Episode 327: Hypersonic Missiles and Global Strategy: Implications for Hegemony, Arms Control, and Systemic Security with Dr Jacob Parakilas

This episode of the International Risk Podcast explores hypersonic missiles through the lens of global strategy, defense policy, and international security. Host Dominic Bowen interviews Dr. Jacob Parakilas from Rand Europe about what makes hypersonic weapons strategically significant beyond their speed.

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Transcript
Introduction

Dr Parakilas: Something moving at Mach five is a weapon, and if it’s coming towards you, the ethical and legal decision framework is not really relevant because the only question is, can I get my interceptor into the air and can it intercept and destroy this weapon before it hits me?

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We read all of your comments and we act on them. Let’s get onto the show. Today’s topic is hypersonic. Missiles and hypersonics aren’t interesting because they’re fast, although they do sound cool. It’s more that they’re interesting because they compress decision time. They complicate attribution and intent, and they stress test systems.

They make early warning difficult. Commander control really put under pressure and even reassurance. Escalation control and arms control are much more difficult. Anxfd today we’re gonna examine hypersonic weapons through the lens of global strategy. What they mean for us, hedge money, what it means for Russia, India, China, and even North Korea, who all possess hypersonic weapons and why they are destabilizing for arms control and how they impact international risk and security.

I’m Dominic Bowen and I’m the host of the International Risk Podcast. Today we’re joined by Dr. Jacob Para. He’s the research leader for defence strategy and policy at Rand Europe. He’s worked at Chatham House and the US State Department and he brings a really unique perspective on what hypersonic missiles mean for the deterrence, for arms control, and for the future of geopolitical relations.

Dr. Parakilas, welcome to the International Podcast. 

Dr Parakilas: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dominic Bowen: Whereabouts in the world do we find you today? 

Dr Parakilas: I am in South London. 

Dominic Bowen: Fantastic. We’ve heard a lot about missiles, whether it’s the US and Israeli attacks in Iran recently, whether it’s the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, or of course many other conflicts around the world. But we occasionally hear about hypersonic I think technically hypersonic something that’s defined as troubling at Mac five five times the speed of sounds. But other than that, speed, why is this category of missile difference why should our listeners be interested in this topic today?

Dr Parakilas: So you’re, you’re right to identify the sort of the nomenclature matters because. The idea of a projectile traveling more than five times the speed of sound isn’t new. Ballistic missiles travel more than five times the speed of sound. So in that sense, hypersonic weapons have been in existence and deployed and operationally used since the 1940s, but.

When we talk about the sort of modern conception of hypersonic missiles, we’re talking about broadly two categories of things. So there’s, there’s hypersonic glide vehicles, which are launched by a ballistic missile, but are capable of maneuvering as they approach their target. And we’re talking about hypersonic cruise missiles, which a cruise missile doesn’t fly on ballistic trajectory.

Near space or space and then come plummeting down to the atmosphere. It flies very much like an aircraft. Most cruise missiles are subsonic. They travel at roughly the same speed as an easy jet flight, and they, you know, they may take interesting trajectories. They may be stealthy, they may have some kinds of countermeasures to prevent being shot down, but they’re basically small aircraft.

So if you think of An initial like that, that suddenly is traveling Mach five or Mach six instead of five or 600 miles an hour. That is a really, really substantial difference in capability. So there’s, there’s an element of this that I think is very much congruent with the weapons that we’ve seen in war, and there’s an element that is not, that is actually quite transformational, unsurprisingly, that’s the one that I think is still farther from operational deployment and strategic relevance.

Dominic Bowen: Now Russia’s repeatedly used hypersonic missiles in Ukraine. We’ve heard that China, and we’ve seen that China has paraded its flagship DF 17 hypersonic missiles and North Korea has been testing its own models, and yet Western powers, at least overtly appear to be lagging behind. Now in such a competitive landscape that we’re operating in today.

Why is the US Europe approaching this technology differently or maybe just more slowly? 

Dr Parakilas: it’s worth saying that the US has deployed some hypersonic missiles, the US Army’s Dark Eagle program, which is very large truck based launcher. The Navy has started to install conventional prompt strike tubes on its Zumwalt class destroyers.

these are still at the early stages of deployment, but they exist and they’ve been successfully tested. I think it’s not entirely fair to say that the, that the west is completely behind. because of the limited number of times that something that you could describe as a hypersonic weapon have been used in combat.

It’s hard in the public domain to assess various levels of readiness, of strategic capability with these weapons. there, there are western hypersonic missiles. in general, the way that the west. Is a little bit different from the way that Russia or China does. changing a little bit and there are exceptions. France has the Bastille Day parade. Generally, there aren’t big military parades that are showcase. instead, you have DSEI, you have the Paris Air Show. You have these industrial and defence sales showcases of weaponry, and that’s a slightly different context what information you get

Testing failures in the West are relatively public. Broadly speaking, Western ministries of defence are fairly open about their procurement. The Russian and Chinese ministries are not, and North Koreans absolutely not. to the extent that these things are a meaningful existing capability rather than just something that looks cool on the back of a truck, driving down Red Square or Tiananmen Square with patriotic music blasting in the background. It’s still, I think, a, a little bit of an open question.

Dominic Bowen: We know that operational costs as well as the research and development mean that there are barriers for countries looking to create their own hypersonic weapons. What do you think are we going to see a, a consolidation more polarizing when it comes to middle income powers having their own hypersonic weapons? And I think that’s particularly relevant, noting countries like Canada and many European countries, allies of the USA. Are now Less confident in their alliance with the USA. And maybe looking to bolster their own capabilities. 

Dr Jacob Parakilas: I think you have to see a Meaningful operational deployment of hypersonic weapons before it’s worth the extraordinary investment to build them. so for example, what are you trying to do? When you are a military officer, a military procurement officer, a military strategist. What you’re trying to do is to create an effect.

The military often uses the term effectors. personally, I don’t love the term. It’s newspeak. the, the point is that you are, you are buying something that is supposed to create an effect on the battlefield, and you are doing that with a limited budget and a limited doctrinal view of the world and a set of capabilities.

So the ability to see your target, the ability to make a decision, the ability to put the weapon where it can be fired, to service the weapon, to destroy the target, to bring it back safely to a base, reload it and restart the cycle again. That’s really expensive, all that stuff. Not just having the thing that goes to the target and makes it explode, but actually all those capabilities which allow you to meaningfully create the effect that you’re seeking to create.

That complex of stuff is expensive. And so if you are that military officer or that strategist making the decision about what to buy. You have to convinced that spending four or five times the amount of money to buy an unproven hypersonic rather than a much larger fleet of. Relatively simple, but proven and effective.

Subsonic cruise missiles or one-way attack drones or fighter jets armed with standoff munitions. these things have been proven in battle. militaries are fundamentally quite conservative in terms of how they approach the question, how you create the effect they tend to prefer. We’ve done this this way.

It’s worked. We know how to do this. We have a pipeline to train people and to build things that do this, that create this effect. And unless we have very, very good evidence that this new shiny thing will do that effect much better, we don’t think it’s worth spending tons and tons of money better to iterate on what we have because we know it works rather than take a big gamble with our nation security.

Again, they’re conservative for a reason. The, the obligations that the military has. Political framework that they operate within does create a, a very strong set of incentives to do what is proven to work. So it’s that balance has to be considered. 

Dominic Bowen: Of course, every major weapons force claims that it’s game changing.

And we’ve seen that with tanks, we’ve seen that with different aircraft. And the fact is, most aren’t, we still see, we’re seeing trench warfare in Sudan. We’re seeing trench warfare in Ukraine. We’re seeing the use of artillery, we’re seeing the use of tanks, despite many people saying the days of tanks and artillery and trench warfare air being over. So I wonder what mission set is actually driving this it about defeating air? Is it missile defence? Is it hitting time sensitive targets? Is it deterrent or is it, is it just signaling. if we really strip away the, the marketing, what is the strategic problem that hypersonic missiles are actually trying to solve?

Dr Parakilas: There are a couple of strategic problems I think hypersonic missiles are attempting to address. One is fundamentally the effectiveness of integrated air and missile defence. And you see that in Ukraine. You see it particularly vividly illustrated. The defence of Israel by Israel, the US, and other regional allies against a complex Iranian attack, including drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles.

Aaron Missile defence has gotten very, very effective. What you do to try to hit your opponent? Now is you launch a layered attack. So you throw a bunch of really, really basic drones first, and they fly slowly, but can go a long way and they can come from a bunch of different directions. And ideally, you get your opponent to expend their expensive air defence munitions on the drones. And then a few minutes after you launch the drones, you launch improved missiles, which are a bit faster, a bit more capable, also generally quite vulnerable to air defence. Then you launch your ballistic missiles with the idea being the drones come along slowly. The cruise missiles go a bit faster, and then the ballistic missiles and everything arrives at the same time, and you create a dilemma for the air defenders. Well, which of these targets is going to hit an empty field and which is going  hit a command post or hospital? I have a limited number of defences. How do I select which of these incoming targets to engage and destroy, and which ones can I let through without suffering an unacceptable blow to my own interests? That’s the standard model because frankly, combat aircraft are very, very expensive. This isn’t World War II where you can send 1700 bombers in a giant box over an enemy city, lose 15% of them rain. Mass numbers of high explosive bombs over the city. Come back home. You’ve got 15% new bombers that have just come off the giant assembly line that you’ve built and do it again the next day. There aren’t enough combat aircraft in the world to sustain that kind of campaign, so now it’s, you do it with long range conditions instead of strategic bombers. Hypersonic missiles the strategic context are designed to be more effective at hitting the target that you really, really want to hit. So you can fit that into that complex attack framework. So you can still use your, your massive flight of drones and your flight of proof missiles and your balistic missiles, and then if you add a few hypersonic missiles as the things which are, will come in the fastest. Be able to avoid defences. when you’re talking about defending against ballistic missiles, you’re talking about only the most sophisticated missile defence systems can engage those. You can shoot down a cruise missile or a drone with a truck mounted machine gun or an F PV drone. if you’re in the right place at the right time, if you’ve got the right sensors, you can shoot them down with electron warfare, you’re not going to have much luck shooting down a ballistic or a hypersonic missile with anything short of. Missile equivalent, a very, very sophisticated, very integrated, networked defence system, and those things are very, very expensive. The most. Updated, most capable version of the Patriot missile, the interceptor itself cost about 4 million. So when you pull the trigger on that, you have to be very, very confident that you are firing at a target that is worth shooting down. So that’s one element. The other element is hitting very specific high value targets outside of context of strategic bombardment. This is principally an anti-ship thing. So modern warships are not armored like World War II Warships, but they have a lot of layered air defences. They have long range missiles, they have medium range missiles. They have high velocity, high rate of fire guns like the phalanx or goalkeeper that basically just spray lead at the target when it gets too close. So it’s quite difficult to hit them with traditional, not impossible. Ukrainians managed to sink the RFS MO with traditional style subsonic cruise missiles. But in general, an aware, capable modern warship or bat surface action group is a very, very difficult thing to hit with traditional missile. If you can get that, the aeronomics and the metallurgy, right, to build a hypersonic cruise missile that can travel five times the speed of sound. Pass from detection range to striking its target. Hopefully fast enough that the defence systems in that warship. Don’t have time to adequately react. And if you can do that, because it’s traveling five times the speed of sound, it’s carrying so much kinetic energy that it causes massive damage and that makes a huge problem, especially if you can hit not just the surface warships, but the.

The, the aircraft carriers, the assault ships, the refuelling tankers, the ships without which, long naval operations are impossible. So hypersonic cruise missiles, I think principally about enabling naval warfare and keeping enemy naval forces back from your area of interest. 

Dominic Bowen: Practically it’s, it’s really difficult. I was actually in Kyiv with some clients in November, 2025, and that was when one of the biggest aerial assaults on the capitol actually occurred. It was about the 13th, 14th of November, and there was about 430 attack drones that was coming towards, Kyiv.

We didn’t know exact number then. We just knew that there was hundreds coming towards kyiv and there was 18 missiles that were were launched on a nationwide attack. course we went down to the bunkers, but on the, on the way down, you could hear, you could hear the machine guns, you could see on your phone and on your electronic watch that there was ew being deployed. But how do places like Kiev where there’s just these nightly attacks of hundreds of drones and missiles, how do the defenders actually prioritize? Because it’s all well and good when we talk about the theory. If you’re a 21-year-old sitting on the top of a building, how do you decide, do I deploy the, the $4 million patriot? Do I use the machine gun? What’s the process? How do we, how do we actually work through that? the,

Dr Parakilas: The process is that ideally the 21-year-old sitting in the back of a Toyota Hilux behind a 50 calibre machine gun isn’t making that decision. The decision is made in a command post that has some degree of sensor fusion.

So when we talk about missile and air defence, that the phrase that is bandied about now is integrated. And the eye part is really, really important because each individual air defence operator, whether they’re, a recruit again, sitting there with a machine gun ready to shoot down low flying drones, or a missile operator the control cabin of a patriot battery or a pilot sitting in the cockpit of, they only have a very, very small part of the overall situational awareness. So they’re basically. Steered towards something and engage the targets within their cone of vision, essentially, whether that’s human vision or electronic vision, it’s the command post that synthesizes all sorts of different data. And traditionally this has been radar data. This goes back to 1940 in the Battle of Britain and the chain home radars that were the key enabler of Britain’s successful air defence against the. Was that there were, and you can visit them, there are bunkers on the outskirts of London that were the places where you can see the genesis of imd. Really interesting. It’s, it’s worth, worth a visit, I would say, because you get this amazing analog picture, like giant map table of all of Southern England with little counters and this. In wartime would’ve been dozens and dozens of people moving the counters around with different radio frequencies to say, okay, there’s a squadron of Spitfires based at RAF, whatever. Put them in. got German bombers coming in this direction. We’re gonna send the Spitfires there. we’ve just seen there’s a different squadron of German fighters. We’re going to redirect the spit fires and we’re going to send some hurricanes to intercept the bombers from being able to control. So that the Spitfire pilot and hurricane pilot and the guy sitting behind the Bower’s gun somewhere in tent doesn’t have to make the decision of what do I shoot at? That they’re issued orders and they can focus on operationally doing their job. So what you’re trying to do, if you are the attacker, is to either confuse or destroy that control centre. It’s much, much easier to hit the central node to make it so that they make bad decisions. One way or another than it is to individually target and destroy each individual launcher and fighter, jet and gun platform that could intercept your units.

Dominic Bowen: Very interesting, and that’s certainly something I’ll have to visit with my son on my next visit to the UK Jacob, I’ll remind our listeners that if you’d like to watch your podcasts, the International Risk Podcast is always available on YouTube. So please go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast and please do subscribe and like our content. This really is critical for our success. Now, Jacob, speed and we’ve talked about the Mac five and MAC six plus, the ability to manoeuvre means that that window for interpretation from these command-and-control centres, when they’re looking at this deployed hypersonic missile really shrinks their, their ood, their ability to observe orientate. It’s quite small now, if we’ve got a fast moving incident, say in Ukraine say in the, a maritime environment like you spoke about, do states or do hypersonic missiles really push state towards launching on warning versus thinking considering the different options? Does this affect how military leaders need to make decisions as hypersonics become more, more normal?

I’m wondering about the crisis management ability when, when leaders in these command and control centres have less and less time to make decisions. 

Dr Parakilas: The short answer is yes. The long answer is a little bit more nuanced because when you say launch on warning, what you’re talking about is launching interceptors, which I don’t think there are fun. There are. There are entirely defensive and entirely offensive weapons. Defensive weapons have offensive implications and vice versa. But if you are talking about intercepting, taking countermeasures against the incoming munition itself, then. Launch on warning is a much less strategically destabilizing concept than the nuclear theory of launch on warning, which is based on the idea that it is effectively impossible to intercept incoming thermonuclear, tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, which may be able to destroy your own intercontinental missiles. Detect enemy nuclear weapons incoming, your choice is to launch or take the risk that your own missiles will be destroyed and you’ll lose the ability to retaliate. So I think there are two importantly different ideas about launch on warning here. Put it another way. If you are on a warship and you detect an incoming track and that track is moving at Mach five, there is zero chance that that track is a civilian airliner.

There’s very little danger. I think that there would be a repeat of the Iran air incident in 1988 in the something moving at Mach five is  a weapon, and if it’s coming towards you, the ethical and legal decision framework is not really relevant because the only question is, can I get my interceptor into the air and can it intercept and destroy this weapon before it hits me? That’s not a particularly complicated ethical or legal question. Of course you do as a military officer. You have an inherent right of self-defence to hammer that button as quickly as you can. There is a, there is a technical and a logistical problem of how do we ensure that our key nodes are protected? Do we have weapons sensors that are capable of pushing the detection on flow out far enough and weapons capable of reacting fast enough? We can intercept those targets, and that’s a, that’s an important and expensive question. The logistical element is how do we balance, the very, very expensive high-end capabilities necessary to intercept those threats versus. Having, having a big dumb gun with tons of ammo that can shoot down lots and lots of drones, because it’s all well and good. Having your FourC interceptor that shoot down an incoming ballistic missile. But if the actual threat is fivehead drones, right? You now have 499 and they’re still going to destroy the strategic question about launch on warning. I don’t think hypersonic missiles actually change very much because. As I said at the beginning, hypersonic weapons in the sense of a weapon that travels faster than Mach five has have existed since the 1940s.intercontinental ballistic missiles generally re-entered the atmosphere. Something between mach, they are incredibly fast. Most of that is discarded on its trajectory to its target. The thing that actually hits the target is the re-entry vehicle, which is this very, very small portion. The size a desk and something that is in strategic terms, the size of a bullet, traveling at 50 or 20 times the speed of sound through the atmosphere, that’s an incredibly diff difficult problem. Just on a physics level, it’s very, very difficult to ensure that something is in the air at the spot that it will be passing through with enough force to disrupt or destroy it. But again, that’s not a new problem. And the, the systems that we have, the deterrence, the, second strike capabilities, nuclear ballistic missile submarines are all designed to create a strategic stability that prevents enemies from thinking that they can get enough of an advantage by launching first and has the theory is.

The nuclear piece since 1945. 

Dominic Bowen: And I wonder, the claims about possible patriot missiles in Ukraine actually intercepting Russian hypersonic missiles I think the ability or inability to intercept hypersonic missiles is one of the reasons why they’re we’re so interesting. How far away are we?

in Europe right now and you are in theUK, there is, there is a lot of tension. I speak to a lot of clients that are very genuinely concerned, justifiably in many, many cases about threats from Russia and from China. Now, many of them around insider threats, corporate espionage, theft of ip, they sponsored organized crime.

there’s, there’s a lot of risks Europe today that people are really justified in being concerned about. But of course, at a macro level there is a, a much smaller chance, but people are still wondering. Is there a chance Russia ever firing missiles into Europe?

how far away are we from having an effective anti-hypersonic missile defence shield?

Dr Parakilas:  Pretty far. So Patriots have been, I’m led to believe fairly effective in intercepting and destroying Russian short range ballistic missiles, including ones like the Kinzhal, the one which is launched from a MIG 31, an aero ballistic missile. It’s called. The Ukrainians have claimed a fairly soft, not perfect, but fairly good success rate in placing Patriots and intercepting those, those missiles. And Europe has Patriots and Europe has a couple of other systems which are broadly comparable to Patriots and Europe has good radars, and especially if you’re talking about Europe as it is today with US support the US can deploy something called fad. Terminal, high altitude area defence, which is one step above patriot in the hierarchy.

if you imagine a hierarchy of air defence systems with that guy with a 50 calibre machine gun in the bed of a truck at the bottom, Thad is pretty much at the top. They can hit targets that are actually in space. And those are mounted on trucks, and the radars are mounted on trucks, so the US can deploy fad to cover areas that are of strategic importance. Now, they don’t have very many of them, and they’re very, very expensive and they’re very valuable, so they don’t cover everything. They have to be where they go has to be chosen and. Once you’ve chosen it, you have to put the trucks on a plane or a boat, and they have to get there and they have to find a spot where they can set up.

So, it’s not like you can just snap your fingers and have, but that, that defence exists under the NATO framework. If you think about Europe, without the us, there is no European Thad equivalent. There is, there are patriots and there are patriot equivalents. You have to think about positioning these things because Patriot engages its target at the edge of the atmosphere, which means that it can do that in a bubble of  a hundred miles or a couple hundred miles. I don’t know the exact engagement on flow, but it’s, it’s not a vast amount can be relative to the expense of the battery and the the need to have other. Defensive systems. There aren’t enough patriots or patriot equivalents in European arsenals to cover the whole continent. So European defence officials would have to essentially choose the targets that they would think would be most likely to be hit and targets that would be most. Devastating if they were hit. So there is an allocation that would need to happen, and the exact mechanism of that allocation would not be something that would be public and would depend very much on the, the exact threat and the intensity of the threat. The availability of other assets because you need to protect these things too, right? You don’t wanna just put it on a hilltop with nothing around it, because then that little silly drone can come along and then you don’t have a high-end system anymore. It’s interesting that you were talking about the choices that European leaders need to make, and Europe especially is seeing that increased interest pressure, and it’s made commitments to invest more heavily in its own defence capabilities.

Dominic Bowen: You’ve spoken a lot about the evolution of technology warfare, and you gave a really interesting quote where you said governments that see themselves as engaged in geopolitical competition at any level appear to be betting that AI will enable them to improve their relative position. And you talked about how given the concentration of resources and the nature of AI development, there seems to be limited chance that AI may allow some smaller powers to leapfrog their way to greater influence.

And so I wonder in this environment where countries are spending more on defence when they’re trying to utilize AI to maybe leapfrog or maintain their position, what should European countries be spending their defence dollars on? And to what extent should hypersonic technology be part of that defence spending?

Dr Parakilas: I think the answer to that is that the threat picture for Europe is in now versus 15. In some ways simpler because Russia is a direct threat. the, the questions about, well, should NATO be an expeditionary force? Should we be doing nation building in Afghanistan? That’s all subsumed to the overwhelming imminence of the threat from Russia. There is quite a lot of data now coming out of Ukraine about how Russia fights, and you can make some reasonable inferences based on that data about how Russia would fight Europe based on how it has fought against Ukraine and strengths and weaknesses of Russia. contemporary Russia as a military power. That said, the fact that it’s simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy. One of the really fundamental problems for Europe is, yeah, okay. It’s, it’s all well and good to say. Well, Russia’s GDP is about the same as Italy’s, which, yes, true, but also Russia is spending a lot more on of its GDP on offensive military capabilities. They have a lot of experience in using offensive military capabilities. They’re not particularly constrained in how they use those offensive military capabilities. It’s not accurate to say that they don’t have internal politics. They do, but they are a authoritarian into totalitarian state, and the internal politics can be resolved by the man at the top making a decision, which is not the case for Europe. Europe doesn’t have a central authority, which can say. We need to be cranking out hundreds of a defence munitions, and the, country A, you’re building tanks. Your tanks are, you shouldn’t be building tanks, you’re building a hundred of them. They’re not, they’re not, they’re fine a hundred tanks are gonna be gone in two weeks of warfare. Stop building tanks, build missiles instead. Strategically, that might be the right decision, but it’s politically impossible because there is no central European authority who can go into country A and say. I’m here, I’m closing down your tank factory.

You need to retrain those. You need to spend 2 billion euros, retraining those workers to do microelectronics manufacturing for missile guidance systems instead of welding homogenous steel build big 60 ton fighting vehicles. there’s the thing that needs to happen. I think there, there would be relatively little disagreement that that needs to happen, that Europe needs to invest very heavily in air defence as the first priority and the enabling capabilities Which at the moment largely provided by the us. But I think there’s a general recognition that Europe needs to have a backstop, if not a fully sovereign, independent ability to do that. Enablement by itself, and by enablement, I mean sensing satellites, radars, logistical resupply, the ability to move ammunition and spares and people around the continent. Things like. the intelligence backbone, the software that links, again, when we talk about integration, the advantage the Russians have is that they’re one country and the government can say, this is the piece of software that we’re going to use. All of our units are going to start using it. It may or may not be a good piece of software, but that’s a decision that is made and it is flowed down and is adopted across the piece. And that’s not true for Europe. 

Dominic Bowen: It’s particularly interesting, on one of my, missions to Ukraine, I was in the east of the country and it was during, that period when Trump turned off support, including intelligence support to Ukraine. And literally it was just frightening how much everything grounds to a halt. And I remember speaking quite a few Ukrainian, military and security service personnel, and I said, but what about the French and the British? They’re supporting you as well. And they went. They just don’t have the capacity. And even I was shocked. I was shocked that really it is only America that can provide so much of the targeting and intelligence, and information support that that Ukraine relies on, which of course also Europe relies on as well. So it really is quite significant. And when you look around the world, Jacob,

what are the international risks that do concern you the most?

Dr Parakilas: Regarding hypersonic weapons? 

Dominic Bowen: Well, actually just more broadly, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a question we ask all of our guests and it’s always quite interesting, regardless of their subject matter expertise.

what are the international risks that come up in conversations or that you ponder when you are, when you’re not working? 

Dr Parakilas: I think, it’s come off the agenda a little bit, but I think the, the speed with which. The climate is changing, creates enormous tail end risks in ways that I think we’re not necessarily thinking about. there there are a couple of obvious ones, like the Northwest passage is open, and that means that the Russian Northern fleet suddenly has a much freer hand to travel around and to create threats against. Europe and Canada and the US from unexpected directions. And that’s particularly true given that Russia has invested much more heavily in ICE capable and icebreaking equipment than particularly the Americans, which where icebreaking is a real weakness for the Americans, a broadly full spectrum capable military. I think they have one, a functional, heavy icebreaker at the moment. Ones they’re building now won’t be operational for years, things like what would a, a collapse in the, the Atlantic currents substantially changing the climate of Britain. That’s one I worry about on a personal basis and a geopolitical basis. British agriculture collapses. What does that do for population flows in Europe? What does it do for the, the security situation? Two thirds of Britain’s population is suddenly looking to live somewhere else because the country can’t grow enough food to feed them anymore. Not only do you have a massive political problem, but you suddenly have this gap in Northern Europe defences because there just aren’t enough people to staff the, the Air Force and the Navy anymore. That tail end risk, which I think, and quite reasonably, I’ve been very focused on Ukraine. I was there last week. it’s. Ukraine is the immediate and urgent question, but I think there are a bunch of things happening in the background that speaking broadly about strategic communities that attention has come off of in the same way that, in the 20 years that we were talking about counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, Russia and China spent a lot of time.

And preparing. North Korea spent a lot of time building up. Its, I’m old enough to to remember when the North Korean military was widely considered a joke and that’s not really the case anymore. 

Dominic Bowen: No, thanks very much for explaining that. It’s, certainly a lot to consider you. You’re right though we often focus on the risks that are right in front of us lose a bit of focus on the, the risks that are still emerging, still developing it, and growing in the background there. So thanks for highlighting that Jacob. And thanks very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast today. Thank you very much for having me. Well, that was a great conversation with Dr. Jacob Parais. He’s the research leader for defense strategy and Policy at Rand Europe. I really appreciated hearing his thoughts today on hypersonic missiles, on defense, global security, and of course, international risk.

Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Keir Fairley. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again in the next. Couple of days.

Outro: Thank you for listening to this episode of the International Risk Podcast. For more episodes and articles, visit the international risk podcast.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, blue Sky, Instagram for the latest updates, and to ask your questions to our hosts, Dominic Bowen. See you next time.