You seem hard to convince that money could go elsewhere, but perfectly fine to let it go to these projects on no particular basis at all. That's not actually a

You seem hard to convince that money could go elsewhere, but perfectly fine to let it go to these projects on no particular basis at all. That's not actually a neutral stance, however much you avoid writing outright praise of hypersonic weapons. In in a small sense sense your last objection is of course almost trivially true for any weapon: each war uses them based on the experience of the last conflict, and armies are always finding novel ways to deploy them. However, if one takes a larger view it is demonstrably false: physics is not so unknown that these weapons could whatever they want, so to call the models used for the article so off the mark as to become straw men is simply wrong.