take out anything significant like strong armour or heavy emplacements. But against small units of well dug in, or hidden enemies - mortars, snipers or troops in trenches, I'm sure they'd be great. I'm thinking basically a grenade with wings that can hover, spot a target and be guided by an operator ~1km away. Still have to fear the EMP though.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The only way to generate a significant EMP is with a nuclear weapon, at which point you have bigger problems than drone swarms. Non-nuclear EMP weapons do exist but the effects don't extend very far.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    >But against small units of well dug in, or hidden enemies - mortars, snipers or troops in trenches, I'm sure they'd be great. I'm thinking basically a grenade with wings that can hover, spot a target and be guided by an operator ~1km away. I don't know why people insist on flying grenades with lots of electronics. That is very expensive. It would be more logical to use the drones for physical target acquisition and surveillance and then use an actual grenade launcher or other conventional weapons to do the killing blow.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time. Except for hypersonics being a basic step up for ballistic missile tech, a better warhead/payload atop a rather standard missile. Those submarines are incremental improvements on very old sub designs. Drones have been around for decades too. Even autonomous "suicide drones", but we used to call those cruise missiles with loiter capacity. Despite the constant rhetoric there is actually very little revolutionary in the modern battlespace.
XorNot 5y ago
There are no hypersonic air-to-air weapons, and they're not even being considered. Hypersonic missiles are only useful against ground-based, slow moving targets. They also look indistinguishable to strategic ballistic missile launches, and cost about the same. They get a lot of US military "give us funding" excitement, but China's various "anti-aircraft carrier" weapons are almost completely useless in war time because they look exactly like launching a nuke and you can't know in advance they're not.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  The recent scmp report (i.e. info PRC wants to leak) on IR sensor development for hypersonic implies they're considering hypersonic AA to directly engage 5th gen fighters. Previously it was hypersonic drones to intercept 5th gen and engaging with normal AA missiles. >indistinguishable to strategic ballistic missile ... >completely useless in war time because they look exactly like launching a nuke and you can't know in advance they're not. They're useful and will be used because US will necessarily be compelled to adopt second strike posture, knowing PRC will use conventional IR/CBMs, if such capabilities are demonstrated to be credible. Especially if PRC backs up with massive nuclear retaliation (which she's building as we speak). Reality right now is that every standoff US weapon from tomhawks to other conventional ordnance can all be nuclear tipped and are already indistinguishable from nuclear attacks for US adversaries. There's no reason PRC or any adversary capable of nuclear retaliation should give any major US platforms a benefit of a doubt - Arleigh Burkes, Ohio SSGN, B2/Lancers from AF global strike etc - they're all capable of nuclear delivery. But benefit of a doubt is necessarily extended by merely knowing US has conventional options, that will be used per doctrine, with massive nuclear retaliatory capabilities. They must wait and posture for second strike. Hence why PRC is now conducting nuke buildup to force US into adopting second strike in response to rapid PRC advanced in conventional capabilities. Current PRC rocket force doctrine is absolutely to saturate US carrier groups with IRBMs. And it looks like eventually this will apply to conventional ICBM/hypersonics, i.e. prompt global strike capabilities once accuracy is sufficient, as per SCMP article on being able to hit "all" critical countries / strike with "strategic depth" so traditional warfare no longer exists. That means hitting CONUS as an option if US ever thinks about hitting PRC soil.

gloriana 5y ago

This is true. But the barrier to using over-the-horizon weapons like icbm / hypersonic is much greater than say drone attacks or fighter jet bombs. Have over-the-horizon weapons ever been used? No. But drone attacks and fighter jet activities are daily occurrences because they can be used with little repercussions.

regularfry 5y ago
Over-the-horizon weapons absolutely have been used. Frequently, repeatedly, and (allegedly) effectively. Tomahawks count, unless they're retrospectively reclassified as drones.

fnord77 5y ago

> A nation could develop world-class AI planes... such a nation would probably already have nuclear weapons. Any nation capable of hypersonic skip glide weapons also probably has nukes. So this hypothetical attack wouldn't be happening. At least w/ non-nuclear weapons.

atlasunshrugged 5y ago

Can you extrapolate on this? In my understanding in recent conflicts (e.g. Armenia and Azerbaijan) and currently in Ethiopia, drones (okay, we're not talking about fighter jets here but still, autonomous or near autonomous aerial systems) have played critical roles in eliminating air defenses, heavy weaponry, etc. and in future conflicts now that parties on all sides know how important the use of such drones are, will be deploying their own drones as countermeasures.

throw1234651234 5y ago
Not the guy you are asking, and won't cite due to time constraints, but here is the tldr. In Vietnam, one nation had a dream. It dreamt of MIG-21s falling out of the sky before they even saw the US fighter. That fighter was the F-4 and it did not get a cannon. It did not get a cannon, because its missiles were so advanced that it did not need one - it would spot the MIG-21/19 and shoot it out of the sky before the lighter, more agile plane (with an inferior radar) got close. Except that didn't happen. Some blame lack of approval-to-fire on target that isn't visually identified, but the reality is that the tech wasn't there. Now it is. Most fighter-to-fighter kills now are radar beyond-visual-range "BVR" kills. Heavier, less maneuverable fighters with more speed, altitude, and radar range can take out lighter ones. The SU-27 can take out the MIG-29. The F-15 can take out the F-16, etc. Now drones. Drones are mainly a joke when the big boys come to play. The aforementioned SU-27 and F-15 CAN detect and CAN take out most drones. Things like Bayraktars are great against insurgents. Not so much against an advanced military. Note that most drones in service now are used as spotters and ground attack. They are VERY slow, but are high-altitude. And, no one ruled out EW when it comes to large-scale conflict. Ukraine, 2008 Georgia, Arm/Azer don't count. edit: For the guy below talking about ICBMs - no one is talking ICBMs. Google AIM-120 AMRAAM and AESA radar. Not trolling, just faster to tell you what to Google than try to summarize.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Except a country with shitload of drones will send 100 of them for a cost of 1 F35 from field runways no satellite can find, and bomb your airstrips. Even if you react in time, and shoot down a dozen, result doesn't change.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Current F-35A unit cost is $78M. Which model of drone costs $780K and has the same range? In reality cruise missiles will be used for most strikes against fixed targets like runways. Even those cost like $2M each.
    - 5y ago

onepointsixC 5y ago

I think you're taking the example of dogfighting a little too literal when it can be easily applicable in all sorts of different ways. Let's take your Hypersonic missiles. The largest difficulty with intercepting such weapons is not their speed, they travel slower than traditional ballistic missiles, but their terminal maneuvering which tries to dodge any interceptors. AI powered interceptors could be a game changer in improving the likelihood of those extremely expensive and limited quantity stand off weapons from reaching their intended targets. And having a slight edge in your interceptor AI vs say the terminal guidance AI could produce overwhelming advantages. > War has changed; making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time. This has been declared a great many times and yet has been also disproven just as many. Just because a M1A1 Abrams tanks and F-117 Nighthawks Stealth Bombers wouldn't have won the Vietnam War doesn't mean they weren't a significant contributors to winning the Gulf War. For better or worse airpower will continue to be the deliver method of most warheads onto foreheads. The hypersonic's which you suggest that are making them obsolete are very costly and very limited in total payload capacity compared to the amount which can be delivered by air. There's a reason why Russian and China are not discontinuing investments into new fighter jets and bomber programs just because they have hypersonics.

typon 5y ago
How is winning a war against a decrepit nation's badly run military proof of any weapons system's superiority?
- onepointsixC 5y ago
  Your belief that the Iraqi armed forces of 1991 were decrepit and badly run is the proof of just how superior those weapons were, along with the accompanying tactics and doctrine. Before the conflict the overwhelming victory for the Coalition of Willing was not so clear. The Iraqi army was battle hardened and tested after a near decade long war against Iran. They had the third largest army in the world, which was trained in Soviet doctrine, armed with potent and modern weapon systems. Their integrated air defense system was state of the art combination of the most modern Soviet and European systems that were redundantly layered and hardened. America, along with its allies, fought them and won in spite of being geographically on the other side of the planet. The exceptional difficulty of achieving that is impossible over state.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing. AI would dramatically reduce the cost of planes and it would eliminate the cost of pilots altogether. If you don't need a pilot then the economics of building planes completely change--you can throw lots of cheaper planes at the enemy and accept that a certain number of them won't come back. I think that will also change the psychology of AI sorties. If a cheap Russian drone downs a cheap US drone, it will probably feel more like "Russians believed to be behind US government hack" than "Russians shot down a US fighter plane". The latter is a lot more of a casus belli than the former.

nradov 5y ago
No the construction economics are still mostly the same. UCAVs with the range and capacity to replace manned tactical aircraft are only marginally cheaper. MQ-25 unit cost is in the $150M range. No country can afford to build a lot of them. The small, cheap "swarming" drones have very limited range and endurance. Useful in some limited scenarios but only if you can first find a way to deliver them to the target area
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I posit that the costs will continue to decrease as mindshifts change--right now (or more precisely, around the time these drones were designed and purchased) we think about drones as being "unmanned planes" and planes are supposed to be big, reliable, and expensive and the military procedures and culture is calibrated to minimize losses of these planes. As expectations change, I think costs will decline as well which will feed back into a change of expectations (time will tell). Regarding "delivering them to the target area", it's pretty easy to conceive of a larger transport craft managing delivery.
  - nradov 5y ago
    What's your point? We already have that. Large bombers are used to deliver cruise missiles close enough to the target area. Cruise missiles are drones by another name. But they're hardly cheap. In fact they're getting more expensive.

1980phipsi 5y ago

You would need sufficient hypersonic missiles to knock out the offensive capability of the target.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing. People have been claiming that over-the-horizon missiles will obsolete dog-fighting since before the Vietnam war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_F6D_Missileer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_F6D_Missileer > Through the later part of the 1950s and into the 1960s, military air planners increasingly believed that future air combat would be carried out almost entirely by long-range missile fire. This changed the basic requirements for a fighter design considerably. The pilots would be expected to fight primarily through their radar and fire control systems, hopefully never even seeing their opponent. Because of this, the emphasis was on "head down" combat and an all-round view was considered unimportant.... Not saying that won't eventually be true, but it doesn't mean it will be true any time soon. The lesson is to preserve the capability until it's actually been proven to no longer be needed.

nradov 5y ago
If you look at the actual data from the past couple decades, far more aircraft were destroyed by SAMs or cruise missiles (on the ground) than in BVR or WVR combat. Dogfights haven't been a significant factor for a long time.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > If you look at the actual data from the past couple decades, far more aircraft were destroyed by SAMs or cruise missiles (on the ground) than in BVR or WVR combat. Dogfights haven't been a significant factor for a long time. Data can only tell you so much. For instance, according to the data, nuclear weapons haven't destroyed any enemy equipment in the last 80 years, but you'd be going too far to infer from that conventional weapons have made them militarily obsolete.
  - stouset 5y ago
    The difference is that nobody is avoiding WVR dogfights just so they can get shot down by a missile in BVR or a SAM. Nobody is getting within range of a dogfight nowadays because these other weapons are so extraordinarily dominant. > The lesson is to preserve the capability until it's actually been proven to no longer be needed. And yet when faced with evidence of this, your immediate response is "data can only tell you so much".

credit_guy 5y ago

> The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. I am not so sure. Fundamentally, bullets are cheaper than missiles. A single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile comes at $400k, about the price of a brand new Cessna. A fixed wing drone under $100k is not inconceivable (drones don't have to support pilots, so all sorts of failure modes are acceptable, as opposed to what's ok for a Cessna). It would be within the capabilities of many nations' armed forces to send swarms of thousands of such drones. Shooting them down with missiles will be both expensive and impractical. The only realistic way to defend against swarms of cheap drones is to use your own cheap(ish) drones that can out-dogfigth them.

bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
I'm not sure that these drone 'swarms' are going to have enough of a payload to take out anything significant like strong armour or heavy emplacements. But against small units of well dug in, or hidden enemies - mortars, snipers or troops in trenches, I'm sure they'd be great. I'm thinking basically a grenade with wings that can hover, spot a target and be guided by an operator ~1km away. Still have to fear the EMP though.
- nradov 5y ago
  The only way to generate a significant EMP is with a nuclear weapon, at which point you have bigger problems than drone swarms. Non-nuclear EMP weapons do exist but the effects don't extend very far.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >But against small units of well dug in, or hidden enemies - mortars, snipers or troops in trenches, I'm sure they'd be great. I'm thinking basically a grenade with wings that can hover, spot a target and be guided by an operator ~1km away. I don't know why people insist on flying grenades with lots of electronics. That is very expensive. It would be more logical to use the drones for physical target acquisition and surveillance and then use an actual grenade launcher or other conventional weapons to do the killing blow.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time. Except for hypersonics being a basic step up for ballistic missile tech, a better warhead/payload atop a rather standard missile. Those submarines are incremental improvements on very old sub designs. Drones have been around for decades too. Even autonomous "suicide drones", but we used to call those cruise missiles with loiter capacity. Despite the constant rhetoric there is actually very little revolutionary in the modern battlespace.

XorNot 5y ago

There are no hypersonic air-to-air weapons, and they're not even being considered. Hypersonic missiles are only useful against ground-based, slow moving targets. They also look indistinguishable to strategic ballistic missile launches, and cost about the same. They get a lot of US military "give us funding" excitement, but China's various "anti-aircraft carrier" weapons are almost completely useless in war time because they look exactly like launching a nuke and you can't know in advance they're not.

dirtyid 5y ago
The recent scmp report (i.e. info PRC wants to leak) on IR sensor development for hypersonic implies they're considering hypersonic AA to directly engage 5th gen fighters. Previously it was hypersonic drones to intercept 5th gen and engaging with normal AA missiles. >indistinguishable to strategic ballistic missile ... >completely useless in war time because they look exactly like launching a nuke and you can't know in advance they're not. They're useful and will be used because US will necessarily be compelled to adopt second strike posture, knowing PRC will use conventional IR/CBMs, if such capabilities are demonstrated to be credible. Especially if PRC backs up with massive nuclear retaliation (which she's building as we speak). Reality right now is that every standoff US weapon from tomhawks to other conventional ordnance can all be nuclear tipped and are already indistinguishable from nuclear attacks for US adversaries. There's no reason PRC or any adversary capable of nuclear retaliation should give any major US platforms a benefit of a doubt - Arleigh Burkes, Ohio SSGN, B2/Lancers from AF global strike etc - they're all capable of nuclear delivery. But benefit of a doubt is necessarily extended by merely knowing US has conventional options, that will be used per doctrine, with massive nuclear retaliatory capabilities. They must wait and posture for second strike. Hence why PRC is now conducting nuke buildup to force US into adopting second strike in response to rapid PRC advanced in conventional capabilities. Current PRC rocket force doctrine is absolutely to saturate US carrier groups with IRBMs. And it looks like eventually this will apply to conventional ICBM/hypersonics, i.e. prompt global strike capabilities once accuracy is sufficient, as per SCMP article on being able to hit "all" critical countries / strike with "strategic depth" so traditional warfare no longer exists. That means hitting CONUS as an option if US ever thinks about hitting PRC soil.