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US Military Seeks Hypersonic Weaponry
Dr. Eggman writes "In an interview with the Star-Telegram, the Air Force's chief scientist, Mark Lewis, talks about the USAF's latest research direction. The service is working on hypersonic missile and bombers for the purposes of reconnaissance and attack. In response to Chinese and Russian anti-satellite developments, the Air Force plans to develop weapons capable of sustained travel at Mach 6 to allow them to deploy against and take out anti-satellite launch sites before the enemy can fire their missiles. Furthermore, should the US spy satellite network be brought down, the Mach 6 recon flight systems would be capable of filling in. Air Force officials hope to deploy a new interim bomber by 2018, followed by a more advanced, and possibly unmanned, bomber in 2035." We've discussed on a number of occasions the scramjet technology that would power such vehicles.
Is the Aurora finally coming out of the shadows?
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Didn't we develope Hyper Velocity Missiles back in the early 80s? No payload, they killed by traveling at mach8. I wanted one as a kid.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
It may just be me and my youth speaking, but planning out 28 years seems a little...risky. Who knows what the hell is going to happen tomorrow, let alone 28 years from now. Does anyone remember thinking "Tomorrow is going to suck" on 9/10/01? PLUS...what about technology advancements? I seriously doubt that in 28 years "stealth" will mean the same thing it does today. How can we plan out 28 years like this? (Serious question...looking for insight from someone with more experience).
Regan talked about welfare queens. These hypersonic engineers are the new welfare queens.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
On one hand you state that this research would not be necessary if the USA kept out of other countries' business, yet then you also make mention that it would be a mistake to assume Russia and China are sitting idle. It would be a mistake to assume that if we suddenly stopped interfering with other countries' business that China and Russia would immediately cease development of capabilities to match and exceed our own.
The real trick is to keep the arms race from switching into a 100 yard dash from the indefinite marathon that it currently is. I'd much rather have the major superpowers fighting to keep each other deterred.
In the end, it would be indescribably foolish to simply cease research on the grounds that we should mind our own business. We SHOULD mind our own business, but we also should keep tabs on the latest technology and that of our global neighbors. I hesitate to say even that, since it is extremely simplistic.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Funny how you think that you "know" that, given that we're essentially the only developed country that doesn't provide some form of national health care, we pay almost twice as much for healthcare as the next most expensive country, and even with all that money we're spending, we're nowhere near the top of the list of healthiest or longest living populations.
1) There's no way to tell exactly where it's going until it gets there. If you know that country A has missile B with range X you can guess at where its going. However, anywhere North Korea wants to send a missile is probably someplace we don't want it to go.
;)
2) No fallout. Worst case you're looking at a small scale cleanup job that needs doing on a military base.
3) Just ask GWB how well preemptive attacks work out for the US's world image
4) Not really. The additional weight required to achieve this would increase cost and/or decrease payload. In both cases another country could "head fake" an ASAT launch to force the US to move satellites out of coverage. Current satellites could move out of position slowly which is good enough for most current ASAT technologies.
5) See the ABM treaty the US signed with the USSR as why this is a really bad idea (TM).
The legendary SR-71 Blackbird, her kid brother the YF-12A interceptor, and the flexible, quick-shooting ASAT weapon. Why go faster? Hypersonic aircraft would run into even tighter restrictions flying in domestic airspace, fuel constraints, not to mention the logistics if the aircraft's requirements are so exotic it requires highly trained crews to maintain it.
"Kelly" Johnson, the father of the U-2/TR-1 and the Blackbirds, came up with a kinetic energy weapon that used no explosive in it. Dropped from 100,000 feet from a Blackbird bomber, the one ton device would have the kinetic energy of a large container freighter hitting at terminal velocity. No explosives whatsoever, just pure momentum. Couple that with a GPS guidance system and you'll have your own man-made meteorite that'll flatten whole city blocks from the impact alone, with pin-point accuracy.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
You are conflating demographic and environmental factors with healthcare outcomes.
If you, for example, remove non-medical causes of premature death (car accidents, homicide, etc) Americans outlive other industrialized countries. Healthcare is only a small factor in life expectancy, and average healthiness is almost completely unrelated to healthcare in the industrialized world. The environmental and demographic factors are atypically poor in the US relative to the industrialized world.
If you look at direct measures of healthcare outcomes, such as diagnostic accuracy and disease survival rates, the US leads the industrialized world by a large margin. The elephant in the room in the recent Lancet Oncology study, for example, was that cancer survival rates in the US are much higher than in any other industrialized country in the world -- about 20-40% on average depending on the country and the cancer. So in this sense, Americans are paying more but they are also receiving much more.
The real situation is that the US has terrible non-medical factors that drag down its statistics but compensates with the best average medical outcomes by a huge margin. In most of the rest of the industrialized world, you have middling to good non-medical factors and middling to poor medical outcomes. In other words, the aggregate statistics are not measuring the same thing. Since we pay the medical establishment to produce positive medical outcomes, it would seem prudent to evaluate their efficacy based on those results and not on the number of automobile accidents people are involved in.
At a minimum, it would be foolish to trash a medical system that produces results such as cancer survival rates that no other system is currently coming close to. The US system may be byzantine and inefficient, but it also outperforms the rest of the world in the key metric of medical results. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water, at least not until a national healthcare system exists with equivalent medical outcomes.
Last time I checked Russia already had a nuclear capable missile with independent, multiple warheads.....twenty-five years ago.
And also last time I checked we only fuck with other countries when it is our business, Iraq our business (cleaning up the mess from GW 1), Iran yep still our business (damn revolutionaries kicked out our puppet gov't that was riding herd on all the fundamentalists), Afganastan yep again our business (we trained all those terrosist to fight the Soviets and the bastards wouldn't chill out afterwards so we're cleaning house (our mess)).
The only thing that is a waste of resources are college funds that continue to produce American hating liberal suck-ups too stupid to think for themselves and actually learn a little history so maybe they might realize that nearly all of the Bush Administration's diplomatic and policy "bunglings" that have "dragged" America down to it's current low have actually been in the works for over forty years and can just as easily be layed at the feet of many President's both Republican and Democrat.
I'm trolling for some "-1 Troll"
(This is an experiment to see exactly how much it takes to knock down ones Karma from Excellent.)
That and I'm really tired of the whiny Apple loving, Steve Jobs pole smoking, wanna be neo-hippy cosumeristic, President Bush is a bad bad man hating, brats that live off of their parents dime and then sit on /. spouting their constant dribble over how everything in the world is wrong even though they've never been farther abroad than a two week school trip to France and wouldn't have the first clue about how bad things in the really real world are and how they have absolutley nothing to do with anything the US has ever done and more to do with the ignorant fucked up societies that have populated most of the 3rd world for over the past couple of thousands years.
I'll take "-1 Flamebait" too, honestly I'm not that picky.
Advice you might consider as well.
On the contrary. "Willingness to invade" is classic soft power - totally passive, inactive, and indirect. It's a cultural and ideological value. Of course, every so often you have to excercise hard power - and actual or positively threatened invasion to maintain the influence of the "willingness". But, that's true of every form of soft power - if you don't use hard power, the influence currency of soft power debases.
Another hint: Wikipedia is great if you know nothing. It's no so great to use as a reference when don't. It's an encyclopedia, not a treatise on the details of international relations.
We're about to elect a fairly fresh Democrat Senator after an eight-year Republican administration and resurrect hypersonic jets (the X-15) and supersonic bombers (the XB-70). Will British music, long hair, and brightly colored clothes be next?
There is a logical reason for this. If you instantly kill an enemy soldier, you've removed one soldier from the battlefield. If you wound an enemy soldier, you've removed the wounded soldier and the two who are carrying him to safety from the battlefield and also terrified anyone within earshot. You've also increased the number of vehicles needed to carry the wounded, the number of hospitals, doctors and nurses required, and the overall cost of the battle. It's cold, heartless logic, but logic none the less.
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