The Team House - Highly Classified Aerospace Programs | Alex Hollings | Ep. 187

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master's degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor's degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University. Today's Sponsor: Private Internet Access VPN (PIA VPN) If you want to enjoy all the benefits of Private Internet Access, now’s the time to subscribe. Head to, https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE and get an 83% discount. Seriously… 83%! That’s just $2.03 a month, and you also get 4 extra months completely free. But you MUST go to PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE for a truly private digital life!  https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE Battling Blades For 20% off your Battling Blades order, go to https://BATTLINGBLADES.com and enter code "TeamHouse" at check. Learn the way of the blade at https://BATTLINGBLADES.com and get 20% off with the promo code "TeamHouse" at checkout! Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show ! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #airpower #specialoperations #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream as well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes.

Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode 187 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, back with David Park. our guest on the show tonight is Alex Hollings. Alex writes for Sandbox News, also has some of his own stuff that he does, writes a lot about aerospace. We actually had Alex on for a bonus episode a while back, but this is our first, you know, debut public episode with him.

So welcome back to the show, Alex. Really happy to have you here tonight. Honestly, thanks a lot for having me. I had a blast last time I hopped on. You guys are really one of my favorite shows to watch. watch, you're definitely one of my favorite shows to hop on to. So thanks a lot for having me. Yeah, anytime, man. Do you make sure you clip that? Yeah, yeah. So, man, why don't I, why you tell us a little bit

about how you got into writing about aerospace defense. I mean, I know you're a former Marine. I have a little bit too much like cardinal knowledge here, so I'll just let you run with it. You do, but this is a great opportunity for me to kiss your ass. So, yes, anytime. Once upon, Once upon a time, you know, after I got out of the Marine Corps, I got hurt so I was medically retired. It wasn't a cool combat injury, but I didn't have any idea what I really wanted to be when I grew up. So I went to college, you know, and I'd always really enjoyed writing while I was at school. I found that I really enjoyed writing as an adult, but I didn't really think that it was necessarily a career path. So when I graduated with my bachelor's, I went straight into grad school, got a job for a defense contractor,

working as an HR guy, which was not the right field for me. But it was a good paying job. And the defense contractor built systems for the F-16, among other things, targeting systems and things like that, which kind of gave me an introduction to the tech side of aviation and sort of the backside of it, where a lot of people don't realize that a lot of the most advanced technology we have today is still, you know, soldered by hand through a microscope,

because it's cheaper to produce it that way than with machines that can achieve that same level of accuracy. It was a really interesting kind of crash course in the tech field. But then I, you know, my mother-in-law passed away pretty abruptly, and my wife and I realized that, shit, you can work in a job that you hate right up until you die, and you never got the opportunity to pursue your dream, you know. So we decided to throw most of the stuff we had away. moved down to Georgia because I used to work in racing. Georgia had a lower cost of living.

I could do contracting work for some racing teams. I worked for Skip Barber racing for a long time while I was getting started in writing. But my real, my first big break as far as covering defense was from you. I will never forget. I was working for a number of, you know, really small independent outlets, not making a whole lot of money. and I didn't think that, you know, writing as a career path was really going to work out for me. And I, unbeknownst to my wife, I took her car because mine had already been repossessed. And I drove to Kroger, the grocery store here in town, and applied to be a grocery bagger.

And they turned me down because I had a master's degree. And I, you know, went back out to my car and sat there going, you know, I have too much education to be a grocery bagger, but I can't find any other job here in Dawsonville, Georgia, where I was living at the time. And that's when my phone rang. It literally did change my life. You guys gave me an opportunity. First, I was doing syndication content,

looking for good stories, things like that. Before I knew it, you know, I was, you know, writing a weekly article, and then I was doing dailies. And the time that I spent working under you was really what gave me the opportunity to branch out. And after a little while, I was covering mostly the Pacific, but some technology stuff as well.

But I was focusing a lot at the time on North Korea and their ballistic missile programs. And as a result of that work, popular mechanics reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in doing some work for them, first relating to China's military modernization, and then it just sort of snowballed. I've been working for popular mechanics now for I think maybe five years. So my first big break came from you, and then my second big break really came from PopMEC. I worked, I ran a number of smaller websites, one that was aviation-specific, some others that weren't. And then right before 2020, a guy named Sam Meek reached out to me. He was a Marine Sergeant.

He and a guy named General Ray Smith, who was a Marine General. He was a real war hero in Vietnam, incredible guy. They started a company called Sandbox, really as a replacement for what Motomail used to be in our day. I know we're kind of old, but Motomail was just kind of a really economic means of getting mail to service members, either in training or deployed. And when Motomail shut down, there was a gap kind of there, not only in the market, but in, you know, support for service members. And so Sam and I say Ray, but I've never called them anything but general. So Sam and General Smith, you know, sat down and put together an idea to create an app that would make it really easy to write a letter to service members and that they would print. But, you know, the real magic of it was that they would get those letters to the service member in training within 24 hours.

Whereas when I went through basic, you know, when you guys went through basic, you probably got letters once or twice a week if you were fortunate. You know, now when you go to basic training, especially Marine Corps installations, because that's, you know, That's where Sandbox started. Every day, they're bringing in just boxes of these letters. And while it's a huge pain in the ass for drone instructors, the Marine Corps itself loved the program because it really reduced attrition. You know, people who've got support from home tend to make it through training. So Sandbox was going well for a while.

And then just before 2020, Sam reached out to me to say, we want to build a media arm of this company, you know, to inform service members and their supporters. But we don't really have a full idea of what it might be. You know, would you be interested in coming on? And I had a few other, you know, lines in the water. But at Sandbox, I got the opportunity to build something from the ground up. And I've been super fortunate since.

You know, our content, you know, seemed to strike a chord. Some news aggregators started picking us up, like real clear defense, some other outlets. I was quickly able to start hiring other guys. You know, I've got an F-35 pilot on the staff, CIA guys, some Navy. seals, green berets, a lot of guys that you and I have worked with in the past even. But then maybe a year ago or so, I noticed that a lot of people were just reading my articles on YouTube. And I was like, well, shit, maybe I could just do that myself. And so we started our YouTube channel, and it's done really well since. So really, I sort of, I lucked my way into covering defense

technology initially, just by nature of what was going on in North Korea at the time. But I, I, I, I really fell in love with it. I love the romance of the engineering, where you take a group of people with a seemingly insurmountable problem, planning for the future, trying to prevent World War III, or trying to prevent something terrible from happening.

And you have to use the resources that you have at hand to produce solutions to these problems that if you're really lucky, if you're really good at it, will prevent problems from starting. So I, in my mind, own way, it's sort of my way of still being a part of the defense apparatus. I get to kind of dig into, you know, the, what I consider to be sexy stories that nobody else thinks of, like

Dennis Overholzer, helping to establish what stealth is back in the day at the Skunk Works. Nobody knows his name, but they should, you know, because he, you know, revolutionized the way, you know, air combat plays out. So I really love those under-told stories about solving problems before they manifest. And I'm really lucky that people kind of like my take on it, I guess. Alex, I mean, you go, I mean, in my opinion, you go so far above and beyond, like what a journalist does because you really love this topic. And you, like, were you a kid who built model planes? You know, like this is, you're like an aficionado in addition to be an journalist, right? Honestly, that means a ton. But yeah.

I am a tremendous nerd, first and foremost, which helps. But yeah, I've always, first of all, I've got way too many problems, including with my vision. Nobody would ever let me fly an airplane. But to be honest, as crazy as this sounds, I don't even really want to. I love, you know, the engineering aspect of it. I love the strategic aspect of it, where you can make 20 of something, and it can literally shift the entire basis of geopolitical discussion for decades to come. The B2 in that case.

So in a weird way, I'm like that, I am that guy who's lucky enough to have somehow monetized my passions. If I were still an HR guy, I would be up at night reading about these programs anyway. And I think that that's probably why my work has done fairly well is just that I'm super pumped about this stuff. Bye. And so, you know, when I, when I relay that, I think that even if, even if you think it might be kind of a boring topic, you're like, what the hell is this guy turning red in the face about? Maybe I'll give it a minute. And that's the thing is that you do, what you do, you do with such passion that I think that anybody can see that it's not just your job. It's your love. Yeah, I'm, I honestly, I won the lottery. I really feel as though. I mean, Jack can tell you from my early days in writing.

really did take me under his wing and let me ask him stupid questions that I was too embarrassed to ask other people. And Jack also just, he gave me a lot of the seemingly, you know, like seemingly obvious advice that you need to hear. One of the big problems that I have, I've worked from home my entire career as a journalist. And I always had this sense that I'm not real, you know, imposter syndrome. I'm just some dummy in his pajamas. doing a lot of research and staying on top of things. And Jack was the guy who was like, they're all just dummies in their pajamas. You know, I mean, some of them go and work in a cubicle every day.

But there isn't anything biologically different between you and these other people. And he told me that when I needed to hear it, you know? And, you know, I know, I know, I know, like I said, this is my chance to kiss Jack's ass. But I genuinely, I'm here. I have this office that I have now and I've got a team of. 18 guys that worked for me, literally all because I was sitting in a grocery store parking lot one day and Jack gave me a chance. I'm, no, I'm flattered to hear that, man.

And I wish I could take one iota of credit for it. But, I mean, apparently I said some things to you that were meaningful. I'm happy to hear that because I feel like I didn't really do anything. And you were just a writing machine. And you were not somebody that I recall ever having to supervise in any shape or form. You just took the ball and ran with it. And so, yeah, I feel like I really didn't do anything at all. But I'm really happy to see, you know, that how far you've come and that you're able to do something that you feel passionate about.

That's awesome. We'll cut that out as a clip, too. Yeah. I'm going to send that to my mom. Alex, what I took from what you just said is that you're wearing pajama bottoms right now, correct? 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, at least he's wearing pants. Yeah. Alex. To be honest, I actually, you can't see it now, but I have a collection of shirts just over here for the meetings that I get in every day. Just so I could throw a button up shirt on over whatever I'm wearing and seem like I bathed myself like a real grown-up. So, Alex, I want to get into some of like the Blackside programs that you've covered. But actually, first before that, I'd like to kick it off and ask you about this new helicopter contract that has. has been awarded to replace the black hawk. I think it's the is it like the x380 tilt rotor? It's the v280 valor. V280. Thank you. What are your thoughts on that? Why are we moving away

from a rotary wing helicopter platform to a tilt rotor? What does this mean for the military? Well, the biggest question that everybody has asked me about the V280 valor is, is it going to have the same problems that the V22 Osprey did? You know, a lot of people die. working the kinks out of the D-22 Osprey. And it is now statistically a very safe platform, but we're never more than maybe six months out from a V-22 crash that costs some lives. But I do think that part of the reason why the V-22

does draw a lot of headlines when it creates crashes is because you can cram a lot of Marines into it. When an F-A-18 Hornet goes down, you might lose one pilot, depending on the Hornet, you might lose two crew members, but when a V-22 goes down, you could lose 10, right? And not to mention the fact that the Marine Corps uses the V-22, you know, as its workhorse transport. The V-280 is significantly smaller than the Osprey. It'll hold about half as many people, probably 10, maybe 12.

It also has, obviously, a much wider footprint than the Black Hawk did, because it's got two props on either side of what amounts a sort of wing. But the V280 is not the Osprey, and it's important for us to remember that. I mean, the Black Hawk also had, you know, a lot of headaches when it first started flying. You know, if you go back and look through the 80s, you'll find plenty of headlines with people complaining about the safety issues with the Black Hawk. And a big part of that is just that there are safety issues every time you field a new platform. But the V-22 was the first tilt rotor aircraft that we put into service.

it's tough to compare that to, you know, the fourth or fifth military-specific rotor craft that we've developed. You know, the UH-1, Iroquois, the Huey, was actually the first helicopter ever developed specifically for the military, and the Black Hawk benefited from a lot of lessons learned through the Iroquois service. And the V-280-Ballor, similar, has benefited from a lot of lessons learned from the Osprey. Some examples of that would be that the props are actually connected via a drive shaft. So if you lose an engine, It'll actually keep spinning that prop at a reduced rate off the power from the other engine to give you the ability to make an emergency landing. It's also important to note that the V280 does have a much wider footprint than the Black Hawk if you put them next to each other.

But if you park the V280 perpendicular to the Black Hawk with its two props lined up this way, it's actually not that much larger a footprint than the UH60. How good will it be? to be honest with you, I don't think anybody can say that they know. I think part of the reason why the V-281 was that its competitor from Sikorsky, I'm blanking on the name now, they were having a lot of troubles with the transmissions and with the design of the propeller blades themselves. So even to this point, it's got fewer hours logged in the air than the Valor does. The Valor has just already proven to be more reliable than its competition for the contract. But it's important to remember that we're talking about a platform where there is one

flying prototype right now. That's longer fewer than 300 hours, you know. So it's tough to make long-term assertions about how capable it will be. But if it does work the way that it's supposed to work, it'll be really, really important when it comes to countering China in the Pacific. It's got more than double the range of the UH-60, can travel at more than twice the speed, can carry two more troops than the UH-60, and has significantly better fuel range. And this stuff all means that in the Pacific, where we're talking about dramatically large distances,

especially compared to the Middle East where we're accustomed to fighting, that range changes a lot. The ability to cover more ground faster means that you can mount operations from further away outside the area denial bubble created by China's, you know, anti-ship missiles and things like that, and still conduct the kind of operations that we're accustomed to conducting, especially within the Army. The UH-60 couldn't do that in the Pacific. And, you know, it's a 40-year-old platform. So as these platforms age out of service, we've got to replace them with something. And the Army seems pretty confident in the Valor's ability to do that. I think that its speed and range will be huge in the Pacific, provided that it really does perform as advertised.

Is this one of these things? And it's kind of horrible to say this, considering human lives involved. But, I mean, some of these other systems that we've had, I mean, the Huey helicopter, I believe, was plagued with problems. The M16 rifle, M16 family of rifles were all familiar. That was not a good weapon when it was first issued. Today, we have this I-VAS virtual reality goggles system that we have soldiers stumbling around Lajune and Bragg, testing this thing out, and they're all getting nauseous and puking. But, I mean, some sort of mixed reality headset probably is the reality. is the future that's coming. But we have to go through this period of time where, you know,

our soldiers are stumbling around Fort Benning, getting dizzy and vomiting as they perfect and redesign the system. I mean, are we going to go through that with this with this aircraft as well? One would hope not. One would hope that we went through most of that with the V-22. Yeah. Right. There are a lot of things that the V280 does that the V-22 wouldn't or couldn't do. But to be honest with you, we're probably still going to run into a bit of it. It's important to remember, again, that this is only the second tilt rotor platform that we're putting into service. And to your point, it sucks to talk about it this way when there are human lives at stake. But there really are growing pains anytime you feel the new system.

And it's very likely going to cause deaths. The F-16 is a great example. It's now the most successful in terms of sales and nations operating it, of anything. fourth generation fighter on the planet, but when it first was flying, people called it the lawn dart, because it kept just spiking into the ground and killing pilots. Now, today, the F-16 is a workforce platform, not only for the U.S. Air Force, which operates something like 2,000 of them, but there are, you know, 20 plus other countries that rely on the F-16 every day as their, you know, everyday driver for combat air patrols and things like that. So Iraqi start doesn't necessarily

mean a rocky service life. And there is a solid chance, I think, that we'll see a rocky start with the V280 just by nature of tilt rotor still being pretty new. But if it's given the chance to mature and it's properly funded, all problems can be solved with enough money thrown into the fire, you know? So if the Army's really committed to the V280 valor, they can make it what they needed to be. The question is just whether or not, you know, they get the financial support to do so. Dave, you want to hit VPN?

Yeah. So we're going to take a quick break for one of our sponsors, or both of them, I'm not sure. But anyway, for some of you guys know that I recently got into cybersecurity about a year ago. And one of the things I learned is it your traffic is never private. And it's fine if you're working out of your house. But if you go to a coffee shop, if you're traveling through an airport, there are pretty much anybody who knows what they're doing can intercept your traffic. those hentai sites you've been checking out

exactly well it's not even hentai like a man in the middle attack can happen in a coffee shop and people can redirect you to their spam site and steal your data um or their spruce site and steal your data so you've got to check out private internet access it's a VPN PIA VPN these days getting on the internet without a VPN is risky business Internet service providers are tracking your every move. And look, even if you're not doing anything illegal or anything you don't want your family to know, you have to protect yourself from the people out there that are looking to do you harm.

What is a VPN? A VPN is essentially a virtual private network. It means it it's a private internet access that encrypts your internet activity and disguises your online identity, making it more difficult for third-party to track your activities online and steal your data. Private Internet access is the most transparent VPN on the market. They keep no tabs on you, and there are no logs policy has been proven in court multiple times. And for a lot of you guys, if you look for a VPN and you find a free VPN,

the reason they're free is because they sell your data and they keep logs. So it's important that you make sure that your company is like private Internet access. and they don't keep logs. How it works is private internet access, hides your IP address, and encrypts your internet connection. This way, you're in control of your data

and your digital life is shielded from snoopers. Look, I'm just going to say, you need a VPN. If you ever use your internet in public, you should have a VPN and, you know, one that you can trust to not collect your data, to not.

sell your data, but it will protect you. Not if you're just visiting hentai sites, which, hey, nobody's judging. But I didn't bring my judgey pants. Exactly. But if you want to protect yourself from malicious people who are, you can have a kid in a, who's learning how to use Cali Linux in a coffee shop, snoop your, snoop your, uh, connections. You need a VPN. So try out PIA VPN.

If you want to enjoy all the benefits of private internet access, now is the time described. Head to PIAVPN.com slash backslash the team or team house, team house and get an 83% discount. Seriously, 83%. That's $2 a month. It's $12 a year for VPN access guys. I, it's, that's so worth it.

It's a solid deal. And get four months completely free. But you must go to PIAVPN.com backslash team house for a truly, it might be foursless. I never know when people say this stuff, but it's the slash. You guys know what I'm talking about. So check them out. Great service, needed service. I think we'll win a practical application for that.

Please do, Alex. If you do research the way that I do all the time, you'll probably already be aware that as of February of 2022, all the dot mill.org website domains are blocked to everyone within the United States. So you can't access any Russian military websites to find out what they say is going on over there. Or even, you know, just to read more about what they're doing with their Poseidon nuclear torpedoes or what have you. You can use a VPN to change your location so that you actually can go read these things that, you know, is all bullshit because Russia is saying it. But it's important to know what their narratives are so that you can identify them in the wild. And our other sponsor for the show today is battling blades. Dave, my samurai sword, please.

So try not to take off Dave's here when we unsheath this thing. Now we're talking. There you go. So battling blades, they make all these different. types of blades like this katana here and they also make other things like dice other types of knives axes i mean honestly if you're an aficionado of sharp things you have to check out this site so it's battlingblades dot com and use the promo code team house to get 20% off that's battlingblades dot com uh and the promo code is team house to get 20% off your order so yeah this thing is super cool

We mess around with this on the set and hopefully don't, you know, do any irreparable harm to anyone. I'm still planning to have Dave cut a watermelon in half one of these days. 200th episode, yeah. 200th episode is coming up in the near future, and we're in the process of planning for that mayhem. And for you, uh, tabletop gamers out there, they have amazing dice sets. Uh, and we're getting one in soon to, to show you. So, Alex, you told me that you've worked on three different stories lately about what are or were top secret hypersonics programs. Do you want to walk us through some of those stories and sort of update us on where all this is at right now?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, hypersonics have been a real buzzword over the last few years, especially in the defense industry. Hypersonic missiles are technically speaking. missiles that travel faster than Mach 5 or around 3,838 miles per hour. But that's not really specifically what modern hypersonics are. All ballistic missiles, all spacecraft that reenter the atmosphere are technically hypersonic. You know, the space shuttle used to break Mach 25 on its way, you know, back in from orbit. What modern hypersonics really are, are not just incredibly fast, but unpredictably maneuverable. That's what the hypersonic weapons that Russia and China have in

service theoretically offer them, and that's what the hypersonics that the U.S. is currently developing offer. Hypersonic missiles fall into one of two categories, either boost glide weapons that are similar to ballistic missiles, but they fly along a more suppressed ballistic flight path, and they might hit, you know, Mach 20 while closing with a target. And then hypersonic cruise missiles, which use a propulsion system called scram jets, which is a form of air breathing jet engine, good for high mock speeds. and these will probably hit, you know, Mach 5, Mach 8 maybe on their way to a target.

But they're very dangerous because they can use the curvature of the Earth and geological features to sort of mask their approach. But the problem with hypersonic missiles is that they are immensely expensive. China and Russia both have boost glide weapons in service, but they're both deterrent weapons. Russia's is the avant-garde, which is a nuclear weapon that's launched from their RS-28-Sarmat ICBM. So their hope is never to use it. China's DFZF is launched from their DF17. It's an intermediate range ballistic missile. It is specifically designed to engage American aircraft carriers at potentially, you know,

four-digit ranges. So again, this is a weapon that they're hoping never to have to use. They're keeping it so that they can threaten the United States with it, you know, for geopolitical posturing purposes. If you use either of these weapons, it's, you know, you know, the onset of World War III. Nobody wants that. Right.

The U.S. is trying to develop conventional hypersonic weapons, both boost, glide, and cruise missiles. But again, these things are crazy expensive. The DOD estimates that they're going to run between $89 and $106 million a missile, which is just useless for most applications. There's real value there for taking out an aircraft carrier. A $14 billion investment, throw $100 million missile at it, sure. But for most other situations, hypersonics are prohibitively expensive. Just doesn't really make sense to field them, especially when you could launch 50 tomahawks for the same price.

And no matter how good the enemy's air defenses are, 50 tomahawks are going to saturate the air defense system and a bunch of them will make it through. But the real answer to solving hypersonics is aircraft to use as delivery vehicles as opposed to using missiles. You could develop this exotic scramjet propulsion system just to embed it in the foundation of a bad guy's house doesn't make a ton of sense. But if you produce what's called a combined cycle turbofan scramjet, that's basically a traditional jet engine that you'd find in a regular fighter aircraft married to a ram jet or a scramjet that's good for higher mock speeds. By combining those two together, what you do is you create an aircraft that can take off and land using that transatlantic. turbo fan, just like any other aircraft. But once it breaks Mach 2, Mach 2.2 or so, where turbo fans are no longer very efficient, the scramjet can take over and propel it up past Mach 5. You guys, you know, probably saw the Dark Star and Top Gun Maverick was a very realistic depiction of what

a combined cycle turbofan scramjet propulsion system would be like. You saw, you know, Maverick adjust the throttle and hit a button and you saw the air bypass flip up for the air to start going through to the scramjet. So that's not fiction. You know, and obviously the Dark Star featured in Top Gun Maverick was actually built by Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, you know, which was a great marketing play for Lockheed, but may have also been a bit of misdirection in favor of actual programs that are going on. Right now, there are two publicly disclosed programs that seem to be aimed at fielding operational scramjet powered hypersonics. aircraft. The first one is the Air Force Research Labs working on a program called

Mayhem, which is very, very cool. The premise is basically taking a traditional turbofan engine marrying it to a scramjet that's capable of Mach 12 or better, potentially. But we're probably talking sub-Moc 10 and putting it into a system that can carry out. They want it to serve as an ISR platform, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, but also as a kinetic strike platform. And what that really is, really means is that you can use existing munitions that are low cost to produce, deliver them with this hypersonic platform, and you get that same value of superseding air defenses without, you know, depositing your hypersonic platform into the ground. So the Air Force Research

Labs mayhem program has been going on for a while, but it's been kind of hidden amongst the, you know, the U.S. has got 70 plus hypersonic missile programs in development right now. And mayhem has just sort of been one of them mixed in. And they used a lot of words that sort of made it seem as though it might be a missile early on that they've been refining in subsequent contract awards to the point where now it's a multi-mission platform, which really suggests drone rather than missile. But they're not the only show in town. There's another program that's received Air Force funding being run by Hermius, which is an Atlanta-based firm. I've met with these guys a number of times, a lot of them are young. They're a bunch of kids, honestly,

building what is first going to be their quarter horse, which is a hypersonic technology demonstrator. They're aiming first for Mach 4 and then Mach 5 later this year with their quarter horse using their chimera engine, which uses a ramjet rather than a scramjet, but is a very similar, you know, premise. Their dark horse aircraft, which they plan to officially unveil in 2025 is their platform they're making for military applications. And in my conversations with them, they've been very hesitant to suggest that they intend for it to carry munitions, but instead they just use words like payloads and they say maybe they can deploy sensor modules with it. You know, they're very careful with what they'll tell me. But what they will tell me is that

they've already received a $60 million contract from the Air Force as well as another contract from Raytheon for an undisclosed sum of money and about $100 million from other investors here and there. Their chimera engine just a few months ago demonstrated in a wind tunnel that it can transition from turbofan power to ramjet power, which is really sort of, you know, that's the holy grail of hypersonic propulsion as being able to pull off that transition seamlessly. They intend to have quarter horse fly hopefully sometime this year. and then there's one more, which is the most well-known, but also the most secretive. And that's Lockheed Martin's SR-72 program.

I started covering the SR-72 back in the day when I worked for Jack. In 2018, Lockheed was very open about the SR-72 program's development. It's to be a successor to the SR-71, which a legendary Mach-3 aircraft. people often call it the fastest aircraft ever. It wasn't, but it was the fastest jet, the fastest air-breathing aircraft. The SR-72 also looks to be a combined cycle turbofan or turbojet scramjet propulsion system. And the reason why I think that it's probably the most mature is because back in 2017, Aviation Week reported on people seeing what they thought was an SR-72 technology demonstrator flying around Palmdale, California, which is, where Skunk Works is located. It's also where Northrop Grumman recently unveiled the B-21 Raider,

the Air Forces Plant 42. There's a lot of secretive stuff that goes on around Palmdale. So when Aviation Week reached out to Lockheed Martin about it, they effectively acknowledged it and said, they're aiming for a hypersonic platform that will be able to outrun air defenses the way the SR 71 once could. In 2018, very early, I want to say in January, late January, early February, one of Lockheed's VPs, you know, went to an event in Florida, put up a picture, a render of an SR 72 behind him on the wall, and said in no uncertain terms, you know, this is flying. It's working. We've got reliable engine starts. This platform is moving towards service. On their website, they said they think they could have it in operational service by 2029. And then on March 1st of 2018, Vladimir Putin made an address to Russia, but really to the world. And that was the address that he announced, you know, the Kinzel, which they call the hypersonic weapon. It's really an air-launched ballistic missile. That's when they announced avant-garde.

It's also when they announced this Poseidon or status six nuclear torpedo. He announced five different sort of Bond villain level weapons. Right. A lot of people see this speech as sort of the beginning of the hypersonic arms race. And if you go back on the wayback machine in the Internet Archive, you'll find that Lockheed Martin pulled down their SR-72 webpage and scrubbed their page of any mention of it the day after that speech, which really sort of suggests that this program that was front-facing and Lockheed funded probably became classified and DOD funded right around the time that Vladimir Putin said,

we're putting hypersonic weapons into service. So was the SR 72 up until that point, it was a purely a commercial project that Lockheed was hoping the government would buy, that they could get a demonstrator. Okay. And then after Putin's scary speech, the U.S. government, we got that. To the point where, I mean, in 2015, popular science had the SR 72 as their cover story, you know, talking about how this is a program of record at Lockheed Martin. It isn't a DOD contract.

It's a program that they're developing because they think it's promising. And that webpage stayed up and continued to get updated. They even put that cover story up on their page. And again, in 2017, they spoke pretty frankly about it with Aviation Week. In early 2018, they were making public appearances and sort of pushing this as a real potential future operational platform. And then the minute, you know, the hypersonic arms race, as we tend to know it, as it tends to be depicted in media. As soon as that started, Lockheed went quiet about the SR-72.

And you won't find another mention of it anywhere on their website until Top Gun Maverick came out. And they mentioned it slightly in reference to Darkstar, which does look a lot like what the SR-72 renders that were released starting in like 08 and on through 2018 looked like very much. In fact, when the first trailers for Top Gun Maverick drive, and then it waited three more years to be released. I wrote a story that said, it looks like Mavericks flying the SR-72. We didn't know what it was called yet.

So it seems very likely that they already had technology demonstrators flying for this combined cycle scramjet propulsion system. On their website, they said that they were working with Aerojet Rocket Dying to produce this engine, which as far as engine manufacturers in the United States go, that's probably your best bet if you're trying to develop this new, exotic sort of propulsion system. The reason why scramjets are so tough to operate, I'll see if I can explain this briefly, but turbofans like the F-100 and the F-15, they're using the F-100 as the core turbo fan for Hermius's chimera engine as well. They basically work by having a big

compressor fan, suck air in, and then a bunch of compressor fan stages compress that air. Then that air is mixed with fuel and ignited and pushed out the back. And has a it's pushed out the back, it spins the gears, which actually spin those compressor fans up front, and creates propulsion. Those are very effective engines up to a certain speed. You can use afterburners to push it up past Mach 2, but afterburners are really inefficient. It's effectively just dumping fuel into your exhaust to create some extra propulsion. So a scramjet, on the other hand, has no compressor fan. It has no moving parts whatsoever. Scramjets can't work from a dead stop like a turbo fan can because it doesn't have that fan but once you're moving fast enough

the pressure of the air flowing into the scramjet is enough to create the compression it needs for ignition and because there are no moving parts and nothing to impede that airflow scramjets might be worthless below mock two but they're very very efficient from mock three up past potentially mock 18 NASA thinks maybe even higher the problem with scram jets though is that you need another method of propulsion to get them fast enough to operate. So today's scramjet powered missiles use a rocket, you know, a single-use rocket to get them to altitude and to speed before the scramjet can kick on. These combined cycle engines use a turbofan so that you can take off under turbofan power, fly at hypersonic speeds, but importantly,

then slow down and land again under turbofan power, a completely reusable platform. It takes hypersonics away from being way too expensive to use and makes them everyday practical. And that is really important, not just for defeating air defenses, but also for overcoming the tyranny of distance. You know, when you're talking about huge distances in the Pacific or supporting special operations troops in places like Africa, an MQ9 Reaper, you know, is not a very fast aircraft. It does 130 miles an hour. If you need to get a Reaper on station, you better hold a lot.

it's already there. Otherwise, it won't get there until the fight's over. We saw that firsthand in Niger a few years ago. But with a platform that can deliver ordinance traveling at Mach 8, it can cover a huge amount of distance at a very short period of time and deliver life-saving munitions for close air support, conduct ISR in places where satellite coverage is limited, or, you know, as Hermius's COO, Skyler Schuford told me, deploy sensor nodes to get a communication system back online if it's brought down by enemy contact. So stealth was really what ended our love affair with going higher and flying faster. The SR 71 famously outran something like 4,000 missiles over its career. Wow. Brian Schuil tells a story that may be apocryphal, but he says he got

his SR 71 up over Mach 3.5, which is about 500 miles per hour faster than a round fired by an M16. This is crazy fast. The SR 72 and these other platforms are looking at being twice as fast, if not faster. I have a couple of questions. So what does, you said this hypersonic arms race, what does that look like? Because we're used to the nuke of your arms race. What does that look like? What does that look like and what does it look like for America to lose that arms race? So the first thing I want to say, and you know, if you Google my name, you will find articles with headlines that say things like America's losing the hypersonic arms race at some outlets. I didn't write those headlines. The hypersonic arms race is not as it appears in most media.

We sort of present it as though it is like you're saying, like the nuclear arms race, this singular race. But it really isn't. It's three different races with three very different finish lines. As I mentioned before, China and Russia both have deterrent hypersonic weapons in service, but they have a number of others in development. Russia's Zircon is a scramjet-powered cruise missile that they plan to mount, they plan to fire from their Belgarod submarine as well as their new attack submarines. China's hypersonic weapons are all about creating that area denial bubble to keep American aircraft carriers away from Chinese shores so that America's most potent form of power projection can't be leveraged in a conflict with China. America's hypersonic efforts are completely different.

America has committed to only developing conventionally armed hypersonics, whereas both Russia and China's are either nuclear or optionally nuclear. So the U.S. says we're not going to put nuclear warheads in our hypersonics. I met with some of the VPs working on hypersonics for Lockheed Martin and I asked them about that directly and they wouldn't answer me. So maybe down the road, we could see it as a nuclear delivery method. But the real problem that hypersonics pose is different for each nation because the way you would leverage them is different based on doctrine. So if America, for instance, were to field a hypersonic weapon like avant-garde, it wouldn't

do us any good. America's nuclear arsenal is already more than capable of overwhelming Russian air defenses and making landfall wherever we want it to. So to develop and field a weapon like avant-garde would really just be a publicity stunt. It would be a race for headlines. Likewise, China's DF-17 and DFZF, which is an anti-ship weapon, makes a ton of sense for China and has real strategic value because China is trying to push America out of the South China Sea, not just America, but literally everyone. They're claiming sovereignty over all of it. America is looking for weapons that we can use in a variety of conflicts right now,

not just as a deterrent weapon, but also as a conventional weapon. A conventional prompt strike was one of the first hypersonic weapons we started working on. The idea initially was sort of like tomahawks, but much faster. Because of the huge costs associated with it, though, that just doesn't make a ton of sense. So to answer your question, what does losing look like? Losing looks like getting so caught up in the headlines. And this idea that America is losing the hypersonic arms race, that we throw our money into the wrong programs to save face.

Right. And we've seen politicians sort of already, you know, accuse the DOD of dropping the ball about this, kind of pushing the DOD to field similar or, you know, comparable weapons, even though they have no real strategic vans. value for us. So losing the hypersonic arms race, in my opinion, would be so being so caught up and wanting to win it that we fail to field weapons that actually meet needs we have within our defense structure. There's an aspect of like the Star Wars program in it that we

baited the Russians into blowing money on stuff they couldn't keep up with. Absolutely. And you could argue that China and Russia have very effectively been doing the same to us right now with hypersonics. Again, it's important to remember that a Tomahawk cruise missile cost about $2 million a piece. So if one hypersonic costs $106 million, you could throw 50 tomahawks at the same target and get the same outcome. You do have the problem of volume. We can't rearm our destroyers with Tomahawks at sea. They have to go back to port. So, you know, getting that much firepower out there to a target is a question.

But if we're talking about money, even with the U.S.'s massive defense, budget at $100 million a missile, that's a good way to, you know, spend yourself into losing a fight. And then what is, what is ISR, you know, intelligence surveillance for economists? What does ISR look like at hypersonic speeds? Like, how does that work? It's a great question. And honestly, I don't have a great answer. The same way, to be honest with you, deploying munitions at hypersonic speeds is a huge engineering

undertaking as well. However, ISR theoretically would be the easier of these two jobs. It really just comes down to the fidelity of your cameras and the other sensors that you've got on board and what your intended outcomes are. So what's cool about using an aircraft like maybe mayhem for that is that the Air Force is pushing really hard for modularity in all of its systems, including NGAD, which is the next generation fighter. The idea there being that you, you know, you're you can swap payloads. Mayhem, it's very specific in the contracting documents that it wants modular payloads that you can swap in and out.

And what that means is that the platform itself is not constrained by the technology, by the ISR technology of the day. If we develop a better camera, a better sensor system, two years down the road, we can just swap them out and still use the same platform. Whereas right now, you know, if you want to put, for instance,

Northrop's working on a new radar for the F-30 that is a huge undertaking, even with the F-35 being designed for upgrades. If you want to do it in the F-16, an even bigger deal. You have to replace all the hardware, all the electronics, all the avionics. So this modular system basically means that when they do solve the question of how do you do ISR at Mach 10, they can continue to improve it. Likewise, when they do solve the problem of how do you deploy munitions at that speed, probably in my opinion, they probably won't deploy munitions at hypersonic speeds. Kelly Johnson, who's the legendary engineer who made the U2, the SR 71, he and the YF12,

which was an SR 71 armed with air-to-air missiles. It came with three AIM-47s that it carried internally. They launched them at better than Mach 3 in testing a number of times. He said with a lot of success. So the engineering problems are huge, but if we could overcome Mach 3, you know, in the 60s. We can overcome Mach 5 in the 2020s. Right. But it's a huge, it's a huge question, to be honest. I don't have a good answer. And at what point as we approach these really unbelievable speeds? And it's funny because like back

in what the 1910s, 1920 is, they thought that the human body would never be able to to survive going like 60 miles an hour or whatever it was, right? But yeah. But as we approach these speeds, are we going to reach the capacity? or the limit for the human ability to survive these, and everything will have to be designed as drone? So the three hypersonic aircraft programs, the two disclosed, one somewhat secret, all do look like they're aiming for drone platforms.

But Hermius, as an outlier, has made it very clear that they intend to make crude hypersonic aircraft. In fact, when I say crude, I mean manned hypersonic aircraft. In fact, they want to make passenger aircraft. that can travel at hypersonic speeds. The truth is the speed isn't the problem, so much is changing direction. So if you've got a pretty stable trajectory, the space shuttle being a great example, you can hit Mach 25 during reentry because you're not doing any really dramatic turns.

It's going to take, you know, the SR 71 would take whole states to turn at speed, whole countries, you know, to be able to turn around. And that is what we're talking about when it comes to hypersonic flight. But the truth is we're going to have to make these drones. And more than that, we're going to have to use AI to solve some of the problems. The RPAs that we have now remotely piloted aircraft, like the MQ9 Reaper, are really effective, but they're not good for air-to-air combat because of lack. It's about one and a half seconds for the video feed to come from the MQ9 to the operator.

Then you have the operator's decision-making time, which might be one second, maybe less, if they're really effective, and then a one-and-a-half second lag for it to reach the MQ-9 again. So by the time the MQ-9 reacts to what it sees, three or more, a minimum of three seconds, probably four or even five seconds have gone by. That's too long to be able to do something effectively when in five seconds you might cover 50 miles, right? So we're going to have to use AI decision-making to support what these platforms do. We're going to have to be able to say, I want you to do this, and we're going to have to rely on these aircraft to make decisions out in the air. Because especially moving at that speed, maintaining good lines of communication, you know, signal clarity is a real question, especially around the curvature of the earth. And you don't want to run into a situation where you lose signal when it falls out of the sky. or turns back.

You want it to complete its mission. So just like the loyal wingman programs we're looking at for the next generation of fighters, these are going to have to be AI enabled drones, not necessarily because of the G-forces, but literally just because of the decision-making process and it's significantly cheaper to field these things without life support systems on board.

So we need to send chat GBT to Top Gun basically. Yeah, basically. Yeah, they already are doing it. You know, they did an AI versus F-16 pilots dog fights, not last year, but the year prior. And I want to be clear that the fights really did favor the AI, but the AI won undefeated. It went, I think, 5 and O without the human pilot even getting a shot in. So we're getting there. Yeah. Yeah, well, the AI thing is a whole other conversation that my old ranger buddy, Paul Shari, actually works on AI stuff for DOD down in Washington.

I've actually been using it more and more for my YouTube stuff. I've been using AI upscalers for old aviation footage and Adobe's AI to clean up my audio. Interesting. So Alex, I guess another thing I would like to query you on is the stealth helicopters, one of which, you know, went down in Abbottabad. This is like an enduring interest and enduring subject that we still don't know a hell of a lot about these things. I mean, I haven't even heard like the official designation of what the helicopter is called, but we think it's a Black Hawk variant. I mean, what have you come across in your research or your sources?

What have you learned about it? So to be honest, I haven't heard an official designation or even an unofficial designation for it. But what I have heard is that it is a UH 60 or started out as a UH 60 that has. a lot of work done to it, not just to reduce its radar return, but also to reduce its sound profile to make it much quieter. That work was primarily in the rotor blades themselves. The way the rotor blades are produced just makes them significantly quieter. There are reports from the Bin Laden raid where people didn't hear the helicopters until they were literally there. I have heard that they are not particularly easy to fly, which

makes a great deal of sense. You know, when we're talking about the UH 60s, when we're talking about, you know, the 160th converting a handful of these platforms to have a smaller radar profile and to be a lot quieter, this is not a huge at volume production where you're going to have a lot of R&D and you're going to work all the kinks out and it is going to work like a charm. It's really more like a garage build with a huge budget. Yeah. And those stealth blackhawks aren't the only, you know, situation like this, the R9X, which is the Hellfire missile full of swords. I've heard from a number of pretty reliable sources that it's not a production missile, it's a kit, where you swap out the warhead from the Hellfire and swap in the deployable blade section. Very similar idea. These are

things that are done, not necessarily in the field, but, you know, monster garage style, if you remember watching the Discovery Channel 15 years ago. So they're not particularly refined, And I think that that's probably why we haven't seen them become a bigger and more prevalent thing. Because they can do their job. But from what I understand, most pilots would rather not fly them. But honestly, I haven't heard anything about these platforms in a while. So if they are still flying, I'm sure we have them. This kind of runs along into the same area as Aurora.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with gold legends surrounding Arbor. Aurora, this idea that we had a hypersonic or a high supersonic platform that we were testing in the 80s and the 90s. I've talked to a bunch of guys from the UK Ministry of Defense about sightings of Aurora that happened over there. If something like Aurora happened, which I don't think Aurora was its name, but there was, it seems, a technology demonstrator meant for that sort of stuff. We're not talking about 747s or F-16s. We're talking about, you know, a very, very small batch of these things that are really handcrafted. And that's probably what we're talking about with the stealth Blackhawks, too. Small batch production, they probably started with UH60s that either hadn't flown much or were new airframes, literally bolted a bunch of shit to them to see what would work.

Once it proved pretty effective, they just sort of put it into use. but I think that it's more likely that we'll see a much more refined version of a stealth platform, a stealth rotorcraft emerge later on, maybe as a result of the V280 valor. But what I do know about those stealth blackhawks is that I don't know much, except that pilots don't like them. How about, I'd like to also query you about like Blackside drone programs, because, I mean, we have a whole slew of publicly disclosed drones. They're sort of like the tactical level, scan eagle stuff.

And then like I call them the GQ of the RPA world is the reapers, those guys. But then I've been told that there's also this like additional tier of like just totally unacknowledged black side drones that the intelligence community and maybe the military has some as well. They flew in combat zones in places like Afghanistan, but maybe other parts of the world as well. maybe over places like Ukraine today. I was just wondering what you've come across in your research on that. I would say this is one of those things that, you know, I can't tell you that I have a source that I can cite to confirm it, but all but certain.

You know, the RQ 170 and the RQ180 are both still very secretive platforms. The 170 people called the Beast of Kandahar for a while, because they saw it flying before anybody really knew what it was. I think that we probably see, because occasionally you'll see an RQ 180 siting on Instagram or something, but for all we know it's not. And what I mean by that is there are lots of different ways to field a black triangle in the sky. And it's very difficult when you're looking at the sky to assess scale of it. How big is that? How, you know, which one is it?

How can you determine between an RQ 170 and an RQ170? or maybe even a B2, depending on the angle that you're at from it. And that creates tons of room for plausible deniability, for triangular, you know, stealth platforms. And the nature of these reconnaissance aircraft makes them really well suited to be these, just a black triangle that you can kind of hide amongst the others. You can field as many of these as you want with as many different payloads as you want because they're intended to fly at very high altitude, usually under cover of darkness.

And if anyone does see it, most people wouldn't be able to differentiate it between one and the other. And because of that, we've probably got a lot of very stealthy drone platforms, especially for things like high altitude reconnaissance and stuff like that, that we haven't disclosed or acknowledged yet.

A lot of people talk about, I think, I'm blanking now, the TR3 or whatever. It was, along with the Aurora Legends, it's this idea of a giant black triangle. And you can find pictures online that may be doctored, but look like a very big triangle with, you know, contrails coming out the back. But how would you know if that's just a painted RQ 180 or if this happens to be something different? So I think that it is all but certain that we have got a veritable fleet of different unmanned aircraft that we can use for a whole variety of things, including strikemen. because it wouldn't be that expensive to field. And it's important to remember that America's black budget floats at around $65 billion a year.

That is the entirety of the Russian defense budget. And we devote that just to clandestine operations. So there's certainly money to put these sorts of things into service. Fucking A. You know, it's interesting because you mentioned that the company that you said was like a bunch of smart kids you know basically hermius right where these i mean where are these kids coming from right like that like how it's amazing to me and it needs to be celebrated but where are they coming from so i have a theory on this uh and it's sort of tied to time frame back in

the 70s uh it was a really exciting time to be an airplane nerd i i wasn't around yet but you know in In the 70s we got the F-16, the F-14, the F-A-18, the F-15, the F-117 came in the early 80s, the B-2 came, you know, was unveiled in 89, entered service in 97. That span of time was incredibly exciting to be an airplane nerd. And if you wanted to get into these fields, you would go get into these fields. But then things tapered off because, you know, the Cold War ended. We went into two decades of the global war on terror, where more budget was being allocated to, you know, maintaining ops and maintaining the equipment that we have.

And it became a lot cooler to be a badass operator than it was to be an airplane geek. Right. Now, however, we're skewing back into that great power competition. And as luck would have it, it came right on the tail of the private rocket industry starting to take off. So there was already a lot of excitement surrounding engineering and these fields that can very easily go into aviation and people who might have wanted to go work for SpaceX when they first started school are now graduating and they're seeing huge opportunities over at Lockheed Martin where they've got a huge new facility where they're building who knows what and over at Northrop

Grumman where they've got potentially 100 B-21s to field not to mention NGAD which nobody knows who the prime contractor's going to be I'd imagine they'll all get a big bite of it and then you've got the Navy's F-AXX program. It is a really exciting time to be in aviation. And as a result, we're seeing young people get excited about it again. Hermius is what they're doing is they're trying to build hypersonic platforms using off-the-shelf technology, which is something none of the big dogs are trying to do. And that's probably why I think they've gotten so much investment. They're taking an off-the-shelf F-100 engine. They're taking ramjet technology that's much more mature than scramjet technology. They're marrying it together in a way that they can do in

ConEx boxes in Atlanta. They're very budget oriented because they didn't come up as a part of the existing defense infrastructure, where everything has six committees and it costs a billion dollars to make a decision. Right. They're not getting those. I think we're going to see more and more of that. That's fantastic. And how are we, because we talk about this technology that we have and that were developing. And on previous shows, when we've had on, you know, our experts in counterintelligence and talking about how difficult it is for Chinese agents walking out of every government contract we have with the plans in their pockets, like how do you see that affecting it? Do you see a real result in how we see China developing, you know, their aircraft and their, you know, missile

technology and stuff. It's a huge problem, you know, and in a lot of ways it's a cultural one. In the United States, we really like to make everything about domestic politics, and we want to, you know, assign every issue to one team or the other, and if you're worried about that issue, then you've got to be on that team. It's really tough to say that almost all Chinese citizens that come to the United States, especially through, you know, American universities are intelligence collectors. They're not intelligence collectors in a nefarious way.

They didn't come here with ill intent, but they were raised in a certain culture that's a bit different than ours. When they came to the United States, it was on the condition that they would provide information back to the Chinese government, most of which is not classified, is not secret, and is totally benign to share. So it creates this sense of, I'm not doing anything wrong. I genuinely don't see myself as a spy. If you approach some of these intelligence collectors, the last thing they would ever identify as, even in Chinese circles, is an intelligence collector.

And that's a really dangerous thing for the United States where we prize our freedom and equal opportunity and making sure that we don't close doors just because of someone's ethnicity. It's a real problem, though, because, I mean, Sue Bin is a great example. he was in Canada working for a defense contractor out of Canada that got access to Lockheed, Northrop, and Boeing's information, and then literally hand it over. You can read his emails that include the schematics for the F-35 and the F-22 where he says, using this, we can stand on the shoulders of the giant. It's a huge problem, and I don't know what the solution is. You guys can speak to the counterintel side of it probably better than I can, but it is very, very difficult to. place security on the employees involved in these programs in a way that prevents them from sharing anything, you know, especially in this day and age.

I think it's fascinating, though, Alex, and I'd love to hear your thought. There's this idea out there amongst many people, and I come across all the time, that the United States government can't keep a secret, that everything leaks. Everything leaks. D.C. is like a sieve. everything comes out. And indeed, a lot of stuff leaks. However, it does seem that our government is able to lock down and keep secret some of these classified aviation programs. There's a lot of stuff that, you know, I cover more special ops in the intelligence community. And if I dig hard

enough, I can usually find out what I'm trying to find out eventually. But with these aerospace programs, it really is, from my perspective, a black hole. I mean, what do you think about how they do, the counterintelligence they have around these programs and how they keep them compartmentalized in secret. Honestly, NGAD and the B-21 are both great examples of how the DOD can still keep secrets. I mean, these are publicly disclosed programs, but the B-21, I mean, we have six of them at some stages of production. There are rumors, I don't particularly buy these rumors, but there are rumors that that first B-21,

we saw roll out of the hangar, has actually. actually already flown. I can tell you for sure that we're building these B-21s with mission systems on board, which is not something you traditionally do with early technology demonstrators. It's not something you usually do for testing. We say right now that we're doing that because, as a result, the B-21 will be that much further along. It'll be that much more mature by the time we move to production. I think that it's far more likely that a lot of the technology were seeing in the B-21 has already been flown in some of those undisclosed drones we were just talking about earlier. So I think a lot of the technology, a lot of the new technology you

won't find in the B-2 that you will find in the B-21 has already seen the sky somewhere, if not in a B-21 and something else and something unmanned. The fact that nobody got a good picture of the B-21 before the unveiling, the fact that at the unveiling, we only saw what they wanted us to see speaks volumes. When the B2 spirit was unveiled in 1989, they tried to do the exact same thing they did this time. They only invited certain people to the unveiling. You know, they put all of the crowd in a very specific place with serious security, including a UH1, Huey, with a door gunner circling overhead to try to keep everybody from getting a look at anything other than head on. An aviation week hired a guy.

with a Cessna to fly right over it and take a bunch of pictures of the back of the aircraft that they published the next week. Their argument was that Russian satellites can see it, so why can't we? So with the B-21, they didn't roll it all the way out of the hangar, and there were definitely no aircraft flying overhead this time. There was no Cessna's around. The fact that they managed to keep the B-21 a secret is mind-boggling, but more so the The Air Force has already acknowledged that a tech demonstrator for the NGAD fighter, America's next generation air superiority platform, it's going to replace the F-22 Raptor, has already flown and broken records.

Nobody has seen it. There's one picture, it got published by the War Zone a year or so ago, that looks like it could be, you know, a Delta Wing, tailless aircraft that could be what people think NGAD will be. but none of us know. And that in and of itself is absolutely crazy. Aside from the fact that it's going to fly with a constellation of drone wingmen, that we also don't know what they'll look like. I mean, they could look like the Boeing loyal wingman or the Kratos Valkyri or like none of that. That's crazy because we know these programs are already being funded.

We know the buildings that are putting them together in. So when you think about special access protocol programs where, for instance, some of the higher level saps are verbal only. You don't write anything down. There are definitely, especially small batch programs like those stealth blackhawks that are going on right now. Again, $65 billion is a lot of money to build a lot of weird stuff. So the U.S. can definitely keep secrets when it's really invested. the problem is when they become programs of record. The F-35 is a good example.

As soon as it becomes a program of record, and we have a lot of transparency because of our form of government, you create opportunity for espionage. So we can definitely keep secrets right up until we've got to let everyone in the room. And at that point, to be honest, just America's approach to having some degree of transparency hurts us.

Yeah. You know, like a sap that only like 35 people in the entire world are read onto, it's a hell of a lot easier to keep secret than, you know. Yeah, then a production floor at Boeing. Right. Or they've literally got 16 fighters being assembled at once. Or let's say a operation. You know, if something goes operational where something, there's actual actions taking place and there's all this logistics and intelligence support. and something goes bang, especially when something goes bang, it's much harder to keep that secret.

You know, and that transparency hurts us in a lot of ways. One that comes to mind is there's a lot of talk online about how good Russian air defense systems are. You know, even now a year into this fight in Ukraine with Ukraine's Air Force still operating, you will find people vehemently arguing that the S-400, the S-500 especially, are these impenetrable air defense bubbles. They're not. I mean, they do appear to be rather effective. But the S-400, the S-500, they use the Nibo M-M radar, which is a combination of multiple radar arrays. But regardless, it's limited by line of sight. If you don't have control of the airspace, if it's not networked to AWACs, it can't see past the horizon. But Russia does not disclose testing failures. So as far as the world's concerned, the S-400 has been tested 10 times and has scored a successful 100. Whereas the U.S.'s overall air defense testing rate from like 1972 on is like 74%, which is very good when you consider that includes the early failures and later successes. But because we're transparent about this, we shoot ourselves in the foot, you know, and it makes it seem as though America is lagging behind countries like Russia and technology like hypersonics. When for all we know, the S.R. 72's flying. It makes us look like our air defense platform.

are behind platforms like the S-400. It paints us in this light, like we can't keep a secret and we can't keep pace. When in reality, like, you know, the MIM, man, I'm blanked, the Patriot air defense system, it is seen rapid improvements since it first saw service. You know, in the Gulf War, where it missed a lot of scuds,

maybe got none of them. And then we brought it back in 03, and it hit every ballistic missile that was thrown at it. And today's Patriots, I was talking to a guy recently who runs them, he was talking about how they don't need a radar lock to launch an interceptor from the Patriot system. All it needs to know is that there's an aircraft in the air. It'll launch the interceptor now. Then it'll keep tracking whatever that aircraft was, providing guidance to the interceptor, until the interceptor can close close enough to switch to its own high-frequency on-board radar array where it'll close to the target on its own. We don't need a radar lock with our air defenses to engage a missile or an aircraft anymore.

But these aren't things that we advertise in part because it's boring, but also because we're good at keeping secrets by keeping it masked inside a big dump of information. If you just make it somewhere on page 64, people tend not to look. And that's our best way of keeping secrets is just using all the red tape and bureaucracy. So, Alex, this is outside the frame of air power per se, but with drone technology, how far in the future do you think it is before every soldier, every combat soldier is like Falcon and has a personal red wing? Honestly, to some extent, we could do it today if we were invested enough in it. I mean, there are drones ranging down from something that you could toss up in the air with the palm of your hand all the way up to, you know, drones that are absolutely massive and would dwarf a person. But the question is really where the value would be in doing that. I think that what we're probably going to end up seeing, as insane as this might sound, is I know we were talking about this before we went on air, we'll probably see drones continue to be more and more prevalent in the battle space.

But we're going to see other technology start doing jobs that right now we sort of think of drones as doing. Those laser-induced plasma filament holograms, which is this technology where we can literally project plasma balls or shape it to whatever we want it to be. And we can guide it around rooms into rooms and relay voice commands using it. We can use them as flashbangs to disorient people inside a room. we can feasibly, with a long enough timeline, use them to map cave structures. They're right now using Wi-Fi signals to map the interior of buildings and identify people inside. So I think that what we're going to see is a lot of the technology right now we associate with more drones. You know, more smaller handheld drones, things like that.

We're actually going to see be replaced by different forms of directed energy, whether we're talking Wi-Fi, microwave radio frequency, or even the, are induced plasma. I think we're going to end up seeing that more and more throughout the 21st century. Actually, that was going to be my next question to you. Was that, you know, at the close of 2022, there's that announcement from what is at the National Ignition Center. They talked to it. It's a new type of fusion that they achieved. Fusion. Yeah. And that's like a singularity moment. If that's actually, you know, real and it's scalable and it can be used effectively in the field. Could you tell us about that and what that means?

I can't not be stoked like talking about this. So fusion, obviously, if we can manage fusion power, it might even reduce mankind's proclivity for conflict because it would make power much more readily available. But fusion, it's important to understand it's a form of nuclear power, but it's sort of the opposite of fission. So a nuclear weapon splits an atom to release a great deal of energy. Fusion bonds two atoms together to reduce a great deal of energy. Fusion power is the idea of making it a self-sufficient reaction, where it'll sustain itself and produce energy. To this point, we've been able to produce fusion reactions, but it's always required more energy put in than we could get out. Just recently, they reached net positive, where the amount of energy we needed

to use to encapsulate that fusion reaction was less than the amount of energy that the fusion reaction actually produced. Now, there are obvious implications for literally everything, not just defense. But I can tell you for sure that both the U.S. Navy and Lockheed Martin have containerized fusion patents that have been on file since 2018 or prior. Lockheed Martin's patent actually even includes an F-16 to show that they could create a containerized fusion power source small enough to fit within the fuselage of an F-16. The Navy actually with their fusion patents, they even included, and I swear to God, I sound like I'm making this up, but time space modification weapons.

The idea that you can produce enough energy using these reactions, theoretically, that you can, you know, sort of leverage E equals MC squared to find that bridge where energy becomes matter and vice versa. And, you know, that's a significantly more powerful weapon than a nuke, obviously. Fusion could literally change everything. We tried to use atomic power for aircraft in the past. The NB36 was the B36 peacemaker that we literally put a new. reactor it on a hook. We hung it from a hook and we would lower it through the Bombay doors into an underground bunker when it landed. It flew a couple of times, not under atomic

power, but with the reactor online. But the problem is that if you crash that thing, you really create a huge problem, right? Radioact to fallout. Russia's Skyfall missile, just like America's slam missile back in the 50s, are nuclear propelled missiles that theoretically have unlimited range. The problem with them, again, is that nuclear reactor. Russia had one blow up on them in 2018 and kill a bunch of their scientists. We stopped building them because we figured out that we couldn't fly this missile over any allied countries on its way to a target because it was just dumping radioactive material out the back. Fusion could solve all of those problems. We'd be talking about aircraft that would never need to land, never need to refuel, submarines, aircraft carriers,

battleships, you name it. It wouldn't need a fuel source anymore. Especially when we're talking with drone platforms, at that point you're talking consistent nonstop ISR access. We could be using aircraft for the same things that we use satellites for right now. But even that, you know, the way that we think about the defense apparatus as it is is married to fossil fuels and our need or logistical need to get oil to everything. If not oil, batteries to, you know. And we have some ideas. Like some people are working right now on satellites that collect solar power and then

beam it to energy collectors via microwave on the ground, which could certainly resolve a lot of these problems, but fusion would solve all of them. And fusion, what's beautiful about it is that if you sever the power to a fusion reaction, it just turns off. There's no meltdown. Right. There's no chain reaction. there's no radioactive waste, there's no nuclear fallout.

Fusion could fundamentally change the way in which everything about the world works. Everything that we do today is based on the power grid we've got and the gas I need to put in my car, the fuel we've got to put in the jet, the rocket fuel that we use to deliver missiles. If we had, you know, not limitless, but practically limitless, cheap, reliable energy produced by fusion, it would change everything about the way our defense apparatus functions at such a fundamental level that it's difficult to picture what it would look like after. Well, it would be Star Trek.

I mean, it would be a post-scarcity world, right? In a big way, it would be. A lot of the conflict we have today is just based on, you know, resource scarcity. If it's not fuel, it's water, if it's not water, it's money, if it's not money, it's whatever. Resource scarcity is the basis for a lot of geopolitical conflict. And fusion would not solve that problem overnight. I think that it is very much more likely that we would see it in defense applications before we'd see it in civilian applications. Because there's a budget to throw at it to solve these problems.

Whereas right now, you know, with the American power grid needs lots. but we're not funding big changes. But the DOD throw money at a problem. Eventually, though, we would be talking about no more coal, no more nuclear power. I mean, maybe not even a need for solar or wind, that eventually, you know, our homes are powered by this type of technology. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, again, like everything about our transportation system, everything about our logistic supply chains.

Everything is tied right now to the logistics surrounding keeping things running. And fusion could solve all of that in ways that are tough to wrap my head around. Right. You know, access to power could allow us to create things that we never even thought we could create before. If we can make laser-induced plasma filament holograms now that look like an aircraft to the naked eye, What could we do with near limitless power? You know, to be honest, even as I think about it, fighters, one of the big problems with fighters,

the engines that we have in them, the F-35 is powered by an F-135 turbofan engine. Its power production is limited by heat. If it produces as much power as it can, it would burn through the fuselage of the aircraft, so we have to limit how much power it can pump out. All of these problems go away. You know, it's hard to, I don't know.

I guess I don't know what war would look like after we nailed this fusion concept because we wouldn't fight it in anything even close to the way we fight it now. Right, right. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, it's things that are over the horizon that we can't even imagine. I mean, personally, I've been thinking about fusion since, what, 1990, whatever, when the saint came out with Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shoe. that is a great bad movie

that is a bad movie get out we're done I love that movie I love that movie too but it's it's in the same group though for me as like Iron Eagle which I love that movie

but I don't qualify it as like a good movie yeah love that movie yeah so let's talk about because we're talking about you know you've mentioned Maverick and Dark Star and some of the other stuff. Now we're talking about movies. Let's talk about Maverick.

What did you love about that movie? What did you hate about the movie? You know, we talked about this before we started, but I expected not to like Top Gun Maverick. I was stoked about it for nostalgia's sake, but I didn't anticipate actually liking it. I'm not a Tom Cruise fan, but I love the original Top Gun. It was obviously formative for me.

I mean, right. I was absolutely, the minute that I saw an F-14 kind of zoomed by very briefly in the first trailer, I was like, that's it, it's my favorite movie of the last five years. But I still expected it to suck. And Paramount invited me out to San Diego to go to, I went to a private screening of it, and then I got to interview all the cast and everybody, which was a great experience. I'm not a movie media guy, you know what I mean? And so it was a bit different for me. But even when I was doing the interviews, I was kind of expecting this to be kind of a crappy popcorn movie.

So I, whatever, whatever. And then we went and watched the movie. And I think my favorite part of it was that the very beginning, the opening, is exactly the same as the opening and the original Top Gun. Yeah. With the exception of their Super Hornets that you see instead of Tomcats, they added women to that little. splash screen at the front and they fixed one copy editing error that was in the original.

But it was the same, you know, as soon as you got in. And then I do have to point out that that entire movie wouldn't have had to happen if they just called the Air Force. Like the B2 could have accomplished that mission without any drama whatsoever. And it's also absolutely lunacy that they're planning for this incredibly important operation was just like two generals. called in a really old and objectively shitty captain and they were like, what do you think? And he was like, oh, well, the F-35 won't work

because they're jamming GPS. So we should try to use it. Nonsense. I don't care. Right. This is an awesome, awesome movie. The scenes where, you know, he's training them to fly, they violate a lot of

things like the training bubble and stuff. I don't care. Right. Awesome. But the best part of that whole movie for me. I did very much enjoy Darkstar, but watching an F-14 shoot down two Sioux 57s in a close quarters dog fight is as close to porn as I have ever seen in a crowded room with my pants on. It was amazing. The Sue 57 is probably a somewhat capable aircraft, but it's not particularly capable. And through the whole movie, I was like, they keep talking about it like it's the boogeyman. It's got the same radar cross-section as the super hornets that they're flying.

It's not that good. But then when they shot two of them down with an F-14 that they stole from Iran, and then shot one more down with a super hornet like it was nothing, I derived a great deal of satisfaction out of that just because of all the Russian trolls that comment under my stuff. I do have to say, spoilers, sorry for anyone who hasn't seen it, but the dark star exploding, as I told you, there's no way Maverick survives that, unless maybe it had an ejection capsule like, you know, the B-58 hustler used to have. But I think that maybe it's more likely that the whole movie that played out after that, all the unrealistic parts about them asking this captain to fly this mission and, you know, somehow managing to defeat the laws of physics to use his own flares to take out a missile before it shot down his first. all of that is just his fever dream as he's falling on the sky from 85,000 feet as he's disintegrating. Yeah.

Yeah, but it's the last of his brain synapses firing as they turn to ash. But I loved the movie. I did too. I was, I went like as an 80s child, I was like, oh, here we go. Somebody else trying to make money from a popular franchise. But no, it was a lot of fun. And the diner. I was going to say the diner scene.

Oh, please. No, no, no, no. Well, I just, I know that it wasn't the same boon for recruiting that the one in 86 was. Right. I recently got to have dinner with one of the guys in charge of the Navy recruiting campaign advertising stuff. And he was really disappointed to report that he's like, you know, we used to be able to set up tables out front of Top Gun. But it didn't do it this time. But who knows?

Maybe it'll just take a little while. One hopes. One hopes. Sorry, you were saying when he walked into the diner. We will have people on the team house in 2035. The reason why I joined the Navy was because I saw a top gun maverick. I guarantee you it's coming. Well, I mean, I'm in, I can't believe I'm going to tell you this, but I joined the Marine Corps almost entirely.

Because in Doom the movie, the Rock punched through a wall and said Semperfy, motherfucker. And I was like, now I have to join the Marines. I don't have a choice now. I'm going to go join the Marine Corps, and I did. It's an effective, I mean, it is an effective recruiting tool. I mean, I think that the Rangers really missed out with Heartbreak Ridge by not cooperating with the producer. So they basically made it about Marines who had done what the Rangers had done, you know. And I got to point out here while we talk about this, because the,

The bad faith argument about what we're discussing is always that this is propaganda, right? And it is, absolutely. But people don't understand that in the United States, this is propaganda where these movie studios are independent organizations, and they approach the DoD, and they say, we want to make a movie that looks like this. Can we use your airplanes, your helicopters, your troops? And the DOD says, well, yeah, but there are conditions. In China, they literally tell you what the movie can be. Right. And that's very different.

American movies frequently make very significant changes to benefit the Chinese, not audience, but censors. The Red Dawn remake, that entire movie was filmed using China as the bad guy. And then because Chinese investors were mad, they went in and used CGI to change all of it to North Korea, which made no actual sets. North Korea is not going to invade the United States. Marvel has been accused of whitewashing repeatedly because they cast, you know, Tilda Swinton as the ancient one, traditionally a Tibetan character. It's because the Chinese censors would not allow a prominent Tibetan character

in a movie they'd release in their markets. Disney, not just Marvel, but Disney has done that consistently. Absolutely. One percent Disney wants the Chinese market and they will do anything the Chinese government tells them to do. I love the American movie posters where the black character is prominent, the Chinese posters. Right. He's like this kind of thing.

You're blended in the background. Exactly. Speaking of the Chinese media, though, so China did produce their own supposed to be equivalent movie to Top Gun that was going to prominently feature their J20, the Mighty Dragon, China's first stealth fighter. And then after Top Gun came out, the Chinese government wouldn't allow the studio to release the movie. movie because they said the special effects were embarrassing. So the Chinese government won't even let you release a completed movie that they helped you produce because they're mad that it wasn't as good as the Tom Cruise movie released by the United States. Damn.

People are very eager to call out the United States for its bullshit, and that's fair and appropriate. But we're so eager to call out the United States that we fail to recognize the very apparent insanity. that's happening, you know, right on the horizon. You know, we're so, we're so eager to call everything American propaganda that we don't think about just how much propaganda we consume. Right, right. Right. And, I mean, you know, speaking of China and its influence in our movie industry,

again, like mad props to, you know, whether it's Tom Cruise or Brockham or whoever, because they wanted to strike, they basically told them, we won't air this in China if his flight. jacket high as the Taiwan flag and like oh well well no they did they did they did take it off you remember they digitally removed it and then the first trailers came out and people freaked out i actually wrote a story about it that that's up in business insider uh about how this was kowtowing to china i love even more that they did it at first realized there was a backlash and took it back yeah uh because i think initially they probably thought no one would notice right and then when people did notice and then when people did notice and

Instead of it just being something that they did and no one ever thought about, it became a very clear message to China that this movie's prioritizing the American market over yours. And it went on to make a billion dollars. Yeah. So let that be a lesson, Dwayne the Rock Johnson. You don't have to make a crappy movie just so that it'll get, you know, I read that what's going on is that the Chinese domestic, their domestic movie production facilities have scaled up to the point that they,

They are really just interested in airing Chinese films now. They're not so interested in recording American films. And that's why the American film industry now is starting to say, well, okay, we're not going to, like, bend the need to China because, like, we can't even get our movies in their theaters anymore. It doesn't matter. I am all for it. Yeah. I don't feel like Disney has gotten that message yet. We've gotten so many bad action movies in the past 10 years because it's all just special effects set pieces with very, with.

You know, a plot that's just to connect those set pieces because it's all going to be done in voiceover, you know, for half the audience who's going to see it. I'm all for it. And likewise, I don't want to see Jackie Chan in another freaking movie. Oh, fuck Jackie Chan. I love Jackie Chan when I was a teenager. Me too. But no, no, he's not a good guy. No, he, no.

I've been a Jackie Chan fan forever, and I was very disappointed. Jackie Chan and Stephen Segal. I've never honestly been a huge stevenilever. However, Chow Yun-Fat has been critical of the Chinese regime. You know what? I didn't actually know that. So I'm down for some Chow-Yung-Fat then. All right.

Chow-un-Fat is the man. I'm in. Okay. I'll actually go watch some of his movies now. Just like, I'm going to go spite watch, like, just to give him the nickel he gets from from me renting it on Amazon. Well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you're so far away, Alex.

I would come over. we'd have some beers and watch hard-boiled, I'd be totally down for it. Look, I'm always down for some Wu films, man. Yeah. I will make, I'm gonna, I'll find a way to fly up there just for it. I'll make it a tax right off. I'll tweet about it and call that work, something like that, because I'm down. I've never seen hard-boil.

It's a tax, it's a tax right off. No, all, look, all of Wu's fans are amazing. So, what was the one where Chow Yun-Fat plays the assassin? Like almost everything Chow-Yun Fatt's ever been in. I was going to say He's fighting the guy who has an eye patch I haven't seen this movie since I was like 13 That's not the one with Miris Serbino in it

No no no that is the replacement killers Yeah that was a good one I don't remember I want to say it was just called like the assassin Or something It was like contract killer Yeah something something very obvious like that Um

Steven Seagall is one of those guys were like he was an ass clown before he became a Russian puppet. But I get all the more satisfaction out of hating Stephen Seagal now that he is a Kremlin puppet. I saw that bad ass at the shot show one time. I didn't know he had, but that's why I consider Air Force One, like the first like 20 minutes of Air Force One, like the best movie ever. Yeah. Honestly, I think the, what movie am I thinking of? Was it executive decision, the one where he died by getting sucked out of? Oh, I had like a stretch limo nighthawk.

I thought it was Air Force. No, that's Harrison Ford in that movie. Oh, shit. Okay. Yeah, he's right. It's executive. It was. Kurt Russell, yeah.

Then that's what I'm talking about. Can we talk about how, like, they fit like 10 guys in the back of an F-17 Nighthawk, first of all? Yeah. Which just doesn't. That just doesn't happen. The conservation of matter. You can't do that. But watching Stephen Seagal get sucked out of the top of it.

Yeah. Awkwardly. Like. The fact that they could only show him from head on because he wouldn't remove his ponytail to, like, for it to be in the movie is, like, it's peak Steven Seagall for me. But it just, it was so weird and unexpected in the movie that he just like suddenly. No, I know. I don't know why I thought it was our first one, but that's what I was talking about, like the first 20 minutes of executive decision. It's like, this is awesome, you know, for him, like, show up and die.

And just die. Honestly, that era of movies are, I still like executive decision. All the old Jack Ryan movies, like The Hunt for Red October. Oh, dude, later, is it next month? We're going to have Chad Collins on, who is the actor. Yeah, the actor that he has inherited the sniper franchise and done a bunch of the movies with Tom Barringer also. I'm going to have a total, like, we are going to have like a very serious academic conversation about the sniper franchise. I have many, many questions.

I still file my bullets. I'm stoked to watch that. I can't wait to see that. still file the burs off my bullets. Oh, yeah. Absolutely, man. I remember watching, that was another one of those movies. Yeah, watching when I was like 13 and I was just overwhelmed by how awesome Tom

Barringer was. It's like, oh, my God, that's what I want to do with my life. Don't you hate it when you go back, though? Like, for me, it was Jarhead. I thought Jarhead was awesome before I joined the Marines. And then when I was like a corporal, I went back and watched it and I was like, what even is this? The conflict of this movie is just that you're sad that you didn't get to shoot a guy.

Welcome to every Marine ever. When I watched it as a kid, although I will say at the end of the movie when they're all like out and they were like at their buddy's funeral and Jake Gyllenhaal has like a big mop of hair, I was always like, that's gross. I'm never going to be that guy. And then I got out and I got fat and grew a bunch of hair. And I'm like, okay. So it wasn't entirely unrealistic. Yeah, I don't even watch most military or like, no, I don't watch any of them now. Like I can enjoy an over-the-top action.

Like I just recently watched Bullet Train, which was a fun romp. I haven't seen that yet. Is that good? It's a lot of fun. I'm surprised that I think the same person who did John Wick did that or there was a, because some of the gunplay, like not the gunplay, but some of the stuff, mechanics of operating the gun was off, which it was surprising. to me. But I can handle, I can handle like the, if that's what you're going to be and you embrace that, then I can enjoy all that. But most modern military movies, I can't even be bothered with. My friends try to show me Green Zone one time. I'm like, this is so dumb. No. This is horrible.

It's, it's always for me, it's either I get frustrated by the heavy-handed political messaging or I'm so distracted by like, oh, what was that movie a couple of years ago that was basically just like Marines versus aliens in L.A.? I love that movie. I'll watch that over. I love that movie, too. It's a recruiting commercial, but there's one part of it that ruins it for me every time. And it's when that guy that played Two-Face, you know, the main character, is talking to his first sergeant, and he goes first sergeant every time. And I'm like, there has never been a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps ever who has printed.

announced both syllables of sergeant. Ever. Yeah. Every time I watch it, it ties me nuts. You mean like first art? First art. Yeah. You say first art.

You don't go, I don't know, first sergeant. Yeah. Nobody has ever said that. But I love that movie so much. I've seen that movie so many times. So my daughter was born a couple years after I got out. So when she was like, you were in the Marines, what did you do? I was an administrator, but I showed her that.

I was like, yeah, mostly this. Yeah. It wasn't green zone. I don't know why it came up. It was Hurt Locker. Oh, God. I hated Hurt Locker. Oh, my God.

And my friends, my civilian friends thought it was amazing. I'm like, why are they doing what they're doing right now? Like, I didn't get it. Yeah. Like, at what point do you get to just go off on your own mission? Right. You know, like, yeah, I'm just going to walk out there and take, you know, justice into my own hands. Right.

Yeah, like the one guy who did that was what, Bobergdoll? Like, it's not what you do. Yeah. So, Alex, where can people find your work? Where can they find you? Well, you can definitely find the majority of my written work on sandbox news.com. That's sandbox with two X's. You can also find it in the sandbox app, especially if you've got service members that are currently in training.

You've got a loved one at Basic or deployed. The sandbox app is a great way to get them letters, and you can find a lot of my content in there. but I've also got an article coming out for popular mechanics pretty soon about the five most dangerous submarines that are in service today. Oh, that's awesome. But you can also find me on YouTube, sandbox with two X's. I've got a weekly series on YouTube called Air Power. Yeah. And you can find me on, you know, all the usual social media, TikTok and Twitter at Alex Hollings.

And I'm just going to say your air power videos kick ass. Like, they are awesome. Thanks. That means a great deal. And for anybody out there who has not checked out. his videos, check those out. You will love them. I really appreciate it. It is the most like unapologetically me thing that I've done

since I've started working in the media. For a long time, I tried really hard to be a badass. I tried really hard to be like whatever I thought was marketable. Air power is me just genuinely geeking out over air power and military doctrine a lot of times in general. So the fact that you like it means a great deal to me because it's like the truest thing to my own personal nonsense that I've ever done and and that's what I'm talking about like it shows it's like you you're you're not just a journalist you're a hobbyist and then I mean that in the best sense and then you love this

content and you're sharing that with people yeah yeah I was as crazy as it sounds I took last week off to see some family and I was happy to come back to work, which is a super fortunate position to be in, you know? Let me get to some viewer questions real quick. Yeah, I'd love to field some. So is everybody going to ask just where I got this? Because that's the most common question that I get on TikTok. Amazon. You can get all kinds of cool stuff like that off Amazon.

That's also where I got this, you know, 30 millimeter round for the Gow 8 Avenger. that the A10 fires. Everybody asks where you get this, Amazon too. So very cool. Now, we will say, we will say that you should not have TikTok on your phone. You should delete it. You should delete it. But if you do have it, where can they find you on TikTok, Alex?

So you're right. I avoided TikTok like the plague, not just because it's a Chinese data collection tool, but also because I'm old and I fear new things. but then work told me that I needed to get TikTok on my phone. So I said, fine, I'm not going to try hard. I'm just going to record myself talking about crap. And for some reason, that's been very effective. And now I've got almost 90,000 followers on there.

You can find me at Alex Howling's 52. I do this. I just rant about different aircraft platforms. I try my best a lot of times to talk about common myths that people have about the defense industry. aviation specifically, whether we're talking about the problem with the media coverage of hypersonics or just the pervasive myth that the Nazis invented stealth, which drives me nuts. Or today's TikTok was about how people think that the A10 would stall if you kept firing it for too long and sustained fire, which is not true.

So, you know, I have a lot of fun on there, but if you don't like TikTok and you don't want to go there, I totally get it because I wouldn't be. probably if work didn't make me. So if you have TikTok and you refuse to get rid of it, you should be watching Alex and not E-girls. Please do. And not E-girls or E-boys. Or watch

Alex and E-girls and E-boys. You know, every once in a while you need a break. You want to learn something about the F-15. Then you can go, you know, go right back to furries and whatever. Right. But for real, I derive so much of my personal self-worth

from that stupid number on my YouTube and my TikTok. So please feel free to go and click on it so that I feel some semblance of satisfaction, you know, until 10 minutes later when I decide the number's not high enough again. And that's Alex Hoggs 52. Yes, Alex Hollings 52. I think that's also my Instagram handle, but to be honest with you, I don't really post much on Instagram. I just kind of go in and scroll around. So Twitter and TikTok are probably the most likely places that you can interact with me. and YouTube obviously as well. Spencer Devons, thank you very much.

Is there any evidence that the AFRL rocket cargo program we evolved to transporting humans for DOD in the future? Entirely possible. I don't want to say yes, because as far as I understand right now, that's not a part of the steps, the plans for it. I think that its value really will more so than being transporting personnel.

it'll really be very rapidly resupplying people anywhere on the planet, which is huge. You guys can speak to much better than I can, but especially special operations units, or, for instance, Marines operating in Syria, they tend to be isolated from support to a large extent. And in this modern era where we're going to be operating special operations, especially, in Africa, more and more, as we're sort of competing in terms of spheres of influence, with China and providing support for counterterror operations and counter extremist operations. The idea that you can get equipment and supplies,

ammunition, whatever you need to someone, you know, anywhere on the planet in a matter of literal minutes, maybe a few hours, I think that that will have such a dramatic effect on the way that we conduct operations, that transporting personnel isn't gonna be a high priority. But as that technology matures, absolutely. You know, there's no reason why they couldn't. Great question, by the question, by the,

the way. Ian Hutchinson, thank you very much. Are these engines meaningfully different from the SR-71, J-58, or just modernized version? Thanks, Alex, and good to see you. I recognize the name, good to see you too, and that is a great question. The J-58, which is the engine that powered the SR-71, is commonly called a turbo-ramjet rather than a combined cycle ramjet. It operates a little bit differently, but in a very similar way. Basically, it operates like a regular turbofan for the most part until you reach up over Mach 2.2 or so. And then it's got six pipes, six tubes that go from the fourth stage of its compressor back directly to the afterburner. So that fourth stage of the compressors very early in the compressor cycle, it's sucking all that air in,

but at that speed, you're limited by how much air the turbofan engine can swallow. So it bypasses the turbofan engine and dumps that cold air directly into the afterburner, which serves both to cool things down so that you can produce more power, but also that's more air to mix with the fuel that's already being sprayed in from the afterburner to produce a lot more speed. So we call it a turbo ramjet because it functions similar to a ramjet, but it isn't technically speaking really a ramjet. These combined cycle turbofan ram jets work in a really similar way. But instead of having those six pipes that bypassed from the compressor, they bypass the turbofan entirely and basically use that turbofan engine as in Hermes' case, it's the dissipator

that slows the airflow to subsonic speeds. With a scramjet combined cycle engine, you can't really have it in the way. That's part of the real problem. But I'm getting too deep into the weeds. The simple answer is that the turbo ram jet that the J58 was is very similar. but it uses six pipes post-compressor to move the air back to the afterburner, whereas these combined cycle engines actually use the engine itself as the interference for a ramjet that bypasses that turbo fan entirely. I don't know. Did that make sense?

I hope so. It's a complicated question. I just want to know when I'll be able to retrofired a 69 cobra with an S-RAM. Honestly, I'd say now, right? Why not? You can solve any engineering problem with money, and you guys at the team house have got a big budget, right?

Oh, yeah. Massive budget. Massive. I mean, look at that chair. Right. I love that chair. Right. Ian, thanks again.

Space X deploying a QRF with suborbial hop, question mark. It's possible. You know, that's one of the things that Elon Musk talked about with Starship was that you could effectively use it for hop flights like that. This is pretty similar to that Air Force Research Lab question. Yeah, it's totally feasible. And to be honest with you, I think it would be a pretty effective use of SpaceX's ability to launch and land vertically. Right now, obviously, there's a lot of value there for privatized spaceflight.

But that ability to get up into orbit and then rapidly land vertically again, especially if you can do it carrying a payload like Starship feasibly can. I mean, we're talking pretty limitless possibilities here. Anything that you need to move very quickly from one part of the world to the other part, you will get there significantly faster that way. Right now, not necessarily cheaper, but sometimes faster is better than cheaper. But as this technology matures, it'll get less and less and less expensive. The more reusable the whole system becomes, the less it'll cost to do.

The fuel is still a really big one, though, when it's. comes to rocket programs. Alex, I know this is, I mean, I'm asking you to, like, project things that people may not be able to project. What do you think or what do people think will be the fastest speeds we'll be able to attain in the atmosphere when we have the technology, too? Honestly, it's a great question, and it really depends on application. Like, for instance, hypersonic boost glide weapons, you know, they're doing Mach 20, Mach 20,

plus. I think that we will potentially we could see things go even faster than that as time goes on, but you become limited in what you can use it for. You can't really accelerate to those speeds and then decelerate very quickly to do things. You also can't really maneuver very effectively at those speeds. HGVs, those boost glide vehicles, they're not powered. So every little adjustment in course bleeds a lot of kinetic energy and slows the whole thing down. I think we're probably going to be limited when it comes to like really practical things that aren't just delivering munitions to probably the mock 10 to mock 12 range but honestly i've been wrong before and that could easily be one i'm wrong about uh you know you run into a lot of issues where so hyper the hypersonic

barrier isn't a physical one like the supersonic barrier is air literally behaves differently going from subsonic to supersonic speeds hyper like the mock five barrier is just kind of like we picked it, but really hypersonic speed is supposed to be when the chemistry of the air that you're moving through changes in an appreciable way that can affect the way the platform actually travels. And you create problems like plasma sheathing. It's really difficult to get signals through these things. It's difficult to maneuver when you're moving at these speeds because even the slightest deformation and your nose cone could cause catastrophic damage. But that's also the reason why lasers are not a very effective means of hypersonic missile defense, because these systems have to sustain huge, huge temperatures. And lasers work by exposing you to a high temperature, usually for a prolonged period of time right now with the lasers that we've got.

But if you're talking about a weapon that was designed to withstand 6,000 degrees Celsius to be able to manage these speeds, hitting it with, you know, a 300 megawatt laser is not going to do anything, unless it's already near its structural. Right. So hypersonics very well could be the future of 21st century warfare, or we may very quickly learn that high hypersonics are more trouble than they're worth. And the Mach 5 to Mach 8 range is where we find the best fuel efficiency. We're fast enough to circumvent air defenses and we're slow enough to still deploy munitions. the faster you go, the bigger all the engineering challenges become.

And to some extent, it's not that we can't overcome them. I genuinely believe, but sometimes it's just that the return on investment isn't there to overcome them. Right. It's sort of like taking a Ferrari out for pizza delivery, right? But it's like what's the way? Yeah. Yeah. Like at some point you go, okay, how much is that, you know, the Ferrari 360 Modania needs a new clutch every 5,000 miles.

So how many miles do I really want to put on this thing? Right, right. Yeah. And Mank 2311, thank you very much. Why didn't the Navy design another platform capable of using the Aim 54 Phoenix? That's an awesome question. So the Aim 54 Phoenix was the F-14's bread and butter. It was an absolutely massive air-to-air missile that had a triple-digit range.

It wasn't really all that effective at 100 miles. It was really that you could launch it while 100 miles away. knowing that the aircraft was still going to be closing with you. And it was really a weapon that was designed to take out Soviet bombers before they could deploy anti-ship nuclear cruise missiles to take out American strike groups. So the first reason why we stopped using the AIM 54 was really that we didn't have a pressing need for it anymore,

and we don't have a lot of aircraft that could carry it. The F-14 could carry six of them. The F-15, you know, NASA tried to mount one AIM-54 on and had a lot of trouble with it. Their plan was to use it for hypersonic technology demonstrators because the Phoenix wasn't technically hypersonic, but if he aimed it at the ground, it would be. But the real reason is that the Phoenix had a range of about 100 miles, and today the aim, Amram has a range of about 100 miles, probably better. It's a much smaller weapon. You can carry it internally with stealth platforms, and it's a lot more effective than the Phoenix missile ever was.

The aim 260 that's coming out will have probably double that range and also be very small. And Raytheon's paragrain air-to-air missile that nobody's leveraging right now is effectively an aim 120 and half the size. It's got the same range. It's got the same kinetic force upon impact. It'll work just as well and occupy half the space as an AMRAM. So really, it's just that everything got smaller, everything got a bit more efficient. And the onboard radar that we have, the F-14 had a massive, radar array.

The F-35's radar array is significantly smaller, but it's an active electronically scanned array radar that is so much more powerful that they can even use it for electronic warfare. So really, technology advanced. Everything got smaller, and the Phoenix missile was just so friggin big that when the

F-14 retired, there wasn't a lot of real good uses left for it. Danny, thank you very much. Whose beard is redder, Dave, or Alex's? Well, mine's, I guess it depends on the lighting. Well, plus mine is mostly gray now, so I can't even, I can't even clays. That's fair.

Mine's going gray at the edges, but as long as I trim it. I got like a Rosal Ghoul kind of beard going. Yeah, it's classy, man. I like it. If I let my sideburns grow, they grow in gray. So I just kind of look like a failing porn star in the 70s. I don't, I'm not aging gracefully. but failing porn stars in the 70s are making comebacks

bare you know actually a lot of the porn stars from when I was a kid seem to be making comebacks too man nostalgia is a powerful thing it is it is like indie movies and all kinds of stuff yeah well Alex I really appreciate you taking the time uh tonight to come and be on the show again uh it's been an awesome conversation yeah we love having you all on, man. I'd love to have you back when, you know, when you have some more work coming out, some more articles, some more aerospace news to report. I'd love to have you back on the show. Yeah, by all means, I'm happy to be here. I love talking to you guys. This is a blast.

And I mean, Davis is fairly new for you, but Jack knows, well, that it's easy to get me talking. It is a lot harder to get me to shut up. So anytime, do you guys want me? I'm the same way. So you don't have to worry about that. We'll have a five-hour show some night. I guarantee you. So this Friday, we're going to have Mark Denbo on the show. He is a attorney who has been representing one of the Guantanamo inmates for, like, I don't know how many decades at this point. So we're going to have him on the show Friday, and it would be an interesting show, interesting perspective. And Alex, again, thank you.

And we'll see everybody on Friday. So take care out there.