And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.
"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."
- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics
> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.
> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried
Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.
That said I enjoyed the article!
A big part of hypersonic/ICBM warfare is anti-detection tech. When you have the two most military capable countries with 'hypersonic' ICBMs that can in theory reach across the planet is < 30 minutes, a massive part of that is stopping the other country from realizing you even fired a missile in the first place. That detection is usually done through satellites afaik. One of the next steps in global warfare is going to be satellite degradation and interference.
It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
Missile submarines have basically made this reality for decades.
We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in the case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable.
FWIW they were cancelled because they didn't have a particularly good kill ratio and proliferation and MIRV meant you'd need a ton of them to prevent an attack landing (and doing so would involve a significant number of nuclear blasts pretty close to the targets anyway). Deterrence was more credible.
And doesn’t the parent article to the Sprint article make it clear that they we didn’t deploy them because fall out shelters combined with building more nukes was deemed more cost effective at saving lives.
The ABM systems we built in the early cold war worked by having nuclear payloads. We could absolutely not hit an incoming ICBM with the tech at the time, so we just slapped a nuke on it and hoped we could get within 1km at detonation.
Importantly, it was a completely dead end. They had no response to MIRVs and could not be built in sufficient numbers to deal with any actual launch. We threw them out because they were in fact useless.
Generally, we have moved away from Nuclear ABM systems because detonating a hundred warheads above a city is very unlikely to work out well.
Intercepting a cold war era ICBM turned out to be feasible with newer technology, and we currently have $2 billion missiles that can feasibly intercept ICBMs (at low quantity).
>No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target
Nobody has fired one of those against a target because almost nobody has a functioning maneuvering hypersonic vehicle. Basically just China I think.
I would expect "real" hypersonic weapons like that are basically uncounterable. The physics just gets too obnoxious. Interceptors will struggle to get better than a coin flip, and they will be too expensive to use on anything else so they won't be general purpose, so equipping them will be full of tradeoffs.
That's the entire point of hypersonic weapons. $3 billion dollars to make that high value target go away, with extremely high probability. They replace 50 bombers launching still quite expensive anti-ship weapons at scale, which is the strategy it replaces.
This of course has rather negative implications for the concept of force projection in future wars. Which is why China made a hypersonic weapon.
It becomes a war of financial attrition at that point.
In contrast, modern hypersonic weapons have plenty of use cases where they'd be fitted with conventional warheads, and used against targets like US Navy ships.
There is plenty that could go wrong if USN ships mounted nuclear interceptor missiles, ready to launch on a moment's notice...
Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem.
"Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though.
So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.