Intercontinental Ballistic UAVs
By Evan Ackerman
DARPA, the defense department’s crazy-yet-plausible ideas office, is exploring the possibility of launching unmanned aerial surveillance aircraft with ballistic missiles. I completely understand the “strapping a huge rocket to it will make it better” philosophy in general, but the specific advantage that DARPA is pursuing is the potential to drop a surveillance UAV anywhere in the world in under an hour. Sounds like a great idea, and it is… The only problem is the launch platform: certain countries (I’m looking at you, Russia and China) get a little bit jumpy when they see the US launching intercontinental ballistic missiles, and these same certain countries have plenty of intercontinental ballistic missiles of their own, not necessarily armed with surveillance UAVs.
VIA [ Danger Room ]
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