Today, Trump hosted a White House unveiling of the new Space Force flag, which pretty much looks exactly like the old flag unveiled in 2019 — the “new” flag even bears the date MMXIX, or 2019 in Roman numerals (and it still looks like a bad rip-off of Star Trek’s Star Fleet Command Flag).
During the event, Trump bragged that, “We’re building right now, incredible military equipment, at a level that nobody’s ever seen before, we have no choice we have to do it, with the adversaries we have out there.” He went on to reveal, “We have, I call it the ‘super duper missile,’ and I heard the other night 17 times faster that what they have right now. Then you take the fastest missile we have right now. You heard Russia has five times, and China is working on five or six times, we have one 17 times, and it’s just gotten the go-ahead.”
This was, apparently news to the Defense Department which, when queried, pointed the media back to the White House for clarification and comment. The White House declined to elaborate and sent the reporters scurrying back to the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Jonathan Rath Hoffman, who Tweeted, tersely: “The Department of Defense is working on developing a range of hypersonic missiles to counter our adversaries.” Full stop.
Even Fox News reported, “Pentagon confirms development of hypersonic weapons after Trump talks up ‘super duper missiles.”
So it appears Trump decided, once again, as the Top-Secret information revealer in chief, free to declassify anything and everything that passes before his dull little eyes, to let everyone in on something the DOD would have preferred remained secret.
To clarify, it has been well known that the Pentagon has been working on super-sonic weapons for decades, starting with 1981’s Vought HVM, (Hyper Velocity Missile) and continuing through dozens of weapons systems that use super-sonic speeds to inflict extreme damage without explosive warheads. These usually travel at around Mach 6-7, or six to seven times faster than the speed of sound. It is also known that other nations pursue similar weapons programs, one of the most spectacular being Russia’s Avangard hyper-velocity glide vehicle, which boasts a reported speed of 27 times the speed of sound (Mach 27) and can deliver a nuclear warhead which Russia claims is “too fast to be intercepted.” And it is… if they are telling the truth.
So where did Trump’s, “we have one 17 times,” claim come from? We can assume Trump hears and sees things he is far too ignorant and deranged to understand (and some of them are even seen and heard by other people!), but he does cling to “facts” and spouts them again and again regardless of the source or veracity, like his claim to a1917 start of the Spanish Flu, which didn’t start until spring of 1918 and continued through 1919, a claim he made again just yesterday (he is incapable of learning or correcting a mistake).
So, either Trump just revealed that our fastest defense against Russia’s Avangard can only go Mach 17, which would send the Russians into paroxysms of joy, or he revealed a new missile that is, in fact, slower than an average contemporary ICBM which travels at about Mach 20. Or he revealed that a new hypersonic anti-tank missile had beaten the Mach 7 prior record, which is impressive and probably not something the DOD wants generally known...
Point is, it could mean almost anything. But I would bet you defense industry experts and weapons designers drew a whole lot more information from Trump’s blurted claim than I can. Information that can allow our enemies to defeat our defenses or defend better against our attacks.
Once again, Trump, America’s Secrets Blurter in Chief, has made America weaker and less able to defend itself.