US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7272

On April 06 2017 02:30 On_Slaught wrote:


There is a reason we haven't shit down any of these test missles shot into Japanese water and the like. I tend to lean towards the idea that we are afraid we will miss, which would be pretty catastrophic news. Still, against NK level missles we have a good chance of hitting. It's the Russian types that leave the atmosphere which are hardest to hit.

On April 06 2017 03:45 Mohdoo wrote:


If either of these happened, why would he still be in such a high up position?

On April 06 2017 03:55 Amui wrote:

As far as missiles go, you can either kill it in boost phase(hard because proximity is required), coast (how do you intercept something 100km up going ~7km/s more or less tangent to you), or terminal(need a launcher near target, also very time critical). Most existing AA weapons are designed to blow up when close enough that fragmentation will probably kill(doesn't need a direct hit). An object going 7km/s will outrun an explosion, so you need to target your interceptor at an area where the missile will be in a twentieth of a second. That's 350m downrange.

A pointy-beaked F-35B Lightning II idles noisily on a runway at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland. Suddenly the plane roars to life and sprints a mere 300 feet before abruptly lifting off and soaring into a cloudless, late-winter sky over Chesapeake Bay. A while later it zooms back into view, slows to a hover over the runway like a helicopter, then drops straight down to the concrete, where it lands with a gentle bounce.

A U.S. Marine Corps test pilot is manning the controls. If he were Air Force or Navy, his version of the military’s highly anticipated new fighter jet wouldn’t have this capacity to take off and land on a dime—though it would come with other custom features. This is why Air Force Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, who’s in charge of overseeing the acquisition of the F-35, brought three plastic models of the fighter jet to a December 2016 meeting with Donald Trump at his Florida residence.

Bogdan, a tall former test pilot who speaks in a raspy, authoritative voice, has been working with Lockheed Martin Corp., the plane’s manufacturer and the country’s largest defense contractor, since 2012. Nine days before their meeting, Trump had called Bogdan’s program “out of control” in a tweet, so the three-star general knew that at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect would put him on the spot. But what he didn’t anticipate was Trump’s eagerness to demonstrate his own knowledge of aviation. Trump talked with pride about his personal Boeing 757, Bogdan says. “Anything about airplanes, he’s excited about, and he told me that the first time we met.”

Amid the gold-inlaid, high-ceilinged splendor of the Jazz Age château in Palm Beach, Bogdan explained the F-35’s advanced sensor system and stealth capability. Trump listened respectfully, but the next day he was back on Twitter, complaining about the plane’s “tremendous cost and cost overruns.” To Bogdan’s continued surprise, in the days before the inauguration, Trump twice telephoned the general at his office in an austere Pentagon annex in Arlington, Va. He wanted to discuss the allegations he’d heard that the F-35’s performance fell short of existing fighters. Bogdan hastened to reassure Trump that those claims were “myths,” “misinformation,” or “old information”—none of them worth believing.

On Jan. 30, his 10th day as president, Trump markedly changed his tone. He took credit for knocking $600 million off the price of the latest batch of 90 fighters and told reporters the F-35 was “a great plane.” Since then, he’s made the F-35 an emblem of his dealmaking prowess. During his Feb. 28 address to a joint session of Congress, the president boasted he’d “saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing down the price of the fantastic new F-35 jet fighter.”

In truth, thanks to Bogdan’s negotiations with Lockheed, prices were going to fall with or without Trump’s intervention. And the plane, discounts notwithstanding, is still on its way to becoming the priciest military procurement in U.S. history. Trump’s self-congratulation serves as a distraction from the larger issue troubling the fighter jet: its performance. While the Pentagon’s official line is that, after years of difficulties, the F-35 is meeting high expectations, skeptics both outside and within the military say it’s turning out to be a two-decades-in-the-making, trillion-dollar mistake.