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Comment by bparsons | Hacker News Reader

The Pentagon does this every decade. They constantly need some sort of existential threat to respond to in order to justify budget increases.

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Consider the possibility that technology changes with each decade and the previous system is...you know...now obsolete.

I assume you have a smart phone and not an Amiga. By analogy, if your enemy has "iPhone" level weapons, would you want to face them with an "Amiga" level weapon? I doubt it.

I don't know whether MIRVs, each carrying a dozen or so atom bombs, compare to HGVs like the Amiga does to the iPhone. I'd like to say absolutely not but I can't. Either way calling ballistic missiles "obsolete" is incomprehensible to the dead.

What's the defense against a hypersonic missile then? Current Aegis and CIWS defensive tech will not hit something traveling that fast. Surely the Pentagon doesn't even need to justify budget increases when we give them more budget than they ask for every year regardless.

> Current Aegis and CIWS defensive tech will not hit something traveling that fast.

Aegis BDM is designed to hit hypersonic reentry vehicles. CIWS is irrelevant, why even bring it up?

>Aegis BDM is designed to hit hypersonic reentry vehicles

Ballistic hypersonic reentry vehicles. The entire point is that these new weapons are maneuverable in the atmosphere at mach 8+ all the way to the terminal phase.

They don't maneuver for shit in the terminal phase. Boost-glide weapons avoid mid-course interception by staying relatively low in the upper atmosphere rather than following a high ballistic trajectory well into space. Once they're in the terminal phase their maneuvering capability is comparable to older maneuvering reentry vehicles (which are nothing new; the novel part is skipping the ballistic mid-course phase.)

They have to know what to hit and make sure the target they are tracking is actually a real target.

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