3M22 Zircon Hypersonic Cruise Missile

This is just testing... it will be during training and exercises that they will be exploiting the natural range of the weapon... imagine the panic in the west when this thing is used during an exercise to 1,600km...

I am sure they are still experimenting with the height this missile will be flying at, and unlike a rocket the onboard flight control system can adjust the thrust setting to change speed and altitude.

With a normal car it makes sense on an open flat salt plain where you can drive in any direction where it is open and flat with no obstacles that for efficient long range driving that moving with the engine in idle you maximise your range by minimising your fuel consumption, but if you start the engine and then put it in first gear and idle along you might slowly get to 20km/h which is not fuel efficient at all. Actually using the accelerator pedal to burn fuel faster and then moving up through the gears to speeds of 80-90km/h where you are in top gear but the engine is running at idle will get you to your best max range with a full tank of fuel... it might even be that your efficient engine rev speed might be 2,500 rpm so in top gear that might be 150km/h it really all depends on the car.

The point is that with an aircraft using a jet engine that climbing to higher altitudes where the air is colder and much thinner, not only is the air resistance much lower but the lower friction means you can fly much much faster using much less power, so for instance full thrust to climb to 30km altitude and mach 8 or 9, but because of the low drag design and lack of friction at that altitude maybe dial back the thrust to a flight efficient setting... perhaps 60% thrust... note in a normal jet engine the air coming through the engine has to be slowed down because it goes through the hot section where fuel is added and burned at subsonic speeds, but a scramjet the airflow can be the external airflow or even faster... so thrust can be significant and not at all reduced with altitude despite the air being much thinner the volume of air at that flight speed would be enormous.

Remember this is a smart missile that knows where its target roughly is and has a radar and sensors to detect enemy radar and incoming ARH missiles and SAM sites and can fly around enemy defences on its way to its target and can jam and decoy interceptor missiles so it would also be able to change throttle settings to speed up or even slow down where it calculates it to be worth it.

When engaging a target 1,000km away the fact that it flew at only mach 6 for the first 600km wont mean anything to the target when it screams into view at mach 9 at 40km altitude.

Of course as it burns fuel it gets lighter...It might even perform a pop up climb over the last 100km so it can dive nearly vertically on target... something that would be rather hard to counter... even if it was moving much slower... the irony of it would be diving at 3km/s means a Phalanx leading the missile to get a hit would be firing into the deck of the ship with its lead before the missile to into effective firing range of the system....

So shore based 1,000km range mach 9 anti ship and land attack missiles.... putting a few in Kaliningrad would stop that Baltic state from blocking Russia from using the Baltic Sea...

1. The ocean is really big, and how hard it is to actually find a carrier seems to depend on who’s talking. I recall someone talking about a war game where a US carrier hid from the US for several weeks, but have I have been unable to find more information or what restrictions were placed on the US for the war game. I’ve also heard that any CSG is basically tracked by every nation with the desire to do so.

US carrier groups would be quite safe in and around US waters or in the southern Pacific or southern atlantic, but approaching Russian waters and they come in to view of ground based over the horizon radars which would detect objects the size of aircraft carriers from enormous ranges.

Just as importantly the IR signature of US carriers and their escort vessels would give their positions away easily enough to satellites.

2. Satellites seem to either be decisive observational platforms, the first targets of military action and irrelevant in a conflict, or only relevant for the opening few days of a conflict that it will take to destroy observational satellites in GSO. Also mentioned are the efficacy of satellite blinding and other non-kinetic countermeasures.

Satellites will give a good indication of where everything is... if they are taken out then it is pretty obvious what is happening so you can jump straight to a full war scenario and those carrier groups wont have moved very far from the last place they were located at before the satellites went down.

There are plenty of other assets tracking ships near Russian territory including ground and air and space based systems.

And also systems under the water from sea bed sonar arrays to subs and corvettes and frigates in friendly waters.

3. A strike by aircraft either seems to totally give away the carrier’s position, or only be moderately useful information to an adversary.

Actually a strike by carrier based aircraft forces the carrier to operate much closer to enemy territory and makes them easier targets to find and engage.

The limited effective range of F-35 and F-18 in the strike role limits the operational distances the ship can operate from... extending that range with inflight refuelling ties up more aircraft because they now use buddy refuelling instead of dedicated tanker aircraft.

4. Adversarial submarines are either an enormous threat due to spotting/strike capability, or considered incapable of getting close enough to the carrier to matter.

The US Navy knows from its own experience that SSKs are terribly dangerous and I rather suspect they realise that Yasen subs are probably pretty dangerous too... not to mention the improved kilo and Lada classes.

5. The effectiveness of the rest of the CSG as acting as a screening force, particularly in obfuscating the location of the carrier seems to either be making the carrier a bigger target or make little difference.

A screening force is supposed to give early warning and to be relatively expendable.... but is rarely the latter because spotting a carrier force is not as hard these days as it used to be...

Submarines can be an enormous threat and I think the threat will increase once they start putting spotter drones in submarines. Modern Russian submarine torpedos have increased range and much more modern cruise missiles than they had even in Soviet times.

The availability of long range cruise missiles also makes it rather useful to deploy further and farther as a threat from US forces in Europe leading to a cruise missile strike against the Pentagon will tell them to back off rather more vigorously than a similar strike to Brussels or Paris or Bonn.

Carriers are very useful for gunboat diplomacy against minor nations (which is why China will procure some, and Russia will probably build one next decade) but lets not kid ourselves.

Air power providing fighter and AWACS support is at the core of HATO air defence on land and at sea.

For Russia it is an important addition that extends reach and vision that enhances performance.

I rather suspect the best solution to hypersonic missile threats will be an energy weapon and that at sea would be the easiest place to deploy such a system though the volume required for such a system would be enormous so it will likely be Cruiser based... which would make defending CVNs useful to help protect such large ships.

Those who think that carriers can survive modern peer-to-peer warfare are akin to those who wanted to lay down new battleships in the early 1940s...

What you are trying to say there is that in the early 1940s the aircraft overtook the surface ship mounted gun battery because an aircraft carried bomb can reach further and faster than any ship mounted gun, while having radar in the air helped prevent surprise attacks which are so critical in wartime.

What you are trying to infer therefore is that Hypersonic missiles has rendered aircraft based radar and aircraft based interceptors ineffective... and I disagree.

I think when HATO gets hypersonic manouvering missiles that Russia will not withdraw Su-57s and Su-75s from service and get rid of all their biggest airfields and instead rely in small 200m motorway strips of pavement for basing helicopters and light aircraft because anything bigger would be dead.

I would suggest the focus would be on the guidance of the threat... optical jammers, lasers, and missile interceptors will be part of the solution but detecting threats early requires AWACS and responding quickly means airborne fighters which in the Navy away from Russian waters means aircraft carriers.

You get two choices with carriers... tiny useless ones with VSTOL fighters that are worse than useless, or big ones with Su-57 like fighters able to carry four internal and perhaps six external R-37Ms or their replacements perhaps even new missiles based on the S-550 SAM...

The simple truth is that nothing gives you situational awareness like being able to send a small group of armed fighter aircraft to have a look at a blip on a radar screen.

New photonic radar might allow you to look at the target visually and ID it but fighters can shoot it down if needed too... or just make it go away.

The problem is that Russia still has very few satellites pointing to sea targets. They currently have only one radar Pion NKS and 4 Liana ELINT satellites. Much more radar satellites are needed.

They go around the earth every 90 minutes, so 16 times a day it goes around the planet seeing the water around Russia.... how far do you think carrier groups could move in 1 and a half hours?

They will have pins in maps showing the current location of all carrier groups for every country that has aircraft carriers and a couple of times a day most of those pins will move to follow the carriers themselves... someone shoots down the satellite and those carrier group locations near Russian waters become target number one and many of them could be eliminated within one hour using Kinzhal and MiG-31Ks.

Flying up to 750km in 13 minutes and then having the missile then fly up to 2,000km at about 3km per second... so about another 10-15 minutes and boom.