Maybe all we ‘know’ about this system is artful misdirection.

This would be an ideal weapon to clandestinely take out a very high value target, especially a mobile one, with a conventional warhead. Like an aircraft carrier.

They would never know what hit them, they would have no idea where it came from, and they would have no counter-measures for it.

Aren’t the Chinese developing their own naval air capability, and testing an anti carrier missile of their own?

Only if it worked perfectly and managed to make a clean getaway (perhaps radioing its intelligence back and then plunging into the ocean), would it be worthwhile. Besides, the whole point to drones is that they are cheap and expendable, you don’t care if the enemy does capture one.

This is a very expensive device that serves no purpose, a technological triumph with no application in the real world. Unless there is something that hasn’t been made very clear yet, it sounds like they didn’t think this one through.

I have no problem with spending lots of money improving our intelligence gathering capabilities, but I would spend it on systems that were more flexible, and had more potential mission profiles, not on a one-trick pony that had only a one-shot chance of success.

I wonder what this thing is supposed to actually do. Near-instant response a world away? What do they have in mind? Precision delivery of an explosive, nuclear or conventional? A high accuracy (silo-busting) ICBM can do that already, that technology has existed for years. A sub-launched subsonic cruise missile can do the same thing too, and even faster than this vehicle, since its launcher can be maneuvered much closer to its target than this guy’s CONUS launch facility.

Maybe they want the capability to insert a Seal Team or some other Special Ops outfit somewhere in a hurry, on a moment’s notice. But that makes no sense either. Those guys train for months ahead of time before they are sent on that type of high value mission, and the support prep is intense, with multiple levels of redundancy and exhaustive study and rehearsal. It’s not exactly the kind of weapon you draw from the hip and fire when you’re bushwacked without warning. How would you extract your team after the successful execution of their attack (or recon, or kidnapping, or assassination)? Besides, Special Ops people can already be inserted in a variety of vehicles, including helicopters, parachute and submarines.

It is very difficult to conceive of any target valuable enough to an enemy, or strategically important enough to us, to make it worthwhile to go to all this expense. There is nothing that costs more to an enemy than the cost to us of getting this system ready. Even if successfully deployed, we lose.

This looks like military pork, a capability in search of a mission. Somebody is having a lot of fun, and making a lot of money, playing with this toy.