Well - if the USAF believes it requires another delivery modality for nuclear weapons in its deterrent role - fine. Conventional warheads are pretty laughable as the payload mass in a HGV or hypersonic scramjet are pretty sad and the heating of the vehicle in flight precludes most simple / credible terminal seekers as are required for lethal radius impact (CEP).

If its a nuke - fine - if its not a nuke - its a waste of money needed elsewhere for practical weapons.

"If its a nuke - fine"
But we both know it's not a nuke.US has no spare nukes of right caliber.
"Conventional warheads are pretty laughable"
You know what's laughable?NOT having a warhead!
" kinetic impact of such a weapon would have the force of a powerful bomb"
I facepalmed so hard my forehead hurts.
And it's not like they're talking about 6kps impact.It's 1.5kps or even lower!

/facepalm
It's a bit too late to ask these questions.
"ARRW, a boost-glide powered missile"
Actually,it's an aeroballistic missile.Or has a payload of twenty pounds.

You sound worried.

I'm worried for brains of people making claims about obvious aeroballistics being boost-glide.

No such "OR" required...
https://www.airforcemag.com...

Lets avoid stupid units and discuss the engineering constraints. (no lbs feet or miles need apply)
Hypersonic vehicles need extremely low drag contours or they rapidly stop being hypersonic. This constraint makes such vehicles long, skinny and have pointy noses in terms of the length over the width. E.g. very limited volume to place payloads as compared to the overall size of the vehicle. Your link to the AF advertising 'mag' shows a very small vehicle and it would have a correspondingly tiny volume for a warhead and an extremely ugly problem for a terminal seeker designer.

As to the 'kinetic warhead' aspect, the basic vehicle is a pretty bad explosive substitute as the pointy design and metals make for more of a 'penetrator' than anything else with extremely marginal lethal radius - recall TNT kinetic equivalence occurs at 2.9km/s. So without a terminal seeker, the CEP of a hypersonic vehicle is driven by time in winds and other issues like asymmetric erosion of the heatshield and you are likely to scare your target as you dig a small deep pit some 100s of meters away.

So bottom line CPS / conventional armed hypersonics are a bad idea. Lethal radius is tiny, ability to locate targets minimal / near zero, and the likelihood of military effect from the use of the weapon is 'poor'.

Would it be possible to use 2 radomes? If the first one is discarded, would the second one heat up so fast that the radar wouldn't have the time to take a SAR picture? If a SAR picture could be taken say 25km from the target perhaps the missile would have time to maneuver if the error is 300m or something like that.

KISS is the design principle that people miss - why go stupid-fast when it creates huge design issues? All that such tricks create is more failure modes with proportionally less payload. Again - if you want to pork a nuke on the hypersonic 'dohicky' fine, but don't waste billions in development to obtain a fractional billion dollar bullet that cannot do the military job due to a lack of credible lethality.

On the other hand - a slower stand-off weapon with LO design avoiding key AD while potentially using support tactics such as EW and a big manly warhead + a terminal seeker gets the job done with margin at a tiny fraction of the development and per shot costs.

I think the hypersonics craze is nothing useful and damages actual military capabilities.

Maybe you can try to make it slow down to mach 4-5 so that it can use its sensor, and use side thrusters for maximum maneuvrability like PAC-3 to make evasive maneuvers and increase the pk.

Could you consider such ideas - sure - but ask yourself why you bothered when a LO kitted cruise missile with a big warhead does the same job better now or in the near future at a tiny fraction of the cost of HGVs using magical bullshitium claims?

In some cases they want the target to be destroyed very quickly. If the target is 1500km away a cruise missile would take 2 hours. They'd probably be used like silver bullets.

Who is 'they' (besides contractor marketing)? This rapidity of destruction construct is some wishful thinking which was originated by a person in a position where their actual job is to be prepared to fight a conflict with the tools and personnel at hand. Normally this wishful thinking is quashed by practicalities of we have xxx billions for the entire span of military capabilities and we have no reliable means for aiming such a weapon against a 'time critical target' AKA mobile target. Sadly in this particular case, the ego with 4 stars attached chose to whine about his wishful thinking to the press instead of getting it properly vetted.

> TNT kinetic equivalence occurs at 2.9km/s

Actually, it's better to use for comparison more powerful explosives used in modern warheads, such as C-4, PBXN, etc. based on RDX or HMX, which have about 25-30% higher energy of explosion than TNT.

"Actually, it's better to use for comparison"
Can we not?A)It makes KE look even worse and B)It screws nice rounding to 3kps.

Oh it would certainly be appropriate to compare against modern explosives - however as I seem to be debunking 'nuke like' claims the direct comparison with TNT is more of a historical reference - regarding Hiroshima at ~ 15kT TNT or Nagasaki at ~ 20kT. The fact that nuclear explosives are ~ a million times more powerful than chemistry is kinda a point.

"So bottom line CPS / conventional armed hypersonics are a bad idea"
You haven't provided enough evidence to make that statement definitively. Especially since you haven't considered the sort of targets such a weapon would be used to target and why and what else the use of them in limited numbers might enable.
"Lethal radius is tiny"
Tiny is a relative term and you have not proven that what you define as "tiny" is a bad thing.
"ability to locate targets minimal / near zero"
You have provided no evidence that the weapon requires an ability to locate targets.
"the likelihood of military effect from the use of the weapon is 'poor'."
This is an opinion provided without any discussion as to what the intended or desired military impact would be.
You also haven't provided any alternative solutions that would enable the same effect to be achieved at the same or lower cost and in this context a full comparative cost must be developed rather than a short-sighted look at only the R&D or procurement costs.
Certainly a 2000 lb dumb iron bomb with a tail kit dropped precisely onto the target will always be a more effective weapon but what is the "cost" in plans and lives of getting a fighter aircraft into range and into position to drop that bomb? How many planes and pilots are you willing to sacrifice so that you can use that $25K bomb/tailkit instead of a shooting 5-10 $10M CPS missiles?
Let's assume they end up costing $10M each. If it takes 9 of these to destroy a defensive emplacement that would have otherwise resulted in a loss of an F-35 it is still a net-win from a pure procurement cost perspective. It is even higher when you consider the human element cost that all we did was expend $90M in weapons and didn't lose a pilot.

" If it takes 9 of these to destroy a defensive emplacement"
ROFL.It'll take 9 of these to even HIT general vicinity of one,destroying is another matter entirely.Again,we are talking about equivalent of 30kg TNT that's spread very inefficiently.Whereas one-ton bomb will DEFINITELY do the job if applied right.
"You also haven't provided any alternative solutions that would enable the same effect to be achieved at the same or lower cost"
I will.DO NOTHING.That enables roughly the same effect,statistically,at far lower cost.
Spending ten million dollars to deliver 30kg of TNT to general vicinity of a target is not military viable.
It's worse than V-2!

"It'll take 9 of these to even HIT general vicinity of one,destroying is another matter entirely"
** Pats Phaeton on the head **
Again, go ahead and believe that... should Putin choose to invade NATO you may get to find out first hand.

"should Putin choose to invade NATO you may get to find out first hand"
Should NATO choose to invade Russia you'll find firsthand how useless this trash is.
But by that time it'll be too late.

LOL - I know your handlers build the threat up to keep you sheep excited but trust me, no one wants to bother invading Russia.

Exactly. What would be the point? Ground invasion in this day and age? Russia will always be the aggressor. If something is started, it will be by them. NATO does not want war, but if there is one, expect hell to come from up above..

"Russia will always be the aggressor"
Based on...?

Based on the fact that NATO has absolutely no interest in attacking Russia. There's nothing to gain from it. So if something starts, it will always be Russia's fault.

"NATO has absolutely no interest in attacking Russia."

Yeah. As NATO had no interest in attacking Serbia, Iraq, Lybia, Syria, you name them. Lol.
NATO won't attack Russia though, because Russia has strong military, and cowards never attack countries that have powerful army.

"if something starts, it will always be Russia's fault."

When Hitler started invasion of Russia, he said, like you, that it's Russia's fault, of course. You are a typical nazi, with the mentality and the worldview. All blame has been already assigned in your rotten mind.

Russia has a military with aging equipment and troops with low morale and bad training that wouldn't stand a chance against a real army. The only real threat is nukes, and we have those too.

"The only real threat is nukes, and we have those too."

Yeah, yeah. Your ICBMs were put on combat duty in early 1970s, your strategic bombers were produced in 1960s. So... whose equipment is ageing? lololo.
Your morale is so horrible it's not even funny(courtesy Phaeton). You are tender and pampered dudes, who can't live a couple of days without hot water. The only ones who ever were matches to Russians as warriors were Germans circa 1940s, but today they are as tender and pampered as you are. I don't believe you're able to defeat even Venezuela in open battle. May be only through blockades and suffocating sanctions, but not in real war.

"Russia has a military with aging equipment"
That's NATO military.
" troops with low morale"
That's Japan.
"bad training "
That's Zimbabwe.
"that wouldn't stand a chance against a real army"
History lesson time.In slightly over a decade,Russia decisively defeated two militaries.In both cases opponent fielded modern equipment.In both cases Russia was outnumbered.In the latter case it was outnumbered so thoroughly it's not even funny.
And in neither case Russia used actual Good Stuff.

"Based on the fact"
Not the fact.Claim.
"There's nothing to gain from it."
Removal of existential threat,a lot of land and all the resources.
Any more bright ideas?

Russia's land and resources are not worth going to war over. And the only way there will be war, is if Russia starts it. If you don't believe anything else, how about having some common sense? The cost/benefit ratio of war vs peace is really simple.

"Russia's land and resources are not worth going to war over."

Lmao. On the scale of importance, land and resources, have always been the main rationale for going to war over. That's history, especially modern one. Return back to your kindergarten kiddo, you haven't yet learnt all the lessons there.

That is funny, since Russia is the only developed country that has invaded and stolen land from another country in recent times.

Except that it's never happened, neither previously, nor now. Stop lying dude. Doesn't become to one simultaneously being uneducated and dishonest. All its history Russia has been involved in border conflicts ONLY. Border skirmishes dont make an agressor. They have occurred all the time with all the countries. The West organized BIG Crusades against Russia several times. Russia never did something similar. We've always been on the defence. We are the most peaceful people on Earth. That's just being objective.

Crimea. Georgia. Donetsk. Lugansk.

Crimea declared independence and then acceded to Federation.Georgia still has it's land.Donetsk and Lugansk are not part of Russia.

Hello! Those ones are part of Russia. They were part of Russia since the times the US didn't even exist. I told you, go back to school and start to learn history, dude.

I knew you would say that. So predictable. If we are to play that game, big parts of Russia belong to the Greek. Because they had it before Russia existed.

"I knew you would say that"

Indeed? So you admit you were just being dishonest, not dumb?

"If we are to play that game, big parts of Russia belong to the Greek"

Still, you need education anyway, bud. Big parts of Russia never belonged to the Greeks,lol. May be for you it's a game, as you are saying. That's part of being modern and pampered. For us Russians it's not a game. We are not talking about 2000 years from now, ancient Greece, or about Babilon or Gondwana. The regions of Russia you've listed exist today, with our relatives living there. Ancient Greeks don't live there, so, stop being hypocrite. Also, is the educational system in the US is so horrible that an average American (not unlike you) doesn't know that Ancient Greeks and modern Greeks are, softly speaking, not one and the same people?
Manderley exist no more, dude, so do Ancient Greeks. If they don't exist nothing can belong to them, lol.

Ah, in that case, give back Crimea to the Tatars. Of course, it's not yours to give. Ukraine would have to hand it over. The Russians living there now are invaders and should be thrown out of course.

"give back Crimea to the Tatars"
That would require Tatars owning Crimea in the first place.In physical reality,Russia annexed Crimea from Ottoman Empire.

"Ah, in that case, give back Crimea to the Tatars"

Lol. Tatars, actually, are now living in Crimea. Their language is even has a status of official state one, together with Russian. So the land is theirs, if ever it was one. Do you even think before you write something?

" Of course, it's not yours to give. Ukraine would have to hand it over"

I never cease to get amused at how Ukrainian trolls pretend they are hilly-billy americans. Lol

"Russians living there now are invaders and should be thrown out of course."

Yeah. And who would through them outa there? You? A pathetic Ukrainian troll pretending he is a hilly-billy? Look bro, three greatest empires of their time, British, French and Ottoman, once uniting together, failed to through Russians out of Crimea. And now you, nationalistic monkeys, believe that you and some pampered Europeans will be able to do it?

Tatars were forcefully 'relocated' back in the Soviet days. That's why Russians are a majority now.

Why would you think I'm a Ukrainian? Just because I feel for them in their plight against Russian aggression? It's too bad we didn't make Ukraine a NATO member before Russia invaded. Then there would have been no invasion, and peace would reign instead of war. Wouldn't that have been better in the end?

"Tatars were forcefully 'relocated' back in the Soviet days"
Would you prefer them to be lynched by the locals who very fondly remembered their deeds?
"It's too bad we didn't make Ukraine a NATO member before Russia invaded"
Georgia was "a valued US ally"and nobody cared.NATO,you hippie,is not a binding treaty when it comes to mutual defense.

Hippie? Haha. Nobody's called my that before. And, yeah, article 5 is binding. You have to be a real member before it applies, though.

"And, yeah, article 5 is binding"
No,it's not.
Gods these hippies.
"by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary"
"as it deems necessary"
"AS.IT.DEEMS.NECESSARY"

"Tatars were forcefully 'relocated' back in the Soviet days"

Of course they were. Because, like your ancestors, they served to Nazis and wanted to destroy Russia. If they had won the war, Russian people would have ceased to exist. After the war we were very kind and humaine to them, by not liquidating them (which they obviously deserved) like they had sought to do with us. We even allowed them to return back home later.

"Why would you think I'm a Ukrainian? Just because I feel for them in their plight "

You feel for them because you also a Nazi, like them. Is it so hard to guess? Lol. Americans don't feel for Nazis and for those who served for them.

"It's too bad we didn't make Ukraine a NATO member before Russia invaded."

Oh, it's another of your pathetic deams. We know. Dream on, pal.

Why are you so angry? Take a chill pill. It's not like what we are saying here has any real life effects.

"Russia's land and resources are not worth going to war over"
To you-maybe.To countries with dwindling resources-very much worth it.
"If you don't believe anything else"
Faith and religion is for simple people.And idiots.I prefer science.
For example,most of European economy has been built on British coal...which is gone...and Norwegian natural gas...which is gone.

Technically speaking large amounts of British coal remain to be mined, as does for example German coal, the problem is 1) political and 2) diminishing returns - the stuff does get more expensive as you go deeper. Russian Gas is just cheaper and cleaner. The question you should be asking is why the Germans have been forced by Chancellor Merkel to shut down all their nuclear power plant programmes, and why France has built practically no new domestic reactors (I think they're currently struggling mightily one one-two for the last 10 years). Partly it has to do with reduced industrial capability, but it is largely political. I suspect US meddling.

The Germans shut down their nuke plants because of irrational fears of nuclear after Fukushima. They are idiots. France's energy is like 70% nuclear. Perhaps they feel they have enough nuclear for now? None of those is because of the US, but the US is certainly meddling with the Nord Stream 2 project. While I agree that getting the gas from Russia is a bad idea, it's better than using coal, from an environmental point of view.