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US Army Completes First Test Flight of Mach 6 Weapon
Stirling Newberry writes "In a terse press release, the U.S. Department of Defense announced the first test of the the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, which launches on a staged rocket and then glides to its target, in a manner similar to the Space Shuttle's re-entry. Earlier, ABC News posted a story with a video animation of the concept. Over at DefenseTech, they argue that the trajectory being different from an ICBM is meant to show that it is not a first strike device, but even the commenters don't think that explanation flies. The speed of deployment and the ability to strike targets without going high enough to be seen by many advance warning radars makes it a precision surprise attack weapon, a kind of super-cruise-missile for surprise, asymmetric attacks."
How surprised will an enemy be to be counter attacked if they strike first? Anyone ask Japan if they were surprised after Pearl Harbor?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If you focus on just two things in the world, then you are an idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You're probably not old enough to remember - but the left has been playing this card since the 70's. Yet, the bridges stubbornly persist in not falling down. (And much of the infrastructure so often accused of being 'crumbling' isn't the responsibility of the Federal government anyhow.)
So, after observing politics for nigh upon forty years, I've come to the conclusion that 'crumbling infrastructure' is the left's version of 'welfare queens'. A useful strawman, but not an accurate reflection of reality. It also ignore the facts that our infrastructure *is* constantly being renewed, and it's impossible to not have at least some of it in bad shape at any given time.
And no, you can't really depend on the various reports about how our infrastructure is crumbling. They all rely on local self reporting, and those doing the reporting have no incentive to be honest and every incentive if not to lie outright to at least be deceptive. If they don't exaggerate, the funding doesn't come - and nothing horrifies a politician or a bureaucrat more than not being able to keep the pork coming. Here locally, when construction started on a replacement bridge (not one of the ones discussed below) the city engineer outright admitted to being deceptive about the bridge's condition "in order to get us higher on the priority list". The mayor, the city council, and the local media (mainstream and non) *praised* him for doing so.
Just this morning one of my left leaning friends posted to Facebook about how all our bridges are ancient and crumbling... The amount of handwaving of smokescreen generated when I pointed out that of the four major bridges in our area, one is twenty years old, two have been essentially replaced in the last five years, and construction on the replacement for the fourth starts next year was absolutely amazing. (Not to mention the construction of one totally new bridge to parallel one of the rebuilt older ones.) Confronted with reality that denies her dogma... she denied reality.