The U.S. Military is Developing a New Meteor Strike Weapon

The U.S. military is developing a new class of weapons which can deliver kinetic projectiles made of large rods of solid heavy metals. Even more worrisome: they’re testing how to deliver them from space - essentially making them man-made meteorites. According to a report published by military and veteran news site Task and Purpose, leading U.S. Army officers gave a presentation at a recent defense industry conference touting the destructive potential of these weapons, some of which are already being tested in battlefield conditions.

Major General William Hix, Director of Strategy, Plans & Policy for the U.S. Army, presented the status of the Army’s development of such weapons at the 2017 Booz Allen Hamilton Directed Energy Summit, a conference devoted to “developing and fielding new directed energy capabilities.” A prettier way of saying “blowing stuff the hell up.” Booz Allen Hamilton is an ambiguously-titled “management consulting firm” in Washington D.C. which has shadowy links to American defense and intelligence organizations. Anonymous accused Booz Allen Hamilton of manipulating public opinion through social media in 2011, and Edward Snowden was a Booz Allen Hamilton employee when he leaked the details of U.S. classified mass surveillance and data collection programs to The Guardian in 2013. If anyone is ever involved with secretive behind-the-scenes military industrial complex intrigue, it’s Booz Allen Hamilton.

At their conference, Major General Hix told attendees that already, the ship-mounted railgun versions of these new weapons are capable of a new level of battlefield violence:

Think of it as a big shotgun shell. Not much can survive it. If you’re in a main battle tank, if you’re a crew member, you might survive but the vehicle will be non-mission capable, and everything below that level of protection will be dead. That’s what I am talking about.

DARPA is already testing orbital weapons which can deliver kinetic payloads at hypersonic speeds - and so are China and Russia, of course. With all the strange satellite activity, secretive spacecraft testing, NASA playing asteroid strike war games, and even the White House paying public lip service to the threat of deadly near-Earth objects, it makes you wonder: could it be possible for a use of these weapons to be blamed on a meteorite strike? Conspiracy theories of a similar nature surrounded the apocalyptic 2015 explosions in Tianjin, China, as some rather imaginative sources accused the U.S. of testing kinetic space weapons on the Tianjin industrial site.

I suppose like most things, it is possible, but perhaps not probable. Very few members of the public have access to primary sources of data about asteroid and meteor orbits, though. Furthermore, unseen asteroids pass dangerously close to the Earth all the time, sometimes with just a few days’ warning. A random act of the universe would be the perfect alibi for dropping a continent-ruining mass of molten tungsten onto your enemies from space. But naaaah, that stuff doesn’t actually happen. There’s no way our overlords could be that malevolent. Right?

...right?