Yes, guidance is very complicated, especially if you want to hit a moving target like a ship. With static land targets it’s “easier”, but getting these high speed missiles on target with a high enough accuracy to do damage, using a conventional warhead or the kinetic energy from a high speed impact is still complicated. Especially in wartime conditions where there will be a mess of electronic countermeasures/jamming to mess with satellite navigation and datalinks. Aside from satellite navigation, a highly accurate inertial measurement unit (IMU) can help a lot, for instance using a ring laser gyroscope like ATACMS uses vs consumer grade IMUs. For hitting moving targets, optical guidance (essentially a camera in the missile), and/or an active radar seeker can be used, with automated target acquisition, the missile can find and hit a target on it’s own. If there’s a datalink between an optically guided missile and an aircraft or ground station, the missile can be manually piloted/guided onto the target by a person, this is called human in the loop guidance or TV guidance. But a lot of this gets complicated at hypersonic speeds, dust on re-entry can blind the camera, then there’s plasma sheaths that could blind it and make a datalink complicated. This may require the glide vehicle or re entry vehicle slowing down just before hitting the target.
Wouldn’t unmanned hypersonic missiles as described need a sufficient guidance system to be developed too?
Yes, guidance is very complicated, especially if you want to hit a moving target like a ship. With static land targets it’s “easier”, but getting these high speed missiles on target with a high enough accuracy to do damage, using a conventional warhead or the kinetic energy from a high speed impact is still complicated. Especially in wartime conditions where there will be a mess of electronic countermeasures/jamming to mess with satellite navigation and datalinks. Aside from satellite navigation, a highly accurate inertial measurement unit (IMU) can help a lot, for instance using a ring laser gyroscope like ATACMS uses vs consumer grade IMUs. For hitting moving targets, optical guidance (essentially a camera in the missile), and/or an active radar seeker can be used, with automated target acquisition, the missile can find and hit a target on it’s own. If there’s a datalink between an optically guided missile and an aircraft or ground station, the missile can be manually piloted/guided onto the target by a person, this is called human in the loop guidance or TV guidance. But a lot of this gets complicated at hypersonic speeds, dust on re-entry can blind the camera, then there’s plasma sheaths that could blind it and make a datalink complicated. This may require the glide vehicle or re entry vehicle slowing down just before hitting the target.