Footnote
HARDCORK? Did you lose focus in the middle of writing that tortured acronym?
DARPA*, the wacky Pentagon research bureau where it's always white-coat-and-propellor-hat Friday, has doled out $6m (as part of a $40m "increment" to an earlier "other transaction") to US aerospace colossus Lockheed. The payment is in support of the renewed US military hypersonic-plane programme, variously known as "Falcon" or " …
You need to have an enemy to justify all the money spent on the military toybox.
The cold war was neat: a sophiisticated enemy with nukes and supersonic aircraft etc. They'd launched Spuntik and were proven to be technologically advanced. Lots of opportunity for the lab-coaters to spend up to advance military technology.
The modern enemy is portrayed as an unsophisticated camel-fiddling ay-rab so it is very hard to justify development of hypersonic aircraft to combat that lot.
9/11 must have been very frustrating for the military. They had aircraft carriers etc that could destroy any military force, yet had nothing to stop a few punks with box-cutters.