3 ms·

Depends on capability of attackers. Even medium range hypersonics strikes = minutes of warning. Coordinating a bunch of TEL launchers to pop out of their cave f

Depends on capability of attackers. Even medium range hypersonics strikes = minutes of warning. Coordinating a bunch of TEL launchers to pop out of their cave for quick launch = maybe an hour to determine whether movement is training exercise or real deal, likely not enough time to conduct analysis communicated up/down command chain to get units to disperse/bunker in time.

lumost 4y ago
Possible, but the bigger question would be what’s the follow-up? If you don’t have hundreds of thousands of troops ready to invade - why do a massive and expensive conventional first strike? A thousand hypersonics won’t win the war.
- dirtyid 4y ago
  Depends on goal of war, whether war of aggression or conquest. If conquest, yes there's need to follow up with invasion, of which mobilization can be done after preemption. If aggression, i.e. goal is to merely want to cripple a place without occupation, a thousand hypersonics can easily bring a society to it's knees. If RU wanted a broken buffer state, they could have gone 100% on destroying critical UKR infra at the outset. Islands with high import dependency even worse off, destroy a few energy terminals and powerplants and carrying capacity reverts to baseline agrarian society levels of subsistence and sustainablity. In peer warfare, 1000 hypersonics especially global precision strike can dismantal adversaries major power projection platforms that can't easily be replaced. It's not going to end a war with a tenancious adversary but it can dramatically shape outcomes. An often cited reason for why US/PRC rivary is particularly dangerous to preemption is that much of the fighting will be maritime, where each side is incentivized to fire first to improve ratio of irreplaceable assets, and such advantage tend to compound. The more side A outnumbers B, the less remenants of B is able to defend against numberically superior A.

lumost 4y ago

Possible, but the bigger question would be what’s the follow-up? If you don’t have hundreds of thousands of troops ready to invade - why do a massive and expensive conventional first strike? A thousand hypersonics won’t win the war.

dirtyid 4y ago
Depends on goal of war, whether war of aggression or conquest. If conquest, yes there's need to follow up with invasion, of which mobilization can be done after preemption. If aggression, i.e. goal is to merely want to cripple a place without occupation, a thousand hypersonics can easily bring a society to it's knees. If RU wanted a broken buffer state, they could have gone 100% on destroying critical UKR infra at the outset. Islands with high import dependency even worse off, destroy a few energy terminals and powerplants and carrying capacity reverts to baseline agrarian society levels of subsistence and sustainablity. In peer warfare, 1000 hypersonics especially global precision strike can dismantal adversaries major power projection platforms that can't easily be replaced. It's not going to end a war with a tenancious adversary but it can dramatically shape outcomes. An often cited reason for why US/PRC rivary is particularly dangerous to preemption is that much of the fighting will be maritime, where each side is incentivized to fire first to improve ratio of irreplaceable assets, and such advantage tend to compound. The more side A outnumbers B, the less remenants of B is able to defend against numberically superior A.