National Security Workforce: Issues and DoD Strategies

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Slide 12

National Aerospace Initiative

From the speaker's notes to explain the image:

Although our nation demonstrated higher speed flight capability in the late 50’s and early 60’s, we have pursued a subsonic, lower speed development path in most of our systems. There are probably many reasons for this, among them stealth capabilities in the 1980’s.

However, as foreign economic competition and foreign pursuit of high speed technologies increase, 15-20 years from now may require our forces to have higher speed capabilities to be survivable and defendable.

The NAI hypersonics goals are to demonstrate a Mach number /Year capability through 2012. This strategy would result in a major demonstration about every 2 years. High speed turbines and ram/scramjet missile demonstrations would be pursued first, followed by a Mach 7 reusable air platform demonstration. Finally, higher Mach number demonstrations of interceptor technologies would be completed.