In a White House news-press, [Trump] said he had spoken with the Joint Chiefs a few days before then about the “super duper” missile that will be 17 times faster than the fastest missile that exists today. If you look at the fastest missile today in operation, it’s an ICBM that’s Mach 20. Clearly, nothing is 17 times faster than that, it just makes no sense. Probably what he’s talking about is 17 times faster than a cruise missile like a Tomahawk or a JASSM. It’s making an assumption, but its possible if he’s talking about anything at all.
He said it again though on Saturday at his speech at West Point… and then he made two other points about it. One is that it would have a range of about 1,000 miles, and second, it would have an an accuracy of 14 inches from the centerpoint as he called it. That’s very interesting. All that information is classified. Now, the President is the declassification authority. But that has not been available to us.
If he is talking about something that is 17 times faster than a Tomahawk or a JASSM, that would put it in the range of about Mach 14 to Mach 16, which actually fits within the profile we think ARRW falls into, the AGM-183A, that Lockheed is developing with this high-life drag configuration. The range of 1,000 miles doesn’t seem crazy, perhaps on the low end of what I’d expect for ARRW. And the accuracy is really interesting. If you do Mach 14 weapon with a 14 inch CEP [circular error probable] 1,000 or more miles downrange, that’s really impressive and I have no idea how they do that.
That was Aviation Week’s Check 6 podcast, “Hypersonics: Where the Technology is and Where it is Going“.
Leave a Reply