© REUTERS/Pascal RossignolAn Airbus A330neo flying past a Boeing sign at the 2019 International Paris Air Show.
The announced reason for canceling the Boeing contract, effective Thursday, was that the project's design problems were so significant as to be either insurmountable or too costly to correct.
Comment: And yet the Pentagon went through with Lockheed's F-35. This Boeing project must have been a monumental failure. Maybe it's fair to blame Russia in this instance: their hypersonic missiles make many American defense systems obsolete, so it's back to the drawing board for American weapons manufacturers attempting to establish full spectrum dominance. But we should thank the Russians. When American military leaders are convinced they have "first strike capability", they tend to lose their minds.
Beyond those immediate concerns, the Pentagon is considering whether it needs to start over with designing a defense against intercontinental-range ballistic missiles, such as those North Korea aspires to build, as well as newly emerging types of missiles.
One indication of that broader concern is the Pentagon's statement that it will now invite industry competition to develop a "new, next-generation interceptor" — potentially a weapon that could take on hypersonic missiles being developed by China and Russia.
The Pentagon currently has 44 missile interceptors based mostly in Alaska. Each is designed to be launched from an underground silo, soar beyond the Earth's atmosphere and release a "kill vehicle" — a device that steers into its target and destroys it by force of collision.
Comment: At least they decided to stop the project, instead of just pouring multiple more billions of dollars into it, like they routinely do with other bad military system contracts... That's progress!