A Hypersonic Glider? Really?!

Let's review.

First, the big geopolitical picture. We're bogged down in two-and-a-half major asymmetrical wars and perhaps a half dozen minor ones against medieval-to-mid-century forces located in caves and patches of desert across the Arabic-speaking world. The last major army to pose any threat to us disbanded twenty years ago, and all comers are either blockaded or don't bother with all the blood and treasure when there is money to be made selling us stuff.

Second, the local political picture. We're bogged down in nasty asymmetrical fight over how this country spends money. On the table right now are trillions in cuts to discretionary spending, military spending, and mandatory spending on things like Medicare and Social Security. We are seriously looking at cutting old people's health care and retirement plans, education funds, underfunding infrastructure, and putting military cost savings on personnel and their families instead of the big, influential companies that sell us pointless, expensive stuff like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that is projected to cost literally a trillion dollars to operate over 30 years.

Third, the tactical-strategic picture. I'm no military expert, but I'm pretty good at Risk. One thing I know is that if you have massive forces all over the world, you can respond to threats quickly and decisively. It means that, as long as you don't stretch yourself out too thin, you've won the Game of World Domination. We have bases and troop presence all over the world. Between Japan, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Djbouti, Oman, and dozens of others, we have the world covered.

In comes the Hypersonic Glider. The plan for this military investment is to be able to strike anywhere in the world from the Continental United States within an hour. It's an unmanned plane capable of achieving Mach 20 outside of the atmosphere, and plunging with great accuracy into any unwitting target on Earth.  As far as I can tell, this has been a goal of ours since the Khrushchev Administration. As of yesterday, its latest iteration disintegrated at high velocity twice in tests. Maybe it's trying to tell us something.

Here's why this bugs me.

Getting stuff into orbit has become fairly routine and affordable. Objects in orbit travel at Mach 25 (25 percent faster than Mach 20), can stay there for years, and can de-orbited into the Lap of the Enemy on fairly short notice. If you want to get fancy about it, the military has successfully launched the X-37, a fully-automated launch vehicle that can stay in orbit for 270 days with significant adjustments to its location, carry a payload that can fit in its roughly 1x2 meter cargo hold, and return to Earth in one piece. It takes 90 minutes to orbit the Earth at Mach 25. Why not make the X-37 a little bigger, and launch 4 or 8 of them, each with a few choice missiles on board, ready to rain down hellfire via ballistic trajectory on a half-hours' notice?

Don't like orbit? Well, we have bases all over the world and subsonic-to-supersonic cruise missiles ready to deliver 1500kg of horror on very short notice. We have 20 B-2 bombers that can go over 6000 nautical miles at just under Mach 1 carrying almost 50,000 kg at a time. Back of the envelope calculation: Bahrain Navy Base to Kabul, Afghanistan: 2000 km, or about 2 hours away on a B-2. One end of Afghanistan to the other is about 1200km. Oh, and we have had patrols flying the country end-to-end all the time for 10 years.

The whole point: Why on Earth do we need to be able to launch something from the Continental US to anywhere in the world within an hour? What does this get us that we don't already have already, or can't develop by modifying other experimental designs? Is there anyone with some sway over the Pentagon who is both skeptical and influential?

We need to cut the crap.

What marginal security to the American public does, say, $685 billion in military spending buy? How does that stack up to our cold war high of about $350 billion in today's dollars?

How about a modest cut of $100 billion a year from defense, like what's already been suggested and vetted? Imagine all the other things that $100 billion per year could buy.

How does our military budget compare to the $4 billion in international aid we spent in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010? Or the roughly $20 billion in aid worldwide? Or domestic education, where our federal investment totals about $70 billion a year? Or 1/8 of the roughly $800 billion in debt payments we'll owe annually in ten years?

Who's running this show anyway?