Fancy Ass SWERVE

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

The conventionally configured ground launch ballistic missile is just a fancy ass swerve. Changed my mind. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:29

And I'm Aaron Stein, the director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. How you doing, Aaron? Pretty good.

Jeffrey 0:36

I'm sitting in front of my Faux Fire, which I think you can see. I can see the TV screen behind you.

Aaron 0:44

With a fire, but you know, on Zoom it looks real. Maybe I'm that emoji, you know, of that little thingy like sitting in the fire as it all comes collapsing down. Maybe that, maybe I can start pulling that off and emojify myself. It's fine, Aaron. It's all fine. It's not fine, but it's okay. so how's it going?

Jeffrey 1:07

It's going okay. It's going okay. Just things are good, Aaron. Things are good. Had a productive day. Talked to Gerry Doyle, the reporter who's writing a book. And I probably shouldn't announce what the book's about, but you're going to want to read it.

Aaron 1:27

Okay. That's an early plug.

Jeffrey 1:29

I'm going to be his hype man. We can get some residuals from his Amazon sales. Gerry Doyle, good follow on Twitter. It's going to be an even better book. Excellent.

Aaron 1:39

Well, we're not here just to talk about Gerry Doyle. We're here to talk about something else, which we have, well, we overtly talked about on our first reboot episode, I should say.

Jeffrey 1:48

The people have spoken. Okay.

Aaron 1:51

We're still a democracy here at the Arms Control Wonk podcast, and we have a plurality of us.

Jeffrey 1:55

No, we are not a democracy, but we are an autocracy that is afraid of being murdered. Okay. Popular will must be appeased. Otherwise, we end up like Ceausescu and his wife.

Aaron 2:07

And his wife. Yeah, sure. Okay. So we have some results on the Slack channel, and we're taking them as we see fit, right?

Jeffrey 2:17

Well, we're holding off on the Armenia-Azerbaijan slugfest because that takes real research. And there's a couple of questions that I haven't answered yet, which came in first. But there was a tie for second place between the Chungus Humongous Wasong, which is the episode that we finished and has just dropped, and... The very curious intermediate range ground launch ballistic missile that the United States tested in December 2019.

What the F was that thing?

Aaron 2:50

Well, I'm looking forward to this podcast because I don't actually know what it is. You've kept it hidden from me, and so I'm curious what it ends up being. But I know you keep using the words hillbilly to describe it, so perhaps it's kind of thrown together.

Jeffrey 3:05

We've been using hillbilly to describe the cruise missile. This thing? Less hillbilly elegy, more Dr. Frankenstein.

Aaron 3:14

I was thinking there's got to be a Discovery Channel show, like Prototype, something like that.

Jeffrey 3:20

I mean, it would be fun to just take people and be like, here are the panoply of capabilities that are available off the shelf in the Department of Defense. Go launch something. Because I think that's more or less what happened.

Aaron 3:36

Okay. So we should probably give a little background to listeners before we launch into exactly how you figured out what this thing is.

Jeffrey 3:45

Yeah, absolutely. So... There was this treaty, the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which didn't just ban intermediate range nuclear forces, but banned all ballistic missiles and all cruise missiles that were held by the United States and Soviet Union, later Russia, with ranges between 500 kilometers and 5,500 kilometers. It was a wonderful treaty. It contributed immensely to the security of Europe.

It... Dramatically reduced the pace and the tempo of the arms race at the end of the Cold War. And it was a monument to the possibility that carefully constructed arms control approaches could succeed and produce a better world. And for all of these reasons, the Trump administration hated it.

Aaron 4:38

In fairness to them, the Russians also didn't like it too much either.

Jeffrey 4:43

Oh, yeah. The Russians were cheating on the agreement. There's no question that the Russians were cheating on the agreement because, you know, the Russian military didn't like the agreement for the same reason that a lot of people in the Trump administration didn't like the agreement. You know, everybody wants to get their war on.

Aaron 5:04

Right. And so I say what is that there was the allegation perhaps confirmed is that the Russians were violating the treaty with a ground launch cruise missile of their own. And the Trump administration decided that this was the time to just tear it all up and go down our own route.

Jeffrey 5:19

Yeah, I mean, I say this in a in a kind of a flip way. But, you know, if you go back and look at the arms control wonk blog podcast, you know, well, I would even say the blog, you know, 15 years ago. John Bolton and Paula de Sutter were calling for the U.S. to leave the INF Treaty.

And very famously, the Russians were complaining that China wasn't in the INF Treaty and had a meeting with Don Rumsfeld where Rumsfeld was like, well, just pull out of it, right? Because, you know, it was little loved in certain circles. So yes, the proximate cause of its collapse was Russian cheating. I think that made it politically possible for the Trump people to pull out.

But in the end, they were just doing what they wanted to do. So the Trump administration in February 2019 announced they were suspending participation in the agreement pending withdrawal, which would take six months. And by August, they were out. And shortly thereafter, in the fall of 2019, They commenced to testing one intermediate range cruise missile that would have been prohibited by the treaty and one intermediate range ground launched ballistic missile that would have been prohibited by the treaty.

And those are, I think, the final nails in the coffin of the agreement.

Aaron 6:41

Yeah. And you call the cruise missile test the hillbilly test because it's a little janky in terms of how they met those timelines and to get everything going.

Jeffrey 6:50

Yeah, that's just an existing... Well, okay, so first of all, when the INF Treaty negotiated, one of the cruise missiles was a ground-launched variant of the Tomahawk. The Griffin. Yeah. And so in order to, you know, make the Griffin great again, I guess, they just took an existing sea launch Tomahawk and its launcher and bolted it to a trailer and fired it.

So, I mean, you know, it's like a big American flag. Like all it really needed was a pair of truck nuts hanging off the back.

Aaron 7:25

I think if you would get close enough, you would have seen sort of like, you know, the bolts stuck like through the thing. I kind of love that. But yeah.

Jeffrey 7:33

Yeah. I like to imagine that, you know, maybe it had like a little American flag detail that said, try to burn this one. Or maybe, maybe, maybe in the window there's Calvin pissing or any of the other accoutrements of, of, of that particular lifestyle. So that's analytically, that was uninteresting. Right. I mean, You know, like, yippee, you bolted a launcher to a trailer.

That's great. You're not actually going to do that in real life. The ballistic missile that they tested in December 2019, on the other hand, was a mystery. The Department of Defense released very little information about it. Really just this short video of it launching. A couple of news stories. That really didn't say very much at all. And then there was...

Like one or two stories in the press based on some very cryptic comments. And that was it. They just did not want to talk about this thing.

Aaron 8:44

Yeah, I kind of have them in front of me. Do you want me to read it or should we just, you know, basically is... Oh, please read it. Yeah, I mean, so I have this, you know, it's like basically the U.S. Air Force in partnership with the Strategic Capabilities Office conducted a flight test of a prototype conventionally configured...

Ground-launched ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The test missile exited its static launch stand and terminated in the open ocean. After more than 500 kilometers of flight, data collected and lessons learned from this test will inform the Department of Defense's development of future intermediate range capabilities. And the video is here, and I think it's exactly 30 seconds long.

Jeffrey 9:23

Yeah, and the only other real pieces of information we got were an article that Space Force put out that just had like – Tiny, tiny bit of programmatic detail. And then one article in the defense press, we'll put the link in the show notes, where a senior official made a couple of extremely cryptic comments where I actually had to email the reporter and ask her how she interpreted what he said.

So there really wasn't much to work with.

Aaron 10:02

But I guess, you know, the way to take this is they test a missile, get a pod, but we didn't know what missile they were testing. Right. So you had to turn your guns and to figure out what exactly this thing looked like.

Jeffrey 10:15

Yeah. So, you know, we basically had to take the tools that we use to analyze Iranian and North Korean missiles and turn them on this thing. And, you know, it turns out you could do that.

Aaron 10:35

I have to think that one of, okay, so I think we should start first with the video. I mean, did you start first with the video?

Jeffrey 10:40

Because I assume that's where you started. We definitely started first with the video. And so the important information that you can get out of the video is, in theory, you should be able to measure the size of the missile. But it is taken from, the video is taken from an incredible distance away. Yeah, I was about to say it's very far away.

It's not very sharp. And there are only a few clear frames before the missile fires. And so we were able to make estimates of the ratio of the length of, for example, the booster to its width. But we didn't really, we weren't confident with any kind of absolute sense of scale. If that makes any sense whatsoever. I mean, you know, we had like a general sense of how big it was.

But nothing like the level of accuracy that we would really want to be able to do a proper analysis. So we have that, and then obviously it takes off, right? And so if we could set a scale to that size, we would be able to measure the acceleration, which would tell us something about the thrust of the missile, which will be really interesting later once we figure out what the heck that thing is.

So then, you know, having like tried to measure it and having kind of an idea of how big it is, but really feeling much better about our our proportions more so than the absolute size. We looked at the notice to Mariners. So we knew how far it flew. And yeah, the notice to Mariners was kind of a little interesting.

We were able to geolocate where it took off. They eventually admitted where it took off, but it was a pretty obvious location at Vandenberg. So that wasn't wasn't a great.

Aaron 12:26

It's still my favorite missile test point.

Jeffrey 12:30

Is that just because you're a local or is it the romantic ocean view?

Aaron 12:36

It's the janky wine bar around the corner from Vandenberg called the Wine Grotto or Ghetto.

Jeffrey 12:43

Oh, my God. Why? When this pandemic is over, Aaron? We have to go. I mentioned it every time. Oh, my gosh. What a great idea. All right, well, I don't want to get waylaid with visions of the wine grotto. So, yeah, we understood the basic geometry of the test. We knew approximately how far it flew. Although, you know, they could have lofted it.

It might have done some maneuvers. All that will come up later. But really, all we had was the kind of vision of it. But then there were these two different hints. One was the official release date. Finally admitted that Northrop Grumman provided the propulsion. Right. And we learned about the in an interview and Lee Hudson at Aviation Week.

She's the one who wrote it up. I have to give her credit because not only did she. Bother to go to the stale bagel breakfast or whatever, rubber chicken lunch, and get the quotes. She realized they were important. She wrote them up and then very patiently answered my questions as I was like, well, how was he sitting when he said it?

Or trying to interpret these things. And so we understood the contract timeline, which is They only began pursuing this system when they after they announced that the US was suspending its participation in February. They awarded the contract in 12 days. And the thing flew in nine months. So it's clear that this was an existing booster produced by Northrop.

Correct. Now, That makes our life a lot easier because there are only so many boosters produced by Northrop. And as it turns out, Northrop makes a beautiful propulsion products catalog that I highly recommend.

Aaron 14:53

You have to tell listeners how you can find the Northrop boosters because I know what the catalog is, but other people may not.

Jeffrey 14:58

Well, it sits online. And if you have access to the – I call it the CNS Missile Library, but it's really Jeffrey's obsessive missile library. It's a Google drive. It's a Google drive, yeah, with like – I don't know. A lot of data. I have I have something like six or seven editions of the Northrop propulsion catalog.

It has all the essential information you would want in terms of width, length, and performance. So we were able to go through and identify what we think is the candidate because it had to be off the shelf because just in nine months, you're not going to invent a new rocket engine, right?

Aaron 15:43

Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 15:47

But it was really interesting because when we looked at it, and I think Jonathan McDowell was the first person to notice this.

Aaron 15:55

Friend of the pod, Jonathan McDowell.

Jeffrey 15:57

We love Jonathan McDowell.

Aaron 15:58

Off-sided. Single point of failure, Jonathan McDowell.

Jeffrey 16:01

Oh, my God, yes. And I vaguely committed career suicide with promoting Jonathan once. I was – I am a fan. Jonathan looked at it and said, you know – The fins, the whole setup. To him, it looked like a Castor 4B, which is a very specific rocket engine. And lo and behold, the dimensions match.

Aaron 16:27

I remember this.

Jeffrey 16:28

Yeah. So, you know, immediately we are like, yes, Northrop makes the Castor 4B. That is a thing you can buy. It certainly could have been produced in nine months for this purpose. You know, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And then the weirdness began because, you know, we were able to work out, you know, we know the mass basically of a Castor 4B.

And we'll talk about it later, but we have, you know, some ideas about the mass of the rest of the thing. But we charted the acceleration. And the acceleration was not anything like a Castor 4B.

Aaron 17:17

I vaguely remember these conversations taking place too, but yeah, go ahead.

Jeffrey 17:21

Just not a caster 4B. Right. And it is an excellent match for a caster 4A in terms of initial acceleration. A beautiful match. And the reason they're different is the caster 4B has a regressive time trace, so you get... All the thrust at the beginning, and then it kind of tails off. And I guess this is a thing that you want for satellite launches.

And indeed, we actually were able to use that fact to confirm that we were not looking at a Castor 4B in terms of its performance, because we literally knew the... Measured acceleration of the Castor 4B over the first few seconds because they wanted to estimate how much vibration it imparts into satellites. And so we could see the thing we were measuring, it was just fundamentally different than a real Castor 4B performance.

We didn't even have to measure it ourselves. But the weird thing is the Castor 4A doesn't have a vectorable nozzle. Because it's meant to be strapped on to other rockets and provide extra boost. So we think they took a 4B motor casing and nozzle, but we think they poured a grain in it that looked a lot more like a 4A.

Which is already a shockingly detailed hypothesis to have about a missile that we can see barely nothing about.

Aaron 18:58

I was about to say that. You took the words out of my mouth. I was like, that's hyper-specific.

Jeffrey 19:07

Yeah, and it's a little weird why you would do that, and there are a couple of hypotheses. I mean, one is going to relate to the thing we see on the front end, which is there are some bins for maneuvering, and so they may not have wanted to have a low thrust toward the end. Yeah. But I suspect the actual reason is pretty prosaic. which is you know, this thing is sitting on a launch table. There's no flame bucket on this pad, so you got to put it up on a table up above the pad. and I, I wonder if the 4B wouldn't have just, you know.

F'd up the pad a little bit more than a 4A grain. Because you get this big spike in thrust with the 4B at the beginning. So, I don't know. But, you know, basically it's a caster 4 booster. Yes, okay.

Aaron 20:12

Okay, so now this is where it gets interesting. So what's on top of it?

Jeffrey 20:16

Well, so it's pointy and it has fins.

Aaron 20:21

Mm-hmm. Now I'm pulling at the video again. This is what you make me do.

Jeffrey 20:27

Yeah. Well, we stared at this thing forever.

Aaron 20:30

Yeah, I can imagine. This is not easy to figure out.

Jeffrey 20:34

All right. Well, we already know that the motor is off the shelf. So our hypothesis is that the reentry vehicle is off the shelf. Right. And this occasioned a deep dive into the lineage of current U.S. hypersonic reentry vehicles. I mean, every reentry vehicle is a hypersonic reentry vehicle.

Aaron 20:59

But there was this... That's not widely known, by the way. I know.

Jeffrey 21:04

Well, I know. But, you know, if you're reentering, you're hypersonic.

Aaron 21:10

It depends if you're gliding.

Jeffrey 21:13

Well, I mean, eventually you can slow down when you're gliding, but...

Aaron 21:18

If you go up, you got to come down. That's right. It's gravity. But anyways.

Jeffrey 21:25

Anyway.

Aaron 21:26

And, you know, the energy to get you up, the energy to get you down.

Jeffrey 21:29

Okay. All right. So. When we looked at the reentry vehicle, we went and kind of dug into the lineage of US hypersonic reentry vehicles. And so the system everyone is really excited about right now is something called the Common Hypersonic Glide Body, which was developed by the United States government. And the contract to make it was then given to a contractor.

So the kind of first thing to observe is the version that's being made now, it's being made by a contractor who didn't design it. The contractor bid on the right to make the thing that the U.S. government designed. And the common hypersonic glide body, which, you know, we've seen pictures of and mock-ups of, right? I'm staring at the page right now.

Okay, right. And I forget, what's the name of the company that's making it? It's a tiny company, and it was kind of shocking that they won the contract. Dynetics, that's right.

Aaron 22:32

Dynetics, Dynetics.

Jeffrey 22:34

Yeah, whatever. A Leidos company, whatever that means. Right, which Leidos used to be SAIC. Oh, interesting. Okay. I almost went and worked for SAIC.

Aaron 22:43

We wouldn't have you, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 22:45

It was an employee-owned company at the time. I would have had stock and nobody would have had me. I'd be sitting on my island in the Bahamas with two fingers up.

Aaron 22:56

Sipping the daiquiri.

Jeffrey 22:58

Yeah, but then the guy who was going to hire me found out I lived with his girlfriend. And this was the 1990s when, you know, that was not approved. I lived with a girlfriend. That was – He decided I was not a fine young Christian man, and that was enough for him.

Aaron 23:14

I could have told him that.

Jeffrey 23:16

Yeah, I know, I know, I know. I was like, dude, that's the least of your worries. I'm a hippie. All right, so Dynetics makes the common hypersonic glide body, but the common hypersonic glide body is derived from the advanced hypersonic weapon.

Aaron 23:30

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 23:32

Which is in turn derived from a Sandia thing called Swerve, which was the Sandia winged reentry vehicle experiment.

Aaron 23:44

All right. You were going to say something. No, no. I'm just following this in my head. I have this old Sandia poster blistered in the top of my brain.

Jeffrey 23:53

You know, most people have that Farrah Foster poster blistered in their brain. Only you, Aaron. Well, I was thinking it would be nice to frame that. But anyways, go ahead. That's because we're weird.

Aaron 24:04

That's because we're weird.

Jeffrey 24:06

We're nerds. You're like, oh, you remember that Farrah Foster poster? Like, no, but do you remember the wings on Swerve?

Aaron 24:17

We're weird.

Jeffrey 24:18

But anyways, yeah, go ahead. So... I've never seen a proper picture of Swerve, and I've never seen a... I don't think I have ever seen a proper picture of the advanced hypersonic weapon, but I have seen mock-ups of the common hypersonic glide body that Denetics is making. And in the illustrations over time, it looks to me like...

The thing that's on top of this missile is basically too long and thin to be a common hypersonic glide body. But the older illustrations of Swerve and the advanced hypersonic weapon do show a longer reentry vehicle. So my guess is, you know, the advanced hypersonic weapon was canceled. Mm-hmm. My guess is that they either had reentry vehicles left over from that program, or they just were sitting on the design capability to fabricate those things.

So my guess is it's an advanced hypersonic weapon sitting on top of a Caster IV. There's one other thing that we'll talk about in a little bit, but those two things make perfect sense to me as right off the shelf. You could do that in nine months. No problem.

Aaron 25:48

Especially if you have all the design stuff ready to go.

Jeffrey 25:55

And there are two things I like about this hypothesis. One noteworthy thing and one stupid thing that amuses me. So the noteworthy thing is, let's go back to Swerve. Right. The reentry vehicle that is basically the predecessor of all this stuff. Sandia tested Swerve in the late 1970s and early 1980s on an intermediate range as basically an intermediate range ballistic missile.

And they eventually they had to stop. I think they both. There was a kind of reduction in funding, but then obviously the INF treaty nixed that. Swerve was basically the Swerve reentry vehicle flown on a Castor 1.

Aaron 26:42

Oh, really?

Jeffrey 26:43

Yeah, this thing that we're looking at is basically the fifth test of Swerve, just with the modern reentry vehicle and the modern in-production Castor motor. Which they had to stop doing because of the INF Treaty. I think there are other reasons they stopped doing it, too. I don't think that was just alone. But you couldn't stick a swerve on a caster and fire it after 1987, right?

Because that would be an IRBM. Which you couldn't do because INF. Right. So this idea, I think, is really quite old. And it makes sense as an off-the-shelf... We're going to test an IRBM. Like, what should we do? And somebody's like, hey, do you remember Swerve? And it's like, what, what? It's like, you put a winged reentry vehicle out of Caster and fire it.

So I think that's what they did. And here is where, by the way, I have to give a little affection to Marty Pfeiffer. Who, by the way, is starting his own podcast and we'll be inviting him on. Is he really? Okay. Yes. Marty, who's wonderful.

Aaron 27:49

I'm like an encyclopedia.

Jeffrey 27:52

And whatever the positive version of a FOIA pest is, because he's constantly filing Freedom of Information Act requests. And then the best part is when he gets them, he digitizes them and makes them available. That's right. And so one of the things that he FOIAed was all of the Sandia newsletters.

Aaron 28:15

That's where I was thinking about all those cool graphics.

Jeffrey 28:18

Yeah. So we have now so much more data about Swerve, which was all unclassified, but was sitting in this inaccessible format of unclassified lab newsletters. And Marty got them through FOIA, digitized them and put them online. And so that's actually how I was able to access images of the swerve test and and textual descriptions of it. And that kind of like set off the light bulb in my head when I was like, oh, well, it looks like a it looks like an advanced hypersonic weapon sitting on a on a caster 4B or a caster four.

We'll just call it the 4B motor casing and nozzle, I think, with a with a different grain. I have seen that before. That is just the old Swerve configuration. That's amazing. Huge kudos to Marty. If you give us money on our Patreon, you should consider giving Marty money on his Patreon because he has way cooler subscriber benefits.

He eventually puts all this stuff into the public domain because he doesn't want to charge for it. But as the, you know, Patreon subscriber, you get you get a jump on it and some analytic work. So that's pretty cool. So that's that's one reason. There's another reason I think this is a test of this. Do you want to know what it is?

It's so stupid.

Aaron 29:50

No, I want to know. I'm actually like riveted here.

Jeffrey 29:54

OK, so. Do you remember how Trump. Went on and on and on about the new weapon the U.S. was developing to Bob Woodward. And Bob Woodward put it in his book and everyone was aghast that he talked about it. Okay, so my hypothesis is he was talking about the common hypersonic glide body. Because in other cases, each time there was a test of that system, he blabbed about it publicly.

Right. He called it a super duper missile. He talked about how Obama had been developing but gave up and then let the Chinese and the Russians steal it. And he has this whole thing. Right. Right.

Aaron 30:37

Right.

Jeffrey 30:37

Of course. So my hypothesis is that the comment he made to Woodward was also about the common hypersonic glide body. But. The best objection to my claim is. Which I think was a sensible objection was he had a short attention span and he only blabbed about things after tests. And there was no test of the common hypersonic glide body in December 2019 when Trump was talking to Woodward.

Right.

Aaron 31:08

Except...

Jeffrey 31:09

Except there was.

Aaron 31:10

Which is why you think...

Jeffrey 31:13

Yes, I think they put a predecessor. I don't think it was a common hypersonic glide body because it doesn't look like that. But I think they put a predecessor system on the ballistic missile and they did the test and they told Trump about it. And from Trump's ear out his mouth to Woodward's ear. And I think the reason people were aghast and didn't want to talk about it wasn't because it was a nuclear weapon.

But because you weren't supposed to say that they had put a glider on this missile.

Aaron 31:43

Right.

Jeffrey 31:43

Even though we can see the little fins. Right. Now that that is, by the way, the danger there is huge confirmation bias because I want to think he was talking about the. And so, like, it gives me I want that answer. I want to say, well, in fact, there was a test. So we should be aware that there is like the potential for Jeffrey bias because because I want that to be true.

But just in terms of the physical measurements and the performance of the missile, to me, it really looks like an advanced hypersonic weapon sitting on top of a caster for.

Aaron 32:16

Yeah, because I was about to say that's the leap in assumptions is that Trump was actually talking about that. And really, who knows about Trump?

Jeffrey 32:24

I mean, yeah, you know, he called it a weapon and, you know, it's a missile and it's actually not a missile. It's a glider. But he calls the glider a super duper missile. So, like, you know, I mean. You know, if he was describing like mid 90s porn, I would think there would be a chance there would be some resemblance of like his words with reality.

But anything outside of that, I think with Trump, you just, you know, you pay your money and take your chances.

Aaron 32:53

That's right. OK. Yeah. Yeah. In a couple days, we won't have to talk about this too much more, which is fantastic. So you think. So we think. But then, okay, so if you put these two things together, then did you try and model how far it can fly or something along those lines?

Jeffrey 33:17

Yeah, we did. Because now you can put it together. And the answer is it should fly further than the notice to mariners indicates.

Aaron 33:24

I was about to say, because if it glides, you can... It must be where the glider comes in, right?

Jeffrey 33:29

Well, so they could have lofted it. And the notice to Mariners is a kind of funny shape. Is it? Well, it's a fan. It's a fan. Like it doesn't have like neat drop points. It's a weird shape. And there looks like there's a little space for – there's also a portion of airspace that's closed outside of it that looks like it's maybe for like an airplane to like circle to like get data.

Aaron 34:02

Okay.

Jeffrey 34:02

I was about to say somebody is watching it. Well, and we, I mean, we did, we've been looking at, we've been trying to see if there were any airplanes. And there are a couple of candidates, but nothing, nothing really, nothing certain. Everything that could be explained normally. So, but here's where it gets really interesting because when you have a baseline, like what did the swerve test look like?

You can ask what's different. And there's one big, big, big difference. Do you have it open in front of you? The video?

Aaron 34:39

Yeah.

Jeffrey 34:40

I do, yes. And do you have it at the still where you can see the rocket sitting on the pad or on the table?

Aaron 34:48

Just as it's launching, yes.

Jeffrey 34:50

Okay. So you see there are fins at the bottom, right? Mm-hmm. And there are fins on the reentry vehicle?

Aaron 34:58

I do.

Jeffrey 35:01

There's a third set of control surfaces.

Aaron 35:03

Right, I can see those.

Jeffrey 35:05

Okay, that's extremely unusual.

Aaron 35:07

Right, because you can see one, then the little ones, and then there's kind of like medium ones. The Goldilocks.

Jeffrey 35:13

Yeah, so... The section between the reentry vehicle and the booster is typically, you'd call it like a payload support module. It's where you'd have like your computers and, you know, for guidance and you need an adapter because the booster is not the same size as the reentry vehicle and you want your reentry vehicle to separate and, you know, all that.

So the question is, why the hell would you have another set of control surfaces? Because this is not like a belt and suspenders. They are not redundant. The way control surfaces work is they disrupt the airflow. And so modeling that is pretty hard, right? So when you've got one set of control surfaces, you have to model the disruption.

There's a reason the fins are typically on the bottom.

Aaron 35:59

I have an idea what you're going to say here, but okay, go ahead.

Jeffrey 36:02

Because the air rushes past and it's turbulent behind it and it's hard to model. And yeah, okay, sometimes you see a second set of pair of fins on the front because the reentry vehicle's got to move. But that already creates complications because those fins, if they are not shrouded, and typically they're shrouded in other contexts, those fins create airflow that then interferes with the fins behind them.

Yeah, creates a disruption for the fins behind it. Got it. Adding a third set of control surfaces dramatically increases how complicated this thing is to model. Like you don't do that for fun. Like you don't do that because like, oh, I don't know. We need some extra fins. It might not work. Like that is a notable deviation from Swerve.

And they don't bother to shroud the front end, which is weird, because when the advanced hypersonic weapon is typically fired, they shroud the front end, both to protect the reentry vehicle, but I think also to not have that problem. And so our working hypothesis is suggested by something that Space Command said, which this was a risk reduction test.

So this is not a system that they are actually planning on deploying yet. They took off the shelf pieces and they went to learn something. And we think, well, I think David Laboon is my co-author on this. We think that they are studying what one army publication called extreme maneuvers. And I should be clear, I don't know if this thing actually maneuvered at all.

It's entirely possible that they just did a data collection with a bunch of Finns to just learn how that works. But there is a paper. Actually, there are a couple of papers, which we had never paid any attention to until now. One is a South Korean paper about making a missile do a U-turn. Like when it's reentering, changing its direction of flight backwards.

Which, if you think about it, would be really useful if your target is hiding behind a mountain.

Aaron 38:26

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 38:28

Right? Mm-hmm. And I can barely hear you saying, uh-huh, because your hands are blocking your mic.

Aaron 38:33

Well, that's because I'm – sorry. My hands are blocking my mouth. That's because I'm really enjoying this and my eyes are closed and I'm visualizing.

Jeffrey 38:39

And so I want to read you – I want to read you this quote from this paper, which was – well, here, I'll introduce it properly. So this is a paper from the Army Research Laboratory, and it's called Adaptive Missile Flight Control for Complex Aerodynamic Phenomena. I rarely – I've never – this is the only publication I've seen.

These people have two publications, but they're the only people I've seen publish about it. But it says, Current limitations in maneuvering flight vehicles can find the mission space for a variety of aerospace applications. Weapon systems with enhanced maneuverability could expand the capability to strike threats that are moving, evading, on reverse slopes, and partially protected behind walls, structures, or alleys.

And then it goes on to say, the ultimate objective of this research is to demonstrate extreme maneuvers as inspired by the fighter aircraft community. And they even observe this very specific problem where they say, flow interactions between upstream control surfaces, e.g. Canards, and downstream surfaces can be highly complex. Experimental and computational studies to quantify the aerodynamic forces and moments resulting from these phenomena are limited.

And of course, there are the inevitable variation associated with manufacturing and employing tactical munitions. So my hypothesis is they needed to do an intermediate-range ballistic missile test that put a nail in the coffin of the INF Treaty just because, right? They had to do it.

Aaron 40:39

Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 40:42

And cruise missile, that was straightforward. We're going to take a VLS launcher, right? We're going to bolt it to a truck. And now this launcher will forever be prohibited by the INF treaty, which means if you try to bring it back, you'll have to give up all of our cruise missiles. So dead, right? You can't bring it back.

I think for the ballistic missile, it's like, okay, well, what's really the purpose of the ballistic missile test? What are we going to do? Well, we want to do it fast, so we'll do it off the shelf. Well, you know, we've got this reentry vehicle. We either have one or we could make one. We have an existing production capacity for the Caster IV.

We could put those two things together. But, like, what's the freaking purpose, or what do you get out of it? And I think they are like, well, you know— It would be an interesting way to start studying how multiple control surfaces might allow extreme maneuvers. I'm not saying that the missile itself conducted any extreme maneuvers. I'm just saying that experimentally, it's like, ah, you know, there may be some things you could learn.

Aaron 41:48

And you could see the military desire for this type of maneuverability from a gliding hypersonic vehicle that could perhaps even have data links. You could go all over the place with where they want.

Jeffrey 42:00

And you can understand why they wouldn't want to talk about it. Of course.

Aaron 42:04

And you can understand why –

Jeffrey 42:07

Like, they're bragging about the hillbilly VLS, right? Because Treaty's dead. We want you to see it's dead. So not only do they show us, like, a lot of imagery of that test, but, like, Billingsley, Marshall Billingsley, the soon-to-be former special rep for arms control who mostly goes on junkets looking at U.S. defense capabilities.

Aaron 42:33

He's special, all right.

Jeffrey 42:34

Yeah, that guy. You know, he goes to the launcher factory, you know, and shows us pictures of it. Like, they're bragging about that thing. This thing they don't want to talk about. I think they don't want to talk about it, both because... It's a capability that if the U.S. acquires, they won't want to talk about, but also because advertising the fact that they're doing this is certainly going to lead the Russians and the Chinese, if they have not already done so, to start thinking the same way.

So all of a sudden, if I'm right that this is the thing Trump was talking about, the reason people are like, oh, God, we don't talk about that, right, has a lot to do with this potential development in military capability, particularly the arms race, where, you know, you're trying to get missiles to do slightly crazy things. Yeah, I've got the South Korean paper in front of me, by the way.

Aaron 43:34

Let's look at that one, too. This is too much fun.

Jeffrey 43:36

Yeah, it's Kim, Kim, and Park. And they are all associated... Well, they are associated with... Two of them are associated with the university, and one of them is associated with the Precision Guided Munitions R&D Lab at LGI NEX, L-I-G NEX, which typically makes the cruise missiles, but I'm sure they'd love to get in the ballistic missile zone.

And the abstract says it all. This paper proposes a purely aerodynamic pitch control design scheme for agile missiles that need to reverse their flight directions for tracking a target. The main challenge in performing this kind of maneuver is that the missiles may enter the high angle of attack domain in which aerodynamic actuation is ineffective.

Aaron 44:25

This makes a lot of sense to me. Your logic train makes sense to me. All of it.

Jeffrey 44:31

I'm not saying that the... And I want to be clear. I am not saying... There are some differences between the general approach outlined in the Army Research Lab paper, which cites this Korean paper and this Korean paper. And I don't want to say that the way the Koreans are talking about doing it is the way we're talking...

It's not as simple as saying like there's one way to do it, but just generally speaking, the army and the army in the U.S. has been funding research and the South Korean, I assume government is funding this research. Well, maybe it's just defense, you know, contractors. But there is interest in both the U.S. and the South Korean defense communities for these really extreme maneuvers.

And I suspect that's what they don't want to talk about.

Aaron 45:15

And then it would make sense that they took advantage of this test. I don't want to call it a prototype, but they took an older, perhaps existing design, but then the interesting part about it was that it was an older, basically off-the-shelf design and capability, but they wanted to test out some fancy new features.

Jeffrey 45:37

Yeah, you already know about the booster. You already know about the RV. What's really interesting is that third set of control surfaces and what that might presumably mean for maneuvering this whole system. And again, I think that is the thing that Space Command put out. I think even though it's almost as vague as everything else, Really gets at that, one of these statements, now I have to dig up, makes clear that it's a risk reduction effort.

And so they're not, this isn't a thing that they are planning on deploying in its existing configuration. It is a test of a capability that will give them data And help them decide if you wanted a highly maneuverable missile. Like this is a test that gives you some data about like how you would do that. So I think that's what they tested in December 2019.

I think they took a... I think they... I think they, you know... Took... They dipped a toe in some waters that I think will be... Important for strategic stability in the coming years and and honestly i didn't even know about the korean paper i didn't know about the u.s paper i did not really realize that people were like geez what if we could reverse a missile's flight you know then we could we could hit somebody in hiding in an alley or or or behind a building or you know It's like, yeah.

Or moving.

Aaron 47:26

Yeah. I mean, according to that paper, like, are there moving targets? Yeah. All sorts of stuff you can do with this.

Jeffrey 47:33

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think I was having a conversation where we were talking about the challenges in hitting moving targets with something like the DF-21D. And, you know, you got to get – my guess is, from what I can tell, you have to get fairly close, right? In the first place, to let the missile do relatively small maneuvers to hit the thing that's moving.

Aaron 47:56

That would make sense.

Jeffrey 47:58

So you're making that basket a little bit bigger if you can move more. You could lead it, and if you've got to back up, you could do that.

Aaron 48:10

So it's... And you could confuse potential... I could do all sorts of stuff with this stuff.

Jeffrey 48:15

But anyways... And hey, for all we know, you know, the thing didn't turn and like just plunked in the water and they were like, oh, that's a mess. You know, so I don't want to exaggerate. But I think it's notable that they don't want to talk about this capability. I think it's notable that it is basically just swerved 35, 40 years later with current capabilities and that the only deviation from...

From the original Swerve architecture is the payload support module having its own little fins. Well, actually, they also shrouded. They shrouded Serv. So they're letting the fins hang out there. And I think that's probably not an accident, right? I think they're really interested in how those control surfaces relate to one another. And that makes sense strategically because that's a thing that we're starting to hear about.

Aaron 49:02

Right. And of course, I think what you're saying, too, is it's just a test. It doesn't mean that it did any of this stuff, but if all the assumptions that go into this hypothesis are true, it's indicative of interest. And we know that they have interests in this type of capability.

Jeffrey 49:22

I'll say it this way. You know what they could have done? They could have taken a fairly traditional advanced hypersonic weapon setup with a shroud and an appropriate size booster and fired it to an intermediate range.

Aaron 49:38

Right. I've got to say, there's a very easy way to do this. They didn't, if, again, if, because of the imagery of the three sets of fins, it doesn't suggest that they did that.

Jeffrey 49:48

Right. But they went, they went out of their way to pop off the shroud and add another set of fins. And, and, and, and then when you ask them about it, they, you know, like start staring at their shoes and mumbling. Right. So that requires an explanation. And the best explanation I have is that they're super interested in using control surfaces to do...

I don't like the term extreme maneuvers because I feel like they're exaggerating what they might actually be able to achieve, but so-called extreme maneuvers. Again, not that they actually did any, but this is a step in that direction.

Aaron 50:29

I feel like I've stepped into your class, but that's good stuff.

Jeffrey 50:34

It's going to turn out it's all wrong. It's actually filled with reptiles and they were just, you know, saying how reptiles handle, you know, high G reentries. I don't know.

Aaron 50:43

I don't know if it's probably a QAnon conspiracy about that.

Jeffrey 50:45

Kittens. Kittens, maybe.

Aaron 50:47

Yeah, who knows? Maybe it was Jeffrey Epstein. Rocket into space. But that's good.

Jeffrey 50:58

For me, it was really fun to... You know, we often don't look at US systems. Not because we don't want to look at US systems, but because there is no point in looking at them because the information about them is typically pretty... Transparent. And so... It was enormous fun to take the methods that we have developed for China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and turn them on a US system and see what answer we get.

And even if we turn out to be fantastically wrong, It will teach us something about these methods and their capabilities and their limits. So I'm hoping that, you know, this will shake loose some more information. And even if we royally screwed it up, we are going to learn so much about these techniques.

Aaron 51:48

So is that an open invitation to U.S. government officials and representatives from Northrop that they can come on the podcast and Dynetics, Dynetics, to come on the podcast and lecture us?

Jeffrey 52:00

Yes. Imagine me in that meme sitting at the table with a sign that says the conventionally configured ground launch ballistic missile is just a fancy ass swerve. Change my mind.

Aaron 52:13

I think that's what the name of this episode needs to be, is fancy ass swerve. So with that, this has been fun. Jeffrey, as always, thank you for, yeah, just, this has been good. I really enjoyed this. So head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast if you want to get in on the action in the Slack channel where you can vote on our topics.

And yes, we will eventually do Armenia, Azerbaijan. That's patreon.com slash ACW podcast. $3 for a student, $5 for a normal person. And I think we should plug Marty Pfeiffer again. You can find him on Twitter. And check out all of his good work as well. With that, Jeffrey, enjoy the rest of your day.

Jeffrey 52:54

It was great talking to you, Aaron. And great to talk to you.