The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the agency's 60th anniversary exhibition presented the concept of a hypothetical interceptor for Russian hypersonic systems such as Dagger and Avangard. The tentative name for this miracle is "Glide Breaker".
First, let's deal with a small misunderstanding that is now being actively replicated in the Russian media. Almost all sources, it is not known from whose light hand, write that the interceptor is a kind of hypersonic aircraft. And in support of this, they offer an illustration from the presentation, in which something conditionally similar to an airplane collides with something that remotely resembles a warhead.
The problem is that the illustration from DARPA has been misinterpreted by someone. It schematically depicts something similar to the Avangard (at least, as it was portrayed by the animators of the Russian Ministry of Defense), which is knocked down by a kind of "interceptor" that looks like either a shell or a cut-off missile. Therefore, be careful when you read the "analytics", in which the alleged interceptor is called "aircraft".
What can we confidently deduce from the very fact of such a presentation? So far, unfortunately, not much. But first of all, we must breathe a sigh of relief: it turns out that the Americans still do not have adequate means of intercepting hypersonic aircraft, and they also highly appreciate the threat posed by this type of weapon.
It is impossible to say anything more intelligible about this presentation. This is not surprising: the complexity and secrecy of the topic overlap, which complicates the analysis many times over.
In general, you need to clearly understand that the concept is just a "rough sketch", a kind of abstract vision, which is still very far from some kind of technical implementation. Moreover, any concept can be rejected or revised if research shows that it is either wrong, too difficult to implement, or costs too much money. Therefore, what the Americans have presented, so far, should be considered only as an application for obtaining appropriate funding. Although there is no doubt that they will receive it in the end.
The timing of such a project is also very difficult to clearly define. But they can be a decade or more. For example, let's take a project of the American combat information and control system Aegis, which is comparable in complexity. Its development began in 1969, and the first ship equipped with it entered service only in 1983. In this case, the task may turn out to be even more difficult: it requires the development of appropriate weapons of destruction, and high-precision guidance means capable of ensuring that the interceptor hits a target moving at a speed of more than three kilometers per second. Despite the fact that the speed of the interceptor must also be very high, the total speed of approach of objects can exceed five kilometers per second or more. Agree, it is quite easy to miss at such speeds.
The declared kinetic method of destruction of hypersonic objects also raises great doubts. Although for scientists any defeat of a target with the help of an object will be precisely kinetic, the military still has several auxiliary definitions. In particular, by kinetic, they usually mean the defeat of a target by one object (bullet, projectile, nucleus, etc.) that does not have a charge and acts only due to kinetic energy. The use of the same warhead and, for example, shrapnel or other submunitions, is more likely to receive the designation "defeat by the method of remote detonation of a warhead" with further clarification of what kind of warhead it was.
However, since we are still dealing with scientists rather than with the military, the "kinetic defeat" designated by them may still turn out to be the usual fragmentation warhead in such cases with thousands of pre-prepared submunitions. In any case, it is still a little easier to believe in this than in a direct hit on a maneuvering target flying at a speed of 3 km / s or even higher.
Separately, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that the target in this case does not descend along a stable and well-calculated ballistic trajectory, but has the ability to maneuver. This means that the planned intercept system will not, as before, have the opportunity to calculate the trajectory in advance and accurately deliver the interceptor missile to the meeting point with the target. The speed of the interceptor will have to match the speed of the "Dagger" and "Vanguard", he will have to be able to actively maneuver and withstand truly enormous overloads.
Of course, all this is quite realizable even within the framework of modern technologies. However, none of the existing types of interceptor missiles yet possesses the full range of necessary qualities, and it is very likely that a new missile (if it is, of course, it is a missile) will have to be created from scratch.
The likelihood that something more exotic will be used as an interceptor is rather small. Neither electromagnetic guns nor more classical weapons have sufficient power and, moreover, will not be able to provide the required accuracy. It is possible that it will be possible to use multi-barreled anti-aircraft guns as a weapon of the last line of defense, but in advance one can assume their extremely low efficiency. Rather, it is a weapon of despair, and not a line of defense against the Dagger. As for the use of mythical aircraft, it looks even more strange and hopeless at the moment.
Therefore, we venture to assume that the development of "Glide Breaker" will take the Americans for many years, if not a whole decade. How much it will cost them is still difficult to judge, but certainly not very cheap.
The question of efficiency also remains open. We must assume that neither our nor the Chinese designers will sit idly by. This means that the aforementioned hypersonic weapons of the "Dagger" type can acquire more advanced homing systems, better maneuvering algorithms, and other surprises for so far mythical interceptors.
