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Dec. 2, 2024 - The David Knight Show
12:22
US Navy's Littoral, Literal Failure "Reimagined" as a Hypersonic Missile Base
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This is Cuban Missile Crisis Part 2, right?
And, you know, that was a big thing, as I said, when I was a young kid.
I was in second grade when that happened.
And everybody was saying, well, there's not going to be any advanced warning.
Cuba is so close to Florida, they can get here in just a couple of minutes.
Well, now, the situation with these hypersonic missiles is that's pretty much everywhere that they can do that.
And it's not just that they're fast.
They can't be seen by the radar because, again, it creates like a plasma envelope in the front as it's going that fast, going 10 to 11 times the speed of sound.
As it's going that fast, it creates kind of a plasma in front of it, and that absorbs the radar.
So your radar doesn't even see it coming.
It's not only just that it's that fast, but you can't see it either.
It's a stealth missile.
So how does the US propose to counter this?
This is a story that shows the utter bankruptcy, financially and strategically, and the bankruptcy of being able to implement or do anything of the US defense industry, the Pentagon.
They are talking about using this stealth destroyer.
It's an incredibly expensive ship.
Incredibly expensive.
Supposed to be difficult for radar to find it.
It looks really strange.
It's covered in all kinds of things to absorb radar and stuff like that.
It's got flat surfaces like you see with the stealth jets and things like that.
But the problem is, I guess with all that stuff, it's not really seaworthy for deep water operations.
And so they use it as literal.
And that is L-I-T-T-O-R-M-A-L, meaning that it's for shallow water, nearby land.
And so this thing was set up to be some kind of land support for Marines or for other troops operating close to land.
And they set it up with, the ship itself costs billions of dollars.
And they set it up with a gun system that they decided was just too expensive to operate.
Each one of the rounds from the gun system costs between $800,000 and a million dollars.
Each round.
And so this ship is kind of like the F-35.
Now the F-35 is a $2 trillion debacle.
A bureaucratic waste and ineptitude.
This is cheaper.
It's just a few billion dollars, but it's another example of how they can't execute.
They just waste money.
And now they're pushing us into a war that's going to waste lives at an unprecedented amount because they're not ready.
To do anything with this.
They're now looking at this thing and saying, well, we could use this as a base for our own hypersonic missiles.
The problem is that we don't have any hypersonic missiles.
They've been doing things like the F-35, which also had a problem with its gun, but it's also got problems with power and reliability and heat and all the rest.
It's got problems with everything.
And this ship is probably the same thing as well.
And so, we don't have hypersonic missiles.
China and Russia do.
But we're fixing to do something about it, right?
We're fixing to do it.
Maybe we could use that total failure of a ship to launch the hypersonic missiles that we don't have.
General, go back and fix your makeup, okay?
What a joke these people are.
So, again, a gun system that was never activated because it's too expensive to use.
And so now they're going to say, well, let's retrofit it so that we can put the hypersonic missiles that we don't have on it.
They'll probably find that after...
After they've retrofitted it, and this other group that's out there creating hypersonic missiles will probably find that the missiles don't fit into whatever they've got to launch it.
It was certainly a costly blunder, said a defense analyst, but the Navy could take victory from the jaws of defeat here and get some utility out of these ships by making them into a hypersonic platform.
They've been trying to develop hypersonic missiles for the last two decades, and we don't have any.
Russia and China do.
And as a matter of fact, as they're looking at this program and fixing to do something about that, they're saying, well, we're going to have hypersonic missiles that travel somewhere between Mach 5 and Mach 7, five to seven times the speed of sound.
Their goals are not even commensurate with what the Russians are already doing, and they're talking about doing this year's out.
The Russians, this Arrestnik, whatever it is, hazelnut tree is what it stands for in Russian, their hypersonic missile goes at Mach 10, and in the final stage, it goes up to Mach 11. They're talking about, well, maybe we could do something at 5 to 7. 5 is the lower threshold of hypersonic.
They don't even have goals of catching up.
Last year, the Washington Post reported that among the documents leaked by former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Texera was a Defense Department briefing that confirmed that China had recently tested an intermediate-range hypersonic weapon called the DF-27.
While the Pentagon had previously acknowledged the weapon's development, it had not recognized the fact that it's been tested.
And, of course, we had a very public test Of Russia's hypersonic.
So again, what is it?
They've got a goal of getting something that's going to be half as fast as the Russian missile.
Which I guess, you know, our defense department is kind of half-assed, right?
About half as fast as the Russians.
But let's just hope that World War III waits for the Pentagon to get its ducks in a row and develop some kind of a hypersonic missile that goes half as fast as the Russians.
In choosing the Zumwalt, that's the program that created these three destroyers.
And there's only three of them.
They call them the Zumwalt.
The Navy is attempting to add to the usefulness of its $7.5 billion warship.
Isn't that amazing?
$7.5 billion for each ship.
Considered by critics to be an expensive mistake, despite serving as a test platform for multiple innovations.
Well, you know, the $2 trillion F-35 was a big mistake, but they're going to continue to pour money into it.
They're going to do the same thing with the Zumwalt.
Zumwalt was envisioned as providing land attack capability, an advanced gun system with rocket-assisted projectiles to open the way for Marines to charge ashore, canceled because each one of the projectiles cost between $800,000 and $1 million.
The three Zumwalt-class destroyers remain the Navy's most advanced surface warships.
Innovations include, listen to this, electric propulsion.
$7.5 billion to create a battery-operated destroyer with a gun that is too expensive to operate.
Where are they going to get recharged?
What is the matter with the Pentagon?
And of course, they've been talking about this for the longest time.
We've got to look at climate change.
Climate change, said the Pentagon, is our greatest threat.
No hypersonic missiles and your aggressive provocation of wars is our greatest threat.
And so, they want to stop climate change by having an electric destroyer.
But they're not worried about World War III. What fools these people are.
It's unbelievable.
So the Navy wants to begin testing the hypersonic missiles in 2027 or 2028. Let me just get Russia to wait another four or five years as we continue to fire attackums into their country before they start using their hypersonic.
It will be just fine, assuming that somebody can make the hypersonic missile.
I guess the CIA is so incompetent they can't steal the plans.
I mean, it used to be that China would steal or buy the plans.
You know, like a secret Asian man, Johnny Wong, bought a lot of military plans from the Clintons.
We don't have anybody they can't buy stuff from in China.
I mean, we buy everything from them, but we can't buy their plans.
Defense plans?
Just the stuff at Walmart.
The U.S. weapons system will come at a steep price.
It would cost nearly $18 billion to buy 300 of these hypersonic missiles that they haven't built yet.
It's probably going to cost several times that.
That's historical, right?
And hysterical as well.
$18 billion to buy 300 of the weapons and maintain them for over 20 years.
Well, let's hope that they do maintain them for over 20 years and don't shoot them.
But think about this.
They shut the Zumwalt down because they had a gun that was going to cost a million dollars a round.
Now they're going to have 300 of these at $18 billion.
So we're talking about $60 million around.
This has been a gun math.
We can't afford to shoot that.
It costs a million dollars each time we fire off one of those guns.
So let's retrofit it so it'll cost $60 million every time we fire off one of those missiles.
This particular missile costs more than a dozen tanks, and all it gets you is a precise non-nuclear explosion someplace far, far away.
Is it really worth it to pay that kind of money, said Lauren Thompson, a longtime military analyst in Washington, D.C.? He must be an analyst and not a lobbyist, because if he's a lobbyist, the answer would be, of course it is.
Of course it is.
The answer is, he said, most of the time the missile costs much more than any target that you can destroy with it.
I'm reminded of Ronald Reagan firing cruise missiles at Qaddafi's tents in Libya.
Tens of millions of dollars to destroy a tent and to kill some of his family members.
Navy Rear Admiral Ray Spicer, though, says conventional missiles that cost less aren't much of a bargain if they're unable to reach their targets.
False news has become all too common on social media.
More alarming.
Some media outlets are polishes.
Polishes.
They say things simply are true without checking facts first.
Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
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