DARPA’S FLYING AIRCRAFT CARRIER PROJECT

As you might have noticed, I've been largely focused on the apparently emerging geopolitical and financial memes for 2018. This story fits right in, though it may not be immediately apparent how it does so. Our friends at the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, a busy not only planning super-soldiers,warp drives, and subterranean operational capabilities, but now, according to this article shared by Mr. H.B., they're also planning flying aircraft carriers:

DARPA Is Building A Flying Aircraft Carrier

Needless to say, the "flying aircraft carrier" is a bit different from those super-hero movies Hollyweird has been pumping out lately, for rather than actual aircraft carrier flying around implausibly, these will be aircraft equipped to launch several drones:

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – more commonly known as DARPA – is moving ahead with a project to create a flying aircraft carrier. According to the Navy Times, the so-called “Gremlins” program involves building a transport and bomber-style aircraft capable of launching swarms of fighter drones mid-flight.

Here’s the Navy Times:

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency plans to demonstrate the ability to launch and recover swarms of drones from a C-130 sometime in 2019, according to statements by the agency and by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, one of two companies contracted to design prototype of the drones. The other is Dynetics.

The test would serve as a major leap into the next phase of testing for DARPA’s Gremlins program.

The new platform is designed to carry drones equipped for a variety of operational missions:

Once dispatched, the drones would be outfitted with different payloads in order to accomplish an assortment of missions, to include ISR, electronic warfare, signals intelligence and even kinetic effects. (Emphasis added)

As one might conclude from my emphasis on the "kinetic effects" aspect of these platforms, this raised my suspicion meter into the red zone, for what is being suggested is a "small version" of the "rod of God" technologies I've blogged about before on this website, particularly a few years ago in conjunction with the mysterious explosions at Chinese chemical plants and the anomalously deep craters these left. At the time, many were speculating precisely on the use of some sort of massive space-based and launched "rod of God" kinetic weapon. More recently, readers here will recall that a hint of such weaponry was made by US authorities in conjunction with North Korea, when an American reporter asked general Mattis about the possible use of such weapons, to which the answer was a curt, but revealing, "yes." That response, I concluded, was an indication of the existence of such weapons at the strategic level.

Which puts a unique context to this "flying aircraft carrier" project. I've occasionally pointed out in previous blogs about the subject of China's silk road project that the building of rail and road infrastructure to connect Asia and Europe fulfilled the prophecy of British geopolitician, Halford Makinder, who prophesied at the turn of the last century that railroads and air transport would eventually tie the Eurasian land mass together, making it invulnerable to the conventional interdictions of (British) sea power. One hundred years later, and we're watching it come to fruition. So how would one interdict such communications infrastructure. One solution is obviously the space-based kinetic energy weapon, whose destructive power theoretically could be equivalent to very large nuclear weapons.

Another obvious platform would be something like... a flying aircraft carrier, capable of deploying a multitude of smaller drones with small "tactical" level kinetic weapons capable of punching craters in road and rail networks and taking out hardened facilities. Tie that concept to other platforms such as an orbital aircraft, and you get the idea: redundancy of interdictive capability is the name of the game.

In short, this is a response - ultimately -  to the growth of the Silk Road initiative in my opinion.

And that means the geopolitical-financial game most definitely is afoot.

See you on the flip side...