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Originally Posted by LoBlo
I remember reading that one of the obstacles for convientional ballistic missiles was that it looked a lot like nuclear missile launches from orbital satellite perspective... so as the missiles fly countries all over the world would be officially freaking out not knowing whether its a nuke flying or not...not a good thing. That is, of course, unless the navy were to give all other countries an advanced warning before it fired, but that's impractical and defeats the "quick strike" mentality... better to not open up that can of worms IMHO.
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True, that's possible. Hence I suspect that if they actually did come into service, they'd be used more like extra long ranged Tomahawk cruise missiles. A lot of this sort of "quick strike" discussion comes from an event that occured in the 90s, when Osama Bin Ladin's exact location was known for a short period of time. Pres. Clinton ordered a submarine to launch a TLAM strike in retaliation for the bombings of American embassies. If he'd only stayed where he was a little bit longer they'd have got him, but by the time the missiles got there, he was gone. People at the Pentagon immediately said, "We need a faster missile!" Who knows how often these kinds of opportunities pop up, though?
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If quick strike is what's desired, then the RATTLERS looks pretty interesting... and appears to be working nicely, just needs to be adapted to launch from specific platforms...
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It's still just a prototype. They've still got lots of bugs to work out before putting it into service. Same with the Hystrike. That's not a real weapon yet either. It's always interesting to see how so many of these future systems fare. Anyone remember the Sealance? They only built 3 Seawolf class submarines. The LCS they're building now is a far cry from the original concept of the LCS. Who knows how that will go? The DD(X) is probably going to happen. Who knows about the CG(X) and CV(X)? So many of these things depend on money. It's doubly the case when Congress seems intent on bankrupting the nation with a combination of irresponsible spending and the irrational belief that the optimal tax rate is 0.
History is filled with weapons projects that for whatever reason went *poof*. Who knows what they'll be thinking about in 10 years?
I think a "Future Systems" database might be fun. It'd be very much in the same genre as the ADB for Harpoon. The thing is, right now is sort of a strange time to be building that sort of thing because a lot of "future systems" are right around the corner. To continue with the Harpoon analogy, the ADB frequently represents systems that also ought to be in the DB2000 (which cover up to 2020). The thing is, the two are sometimes inconsistent with each other.
I like to think of it as ADB is "what might have been," and DB2000 is "what actually came about." None the less, sometimes I think it creates strange impressions of things.