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US Hails New Milestone in Development of Hypersonic Weapons:
In the US drive to acquire an operational hypersonic weapon, after the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) programme was canceled in February due to budget issues, Lockheed Martin had been pushing ahead with the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), with its first captive-carry test held in June 2019.
The US Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have completed successful captive-carry tests of two hypersonic weapon variants designed by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, the organizations announced in a press release on 1 September.
A captive-carry flight test is when missiles remained attached to a test aircraft for the duration of the flight. The method offers an opportunity to accumulate data about how the design, as well as the aircraft carrying it, will perform subsequent free-flight tests.
[...] Both companies, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, have designed the scramjet-powered hypersonic missiles as part of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) program run by the Air Force and DARPA, writes Defense News.
"Completing the captive carry series of tests demonstrates both HAWC designs are ready for free flight," said Andrew Knoedler, DARPA's HAWC program manager, making no mention of the location of the tests or the aircraft used.
The success of the recent tests put the US Air Force one step closer to achieving a long-cherished goal of fielding a hypersonic cruise missile.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2020, @11:37PM (3 children)
World War III (2026 – 2053) is right on schedule.
(Score: 4, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday September 03 2020, @12:21AM (2 children)
The next story down has China wanting to double the number of nuclear warheads they have in the next decade, so maybe World War III won't take that long.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday September 03 2020, @03:02AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday September 04 2020, @11:35AM
Yeah I was struck by the coincidence too. As I write here, the sort of tech and social organization used to create, say, hypersonic nuclear missiles out of fear could instead make the world a better place out of joy: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
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Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironically ... irony. :-)
So, how can we transcend militarism? ...
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.