Yes. Eventually. But it’s not better sensors, just more. A lot more. The present advances in machine learning strongly indicate it will eventually be feasible for robots to do all steps of the pipeline, from mining the minerals and constructing the buildings to manufacturing and inspection. Even of high end weapons, which today are actually mostly built by hand.
A jet fighter or torpedo or submarine other high end weapon actually has a tremendous amount of hand labor that goes into building one. The reason is a combination of small volumes and other factors.
Anyways, eventually there will be fully automated plants that can make even small volume niche products completely autonomously. Including weapons. And the plants themselves will be using robots that can be made in other such plants.
It’s exponential growth. You can reasonably expect 10-100 times growth in worldwide industrial capacity. At which point something like a sensitive solar powered sonobuoy or other spy could practically be deployed (by a drone aircraft of course) in such massive numbers that the ocean no longer provides concealment.
That is another scale thing - machine learning systems would be needed to listen to all these hydrophones instead of a human with ‘golden ears’ such as in a Tom Clancy novel.
The USAF isn’t looking at road mobile ICBM?
A Topol-M mobile missile is longer (22 v 18 meters) and heavier (48 metric tonnes to 36 metric tonnes) compared to a Minuteman III. Makes sense it should be on a mobile launcher
It’s large amounts of cheap fire power that is also easy to secure and supply.
Each leg of the triad ensures that an attacker would suffer some amount of damage, but ICBMs guarantee that the retaliatory strike would be overwhelmingly destructive. That’s the real deterrent, and ICBM are cheaper to maintain and operate than subs and bombers.
Bombers represent flexibility in the force, they can be retargeted easily and can be incrementally escalated. But they are costly to maintain and secure, and vulnerable to enemy air defenses.
Subs represent resilience and stealth. They guarantee there will be some sort of retaliation no matter what. They are costly to secure and maintain, and there aren’t many bases where they can be resupplied and rearmed.
ICBMs guarantee that any retaliatory strike would be overwhelmingly destructive. That’s where the most forceful part of the deterrent comes in. ICBMs have extremely fast response, they cost less, can’t be captured or shot down, don’t have long logistical tails.
Without ICBM, an enemy might calculate that if they can wipe out sub and bomber assets, then it might be worth the risk of decapitation. ICBMs ensure that enough forces would survive to make an overwhelming response.
Putting the new missiles in the same hole in the ground as the old missiles is cheaper than building many, many, many miles of new roads for sure.
Besides, since space-based surveillance is becoming a commodity, the value of road-mobile deterrents is likely going to decline over the next many years and decades.
A MAZ7917 TEL which carries the SS-25 can use ordinary roads. No need to build new ones.
While road mobile missiles can probably be detected much more quickly, in the 40 or so minutes from detection to destination the launcher will be many miles away. It cruise at about 30 mph so it would be 20 miles away if not more.
That’s 1260 sq miles of area which has to be covered. They’ll have to use a damn Tsar Bomb for every launcher.
Both China and Russia (and the US for that matter) are developing, and supposedly have working models of hyper-sonic missiles able to adjust their targeting in flight, fly non-ballistic courses and, again supposedly, could hit a maneuvering US carrier with either a conventional or nuclear warhead. Plus a lot of other magical features. I’m more than a bit :dubious:, but they say they can, and neither Russia nor the CCP is ever known to lie or exaggerate. And we all know how reliable the US is (though, to be fair, the US isn’t really saying much about it’s own program)…
So, in theory, assuming you could actually make such a system work and actually be able to update your kill chain, then road launchers would be just as vulnerable as air craft carriers or anything else that moves. Or, to be more specific, as you point out, if large scale launches are confirmed, we could as easily flush the birds out of ground based launchers as we could with mobile launchers, if it comes to that.
In any case, I’m not seeing it as a priority for the US to have this capability. Our own version of the triad is flexible enough, especially assuming we are also in the process of updating our own launchers, which supposedly we are.
I don’t know how it works in Russia or China, but I assume there’d be some security concerns about having mobile ICBM launchers out on “ordinary roads” with normal civilian traffic like just another semi.
In the United States, the idea that an ICBM will drive on ordinary roads is bonkers. The American tinkering with the idea during the Cold War highlighted the extremely high cost, especially after billions were wasted on putting them on rail cars. And it highlighted problems that the Russkies and Norks don’t need to deal with, like conducting an environmental impact statement on the places a mobile ICBM would go. We’re talking several tens of billions of additional costs for deploying the road-mobile concepts that were a joke during the Cold War.
Nope on all counts. If you assume 30 mph, the thing has to stay on a road. Sure it may go east or west, or north or south, but it’s going to be on a road. Further, as ISR becomes omnipresent in the coming decades, that 40 minute flash-to-bang time is going to come down significantly due to hypersonic weapons or advanced cruise missiles with much greater range that will be faster and much, much harder to detect and much, much more agile that today’s ICBMs.
Depending on the scenario, we could be talking about an adversary having almost no notice of a raid that uses hypersonic weapons with no explosive payload at all that can precisely target trucks on roads from continents away. We are not there today, but by the 2040s? Oh sure, that’s a very reasonable proposition.
It proved devilishly difficult for aircraft to find, let alone hit BBs. The problem is not that a single HSV could kill a carrier, or even several launched en salvo, but that even hundreds HSV are many order cheaper than a carrier. And can hit at much longer range. And persistently. For a long time before the ship can retaliate. A BB usually needed multiple sqdrn of aircraft, attacking from multiple vectors to suffer damage or be sunk, and her air defences regularly accounted for many attackers.
A carrier should ideally survive until the war concludes. A TEL only until it’s missile is away. Which takes minutes.
I am also guessing the security for such an item would be a real nightmare. Here you are driving around an EXTREMELY obvious thing that is full of rocket fuel with a nuclear warhead on top.
Can you imagine what a determined group of 5-10 bad guys could do with that?
Uh, are you talking about World War II? You think that the last war where battleships were relevant – and then discarded in years since then – is in any way relevant?
Not on the interstates around my town between 9AM and 5PM.
How would you guarantee this road would always be clear, and not vulnerable to (say) a Russian sleeper agent jack-knifing a semi full of live chickens and $5 bills in the middle of the road right before the nuclear assault?
This might be speculation on my part, but I think their strategy (and China’s) revolves around “we’ll kill every living family member of anyone who fucks with our missile trucks” or something like that.
They didn’t. It’s a numbers game. Russia knows that in a nuclear war where the USA strikes first, some of their road mobile ICBMs wouldn’t make it. The obvious thing to do would be to bomb their depots with stealth bombers.
Some must be out on alert in semirandom spots along the roads under camo netting.
But some would and they would be aimed right at NYC/DC/Dallas/LA etc. High value targets. Any effort to evacuate those cities in advance of a nuclear war would put the Russian nuclear forces on alert.
In a sense it is a hostage situation. I don’t think it has long term stability, even though it has been peaceful for many years.
They just don’t care that much. They have a lot of empty land, so they just say ¯_(ツ)_/¯
No one takes nuclear weapon security as seriously as the US. We even paid Pakistan $100M just to beef up their nuclear security because we think it sucked so bad.
I mean vulnerable in the sense of being commandeered/captured by terrorists, not getting hit by American nukes. Russia shares borders with many hostile/unstable nations in Central Asia, and has many enemy terrorist groups who have reason to 1) get nukes and 2) jab Russia in the eye. Russia is also the largest nation by size. In theory, road-mobile ICBMs are a risky thing for Russia to do.
It’s about 650 missiles, not 100. The US has 3 strategic missile wings based in Montana(Malmstrom AFB), North Dakota(Minot AFB) and across parts of SE Wyoming , W. Nebraska and NE Colorado ((FE Warren AFB in Cheyenne).
Each one has about 150 missiles emplaced in silos well spread across the countryside.
Beyond that, we’re not talking about something like a Patriot or Hellfire missile here; we’re talking about something that is intended to lift a warhead bus weighing something like 3000-4000 lbs into a very precise ballistic trajectory, such that the warheads on the bus can be put on target within a CEP of 90 meters (or probably less in the GBSD; Peacekeeper had a 90m CEP 30 years ago, and Minuteman III has a 120m CEP).
This is no mean undertaking; historically ICBMs have been repurposed for NASA (the Titan II-GLV, the Mercury Redstone and the Mercury Atlas were all repurposed ICBMs. ), or for satellite launching (the Titan II, Atlas, Minuteman and Peacekeeper missiles (as the Minotaur I through V)).
So we’re not talking “build a missile”, we’re talking something more on the order of “Build a rocket for NASA, and perch a nuclear weapon delivery system on top”.
And it has to meet all sorts of readiness criteria and similar stuff in the bargain that civilian launch systems don’t.
So in that light, it’s not surprising that ICBMs would be extremely expensive.
Oh. Well one can only hope their PAL technology, which the USA developed and shared with Russia, actually works and is not full of bugs like typical shoddy Russian software.