Posted on 05/09/2019 5:01:53 PM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE — A flare lit up the sky early Thursday as the Air Force launched an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile from Santa Barbara County amid a round of missile launches by North Korea.
The U.S. test missile launch was the second this month from Vandenberg Air Force Base, with the Minuteman 3 roaring out of a silo at 12:40 a.m., carrying a test re-entry vehicle.
The Global Strike Command said in a news release that the re-entry vehicle traveled 4,200 miles over the Pacific to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
ping
Ping.
Minuteman III
Primary function: Intercontinental ballistic missile
Range: 6,000-plus miles
Speed: Approximately 15,000 mph
Very nice.
But seriously:
SILO based missiles..?
Just seeing it is like those old pig-tail phones, with the rotator clacker thing you’d put your index finger in to dial-wind. Or a little more optimistically, it’s like that scene in Wall-Street, where Godon Gecko is making a mobile call from a mobile phone much bigger than a brick.
MOBILE, bro..!
Evvvverything needs to be mobile.
True, but ground silos are fine if you’re testing missile readiness, function, capability, software and hardware mods, etc..
Can’t do it if congress won’t fund it.
Land based ICBMs count when you want CEP in double digits.
They should try hit another island.
[with the Minuteman 3 roaring out of a silo at 12:40 a.m., carrying a test re-entry vehicle.
The Global Strike Command said in a news release that the re-entry vehicle traveled 4,200 miles over the Pacific to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.]
Rocket Man,
burning out his fuse up here alone.
Too bad it wasn’t armed. And it should have hit Lil Dong in his ass.
Thanks for Posting!!!
Launch Ping
Probably testing the newest modern tech systems. SILO based ICBM missiles are passe and the military knows it. Some bombers are still effective at 35,000 feet, but our real deterrent lies deep in the seas where no one knows where they are.
They are called Trident submarines with multiple targeted warheads on 24 ICBM's. They let me sleep at night. The bad players know we have more than one out there and when deep enough, satellites can't track them. Think of the devastation of just one Trident sub. It could kill an entire nation. Want to use the Defense budget more efficiently? Build more Tridents along with state of art support attack subs.
I don't want our kids in any more useless ground wars or nation building. Let Venezuela kill themselves in their civil war. I don't care. Whoever wins with China or Russian support, let Venezuela or others attempt to attack us and find what is deep off their coast!
Slightly different topic, but this is a VERY interesting vid on the advantages and disadvantages of various anti-ship missiles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bgaoM6qSV0
 |
 |
“Evvvverything needs to be mobile.”
It really depends on the capability of your potential adversaries and the role of this element of your systems.
MMIII is designed to be launched on warning. We have the CCC and surveillance systems to make that a real concept.
Remember, there’s 550 of them deployed and operational (of about 1,000 in existence).
They work. Every time.
Accurate to 50m cep. Three MIRV warheads of 100kt or single 1MT.
Shoot at us and there’s a mad hornets nest coming back at you.
We also have preemptive, first strike capability with the Tridents. When combined with the MMIII, it’s simply overwhelming for any nation or groups of nations.
Trident warheads, hundreds of them, can be hitting targets 8-10 minutes from launch. The MMIII following 15mins later.
It’s a long, detailed story.
But rest assured, the US Nuke force is the very best in existence. And NOBODY will deliberately challenge it.
Even now. After all these years.
Yep, being the 2nd test in 9 days can’t be an accident. And ours don’t just fire off in a random direction like Lil Kim’s, ours actually hit something.
There’s a video on YouTube that I can’t find anymore, but it’s interesting. It’s multiple warheads hitting at Kwajalein Test Range. The camera has a field of view of about 300 feet and every reentry vehicle hits dead-center in the camera view. All Kim can do is lob them in some general direction. It wouldn’t surprise me if DoD ran across it, declared it classified, and had it pulled.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.