I wondered why we needed to spend money on a submarine detection system, given that terrorists — supposedly the biggest threat — don’t have submarines.
Boeing Wins Contract for Tracker Planes (washingtonpost.com):
The Navy chose Boeing Co. over Lockheed Martin Corp. yesterday for a $3.9 billion contract to provide the military service with aircraft to hunt submarines and track surface ships.
Well, it turns out, one of the Axis of Evil states does have subs and they can be made into launch platforms for nuclear missiles.
The submarines were purchased from the Russian Pacific Fleet as scrap, though largely intact, by a trading company funded by Rev Moon of the Washington Times, recently crowned as Messiah in the presence of a group of US legislators. MeFi reminds that Moon is also the guy who writes the paychecks of Bill Gertz, Tony Blankley, Wes Pruden, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg.
And North Korea has the missiles already, unlike other notable tyrants.
Top News Article | Reuters.com:
North Korea is deploying new land- and sea-based ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads and may have sufficient range to hit the United States, according to the authoritative Jane’s Defense Weekly.
In an article due to appear Wednesday, Jane’s said the two new systems appeared to be based on a decommissioned Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27.
It said communist North Korea had acquired the know-how during the 1990s from Russian missile specialists and by buying 12 former Soviet submarines which had been sold for scrap metal but retained key elements of their missile launch systems.
Jane’s, which did not specify its sources, said the sea-based missile was potentially the more threatening of the two new weapons systems.
The MeFites seems skeptical of how seaworthy those old subs are, but they need only as reliable as the CSS Hunley to do the job.