. At this point, I think USA better make something like kinzhal:
A US version of the AS-24 Killjoy? Well Boeing could dust of the plans for the long ago cancelled XAGM-48A Skybolt and update the design, the last 60 years have seen HUGE technological leaps in a large number of areas of science and engineering.
It would likely just be a PrSM that's air launched. Which isn't very useful. Kinzhal would be cutting edge in like 1975 I guess.
How is it not useful?
Because it requires an aircraft with external carriage.
This is not very useful when air generals think you need F-35A just to bomb a tank in WW3.
Kinzhal range is 1000-2000 km, that mean you can strike extreme deep inside enemy territory without any risk whatsoever.
Maybe at high altitudes. Why do you think Kinzhals and their carrier aircraft are flying so low in Ukraine to be filmed by cell phones, at targets less than 500 kilometers distant from the frontlines?
The speed is Mach 10-12, and since it fly in space, that pretty much the average speed (much faster than even ARRW). Most SAM can't even destroy Mach 10-12 targets.
Patriot would have pretty little to no difficulty destroying an air launched Iskander. Or a MiG-25. The same is true of S-400 and an air-launched PrSM or the F-15E needed to carry it.
By the time something like Kinzhal becomes usable in a A2AD zone, you can quite literally overfly a target with a Paveway and achieve pretty much the same effect, with something like an F-35A or a Su-75, which is why America isn't interested in the idea. It wants things it can fling at Patriots, S-400s, and HQ-9s without having to destroy them first, and maybe TEL bunkers before their road mobile launchers can disperse and nuke too many fighter bases. Which means hypersonic weapons.
The purpose is not to replicate the long range artillery with a fighter jet. The purpose is to hit something very quickly, at extremely long range, with high targeting ambiguity, which requires the ability to actively maneuver across a high cross range. Kinzhal would destroy itself trying to keep up with LRHW much less ARRW or HACM if it had to turn that hard. So would PrSM. Both of those weapons require highly accurate targeting data and have very little ambiguity in the target's location.
Then Kinzhal can also drop 10 decoys, each of them decoy also carry a jammer, then because Kinzhal fly in space, those decoys can move at Mach 10 as well.
Good thing America has a lot of time to tinker with the Q-65s and LTAMDS's software after studying the Iskander's actual radar decoys then? Kinzahl isn't getting newer, more sophisticated radar decoys before America can produce countermeasures for their radars, that's for sure.
Flying in space is less interesting than being able to fly in atmosphere and that is less interesting than maneuvering in atmosphere.
Tell me 1 system that is not ICBM/SLBM in the Western world has with similar capability to Kinzhal? , there is nothing, not even remotely close.
Tell me one reason why the "Western world" needs it when America has aircraft that can just survive in an "A2AD bubble" pretty casually.
The reason America doesn't need, and never will need, a weapon like Kinzhal is because it has the capacity to produce new aircraft. Russia does not. Russia relies on old aircraft that have been factory zeroed, or aircraft built to 1980's standards when they're new, and thus the standoff range becomes their main survivability method.
OTOH a B-21 can probably bomb an S-300 or HQ-9 from a few miles away with glide bombs and they wouldn't know they were under attack until they start exploding.
The most sophisticated air power regimes don't require trying to shoehorn in wacky standoff measures into their bombers. When they do they prefer very slow, stealthy cruise missiles that can't be seen, tracked, and targeted from orbit. Kinzhal, if it isn't being tracked on radar, can just be tracked by SBIRS-LO (or its replacement) and that targeting data fed back to a IBCS LTAMDS which will feed the information to a PAC-3, until the latter gets into range to acquire the target with its onboard mmW seeker, of which it is highly unlikely that the Russians have developed a jammer decoy for. Rest in peace, Russian air launched ballistic missile, you would have been great in 1992 if the USSR hadn't died.
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