Weapons I was just reading an article I believe was hyped up to get our attention so we would keep reading it. It had to do with what it called new submarine technology by the Chinese. It talked about using a high-powered laser to propel a submarine to supersonic speeds. I won’t get too worried about this happening any time soon. First of all, there is so much more to be figured out than just how to power the laser. Second even if it could do this silently as they said, they went on to contradict themselves because they then went on to say the system causes cavitation, one of the ways to detect submarines. You can’t have both a silent submarine and a cavitating one. One of the things I don’t understand is why we are yet to have a hypersonic missile. I have begun to think we do and are just keeping that fact secret for some reason. Years ago, we got one of the Chinese scientists who was a leader in that field who defected and just recently we announced the first U.S. ship to be equipped with them, which was the Zumwalt. Speaking about the Zumwalt it was the biggest waste of money to build. It was supposed to be the next advancement in destroyers, and three were built at an incredible cost. The cost of the program was 22.5 billion dollars and after testing it was found they were not better than the Arleigh Burke class destroyer they were supposed to replace. Just the cost to build each Zumwalt class destroyer was well over 4 billion after all the money spent on research. The destroyers it was going to replace cost less than half as much. Every time we built a Zumwalt destroyer we could have built two Arleigh Bulke destroyers which were just as effective in battle. China has been accused of testing weapons in space which they have denied. I don’t think there is any way short of war they could be stopped from doing this. I have to wonder how many other countries are doing the same thing. I wish all the countries could see the light, and if not at least keep the military out of space. One of the big problems which is not talked about much is defending against drones from ships and even from land. The United States has shot down many drones, but in some of the cases is using missiles costing millions of dollars to shoot down a few thousand-dollar drone. It makes no sense. If we keep that up can you imagine how much bigger the financial hole we are in already will be? It seems like lasers should be used, but I wonder if a drone is made mirror like, would the shot would just be deflected. Our enemies are building thousands of these cheap suicide drones and if a big enough swarm is launched it would no doubt be a problem to defend against. When we think of drones, we usually think of drone planes, but there are many other types of drones and some might be even harder to destroy. There are now drone subs out there and these will be particularly hard to spot and stop, especially if they use the new silent engines. I recently read about drone tanks being used somewhere, I think in the Ukraine. I don’t know how reliable the report was, but it seems creating a drone tank would not be that hard to do, after all, many of our cars have the ability to drive themselves, so why not a tank? It used to be a plane was pretty much protected from missiles if it flew high and fast enough. This is a thing of the past. It is suspected however the United States has developed a plane which can fly into low orbit and return to earth. This would mean it could reach any target on earth incredibly fast because it would be able to circle the earth in about 90 minutes. The British had also stated a few years ago they had a plane which had two engines, and switched between them to get into space. This creates a need for reliable long-range rockets which could knock down orbiting objects. We already did this once from a ship when we took down an old useless satellite and China also did it once. The M4 and M16s which are the mainstay of the individual soldier and others are being replaced with the more efficient XM7, next generation rifle and the XM250 next generation automatic rifle. I had an M4 carbine when I was in the military and they were not the best. I am surprised it took so long for the military to realize this. The M16 got a lot of people killed when it first came out because it would overheat and jam. The problem was solved later. Let’s hope these new weapons don’t have problems which might turn up later in combat. Anyone who has been following the war between the Ukraine and Russia probably knows the huge success the Ukraine has had using the Javelin antitank weapon against the best Russian tanks. The U.S. Army has a newer antitank weapon. It is the Excalibur round. It is GPS guided and has a special armor-destroying warhead. It is not handheld as is the Javelin. This means the Javelin would still be the antitank weapon of choice for a squad out in the field. The new tank killing shell has far more range than a Javelin. Lastly, I would like to talk about aircraft carriers. The latest ones had many bugs and some were quite important such as the electric catapults which would breakdown after launching only a few planes. I think the problem was overheating, but I am not sure. The sight of a carrier group is quite impressive and carries political weight, but some believe carriers are now sitting ducks to some of the advanced weapons coming out. I am still waiting for the flying aircraft carrier to appear.
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