this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Politics
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Of course this is about Musk lining his own pockets. I guess that's what the US government is for now, enriching billionaires at the expense of all other citizen.
Yeah. The US government has always been about 80% for the purpose of enriching billionaires at the expense of yada yada yada. Now we're explicitly shutting down the other 20%, which up until now was doing a really remarkable amount of mostly invisible good works in the world. 😢
Fun fact, the US first developed a hypersonic interceptor in the 1960s with the nuclear armed Sprint missile.
Moreover, the US demonstrated the ability to successfully identify and shoot down incoming ICBMs launched from the other side of the ocean with the Aegis system in 2012, and said system is now installed on a number of our and our key allies ships and bases.
The problem is not that it’s impossible to shoot down an ICBM, far from it, the problem is that to provide a reasonable margin of safety in a full scale nuclear extange you would need an absurd number of said missiles, as an opponent an just choose to focus all their missiles at a few key targets, so you would need to have all your cities and bases to each protected by enough missiles to take out the entirety of your adversaries arsenal by themselves.
So if you actually wanted to actually improve the US’s missile defenses, you would just be ordering more RIM 161 SM 3’s from Raytheon and Mitsubishi, not throwing money at Musk’s cronies for their ‘invaluable insight’ into this new idea.