What we support and defend

[carl]

Nice idea, provided you could get all the 787 sub-assemblies that are made all around the world--France, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, and Sweden to Washington state to build more once the initial fleet was shot up by opponents with longer range systems than the 100 miles or so that a Slammer has. BTW, the AIM-120D costs about $700K/missile. Pretty hefty price tag. An opponent could surely spend a lot less money to equip some patrol boats (or even old freighters) with SAMs and send them out under the expected orbits that your protection force would need to fly to cover the tankers etc. That 787 would be unable to do much to counter that threat other than to use LAIRCM (another price item to add to the cost of your quick fix) and other devices to try to protect itself from the SAM threat.

So I take that an off the wall idea I considered for about 10 seconds to illustrate the kind of thinking that might have to be done in an emergency should become an immediate national defense priority then do you. And here I thought I'd get a six figure consultants job out of it. Darn.

You got any ideas?