Click Here for the article. A cool billion each and worth every penny.
Reusable. Two-year mission capable. Can change its orbit. Can carry munitions. And ready to overfly Russia for the first time. No wonder Russia and China are so butthurt.
Put a MiRV warhead on this and you've got hardcore first-strike cred. Being able to change its orbit makes it maddeningly difficult to track. It could appear over Moscow or Bejing and drop its warhead, and nobody would know anything about it until it was all over.
The Cold War never ended. China is still communist, more powerful than ever, and only getting stronger. And Putin is ex-KGB, and has made it his life's mission to screw NATO any way he can.
It may not be palatable, but to secure the peace is to prepare for war.
Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine has kept a hot war between superpowers from breaking out since 1949. It sucks, but it sucks less than World War III.
If there was an international incident, a crisis, we could launch one in a hurry, then shift its orbit so they can't track it. If it looks like we launched it in haste in response to the crisis, Bejing and Moscow would s--- themselves. Whether it really had a nuke on it or not would be irrelevant. The fact that it might is all that would matter. Diplomacy is all about a credible threat.
China in particular hates this airplane. They've said so. As far as I'm concerned, that's reason enough to operate the program.
@ArcturusAerospace but make no mistake, China is not our friend. If we want a secure peace, the Chinese leadership must understand that NATO can vaporize them in their sleep.
I don't want war. I don't want to kill anybody. But I also don't want a Chinese world order forced onto us. First-strike capability is all about negotiating power. We should never ever draw first blood. But the knowledge that we can works to force the hands of our enemies.
@ArcturusAerospace I agree 100%
Just because China is Communist doesn't mean that the US should go to war with them.
Wdym?