Hypersonic Dreams Wither, But Never Die

Will the Invisible Ship Ever Fire a Shot?

As the military budget soars towards $1 trillion and beyond, it is always worth reviewing the money-eating programs powering its climb. The Pentagon and its corporate partners do their best to divert us, the taxpayers, from pondering how little defense we get for our defense dollar. But every so often a disaster becomes too egregious to conceal behind the protective cover of a bought-and-paid-for congress and servile mainstream media. Most people are now aware, for example, of the $1.7 trillion F-35 atrocity, or the pathetic saga of the Navy’s Little Crappy Ships. Fewer may have learned the latest chapter in the decades-long fantasy of hypersonic weapons, one that stretches back to the days of Dyna-Soar, a ‘50s program that ran up a $1 billion tab (real money in those days) without ever leaving the drawing board.

On March 29, the air force announced that it is abandoning work on Lockheed’s Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW. This is, or was, a missile launched from a high flying bomber and boosted by an attached rocket motor to speeds five times the speed of sound or more. Discarding the rocket the missile glides at lightning speed to its target, all the while maneuvering unpredictably to confuse and evade enemy defenses.

Hopes for the weapon, potentially a $5.3 billion buy, ran high. As far back as March, 2020, Under-Secreary of Defense for Research and Development Michael D. Griffin stated that the day the weapon would enter service was "close at hand.” This happy news was relayed to President Trump, who boasted of the “super-duper missile, seventeen times faster than what [Russia and China] have right now. It’s just gotten the go-ahead."

ARRWs in the Ocean

Sad to say, none of this was true.