War Is Boring

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN For decades, the military has tried — with little success — to build missiles capable of traveling at breakneck, hypersonic speeds. Missile tests, however, have been uneven, with repeated failures punctuated by the occasional stunning success. Now the Air Force is taking a bigger role by seeking to build another hypersonic missile, [...]

On a cold September morning in 1945, just two weeks after World War II ended on the deck of the USS Missouri, three B-29′s lifted off from newly-renamed Sapporo Air Base on the Japanese island of Hokkiado. They would not land again until headwinds over the Arctic forced a refueling stop at Chicago’s Midway Airport, preventing the bombers and their crews from reaching Washington, D.C., non-stop.

Even the most high-tech warplane in the world is useless without its weapons. From the earliest days of aerial combat, fighter planes succeeded or failed depending on the accuracy, lethality and reliability of their machine guns, cannons, rockets and bombs. That’s why the U.S. military is hard at work on a dizzying array of pricey new guided munitions to match its trillion-dollar investment in stealth fighters, bombers and killer drones. Some are super smart. Others, super fast. A few are designed to be tiny. All of them have one purpose: to blow away the target, and only the target.

China is militarily weaker than many people think, especially compared to America. This, despite lots of showy jet prototypes and plenty of other factory-fresh equipment.

First, there was the undetectable, ship-killing flying boat. Next, a brand-new jet fighter equal to the U.S. F/A-18. After that, a stealth fighter capable of striking Israel. Then a killer drone nicknamed the “ambassador of death.”

On January 11, a large missile streaked upward from a test site in China. The missile rocketed beyond the atmosphere and struck another similar missile launched from a separate site. Later that day, the official Xinhua news agency announced a ‘test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology.’