WASHINGTON - Weapons die for all kinds of different reasons. Sometimes they happen at the wrong time, either in the midst of defense austerity, or with the wrong constellation of personnel. Sometimes they fall victim to the byzantine bureaucracy of the Pentagon, or to turf fights between the services. And sometimes they die because they were a bad idea in the first place. For the same reasons, bad defense systems can often survive the most inept management if they fill a particular niche well enough, writes Robert Farley for TheNationalInterest.org. Continue reading original article
The Intelligent Aerospace take:
October 7, 2019- Unsurprisingly, a good number of the weapons selected by Farley for his piece for The National Interest focused on aircraft, which are often put into competition to be selected by the Department of Defense and individual branches. Anyone reading this likely recognizes that aircraft and associated components are both expensive and difficult to design with both cutting-edge technology and taxpayers in mind. One such system Farley selected was the B-70 Valkyrie, which was a speedy heavy bomber that could prove useful in delivering nuclear bombs to the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War, but was quickly made redundant as Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles could deliver (possibly world-ending) destruction from a distance without an aircraft and crew.
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Jamie Whitney, Associate Editor
Intelligent Aerospace
