Free Republic

The US Air Force on Wednesday test launched a hypersonic cruise missile, with the vehicle accelerating to Mach 6 before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, officials said. The Air Force said the test flight of the X-15A Waverider lasted more than 200 seconds, the longest ever hypersonic flight powered by scramjet propulsion. The previous record was 12 seconds in a NASA X-43 vehicle. "We are ecstatic to have accomplished most of our test points on the X-51A's very first hypersonic mission," Charlie Brink, program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. "We...

Prompt Global Strike (PGS) is an initiative of the United States military to develop a system capable of a conventional weapon strike anywhere in the world within an hour. The system is designed for time-critical strike in emergency situation, or to counter terrorist activities like attacking a terrorist leader based on inputs of his location, or against a rogue state preparing to launch an attack by localised destruction of his weapon assets. Need for Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) can be described in a given scenario where the United States has learned of a terrorist group’s plan to transport a...

WASHINGTON — In coming years, President Obama will decide whether to deploy a new class of weapons capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the United States in under an hour and with such accuracy and force that they would greatly diminish America’s reliance on its nuclear arsenal. Yet even now, concerns about the technology are so strong that the Obama administration has acceded to a demand by Russia that the United States decommission one nuclear missile for every one of these conventional weapons fielded by the Pentagon. That provision, the White House said, is buried deep inside...