AIR POWER
Comments (5)
Why couldn't they make it go 450-550 knots for a real leap in capability?
Edward Randall at 8:39 AMThe elephant in the room: The valley of death. Perhaps it would be worthwhile for defense related congressional committees to take the senior enlisted N.C.O.s and the company engineers along on a tour of said valley and pick useful items for final development and deployment. If the top enlisted are thinking clearly, they will bring some E-5s along as advisors because they will be the ones using / training on these items. [It seems that flag officers and their civilian counterparts have been away from the user environment to properly evaluate "items in the valley of death"; or too interested in supporting one or another vendor (or avoiding supporting one or another vendor). Advice: Stay away from the sales force in favor of the engineers who built it in the first place.]
Everett Puterbaugh at 10:19 AM
These comments show blinkered thinking. DARPA was established to fund possible "Buck Rogers" stuff. Most famously the Internet.
Blinkered thinking has the US playing catch-up on hypersonic weapons.
The money discussed in this article is less than the cost of one F-35. I doubt ot spending it would enhance the US warfighting capability.
In war you have to plan for the future or you won't have any.
This is all very nice, but the DOD has many higher priorities that are unfunded. We need to be preparing for a hot war with a major power in the next few years, not building Buck Rogers stuff that can't be in service for 20 years.
John Stuart at 10:37 AM
Every R&D dollar that's spent takes away from actual procurement. That's why all this "great stuff" never gets to the warfighter. I 100% agree John. Instead we are divesting actual capability today for a notional capability sometime in the future. Divest to Invest. Everybody's doing it.
Domenic J. Veneziano at 9:01 PM