The Switchblade

I am an amateur pilot, and I love strange airplanes, and this one takes the cake. It is a proposed strategic bomber for the Air Force starting in 2020. Here's what it does and some back-of-the-napkin analysis:

Normally the airplane just tools along at subsonic speed. It can loiter up to 15 hours

When it comes time to attack, the wings flip around like a switchblade, and the plane accelerates to Mach 2, looking like it is flying sideways

While still supersonic, it drops its bombs and completes its mission

There are a couple of things to note here:

• There's no pilot - Looks like all of us stick jockeys are out of luck in the future. Robots will be flying the toys and pounding the bad guys. I just hope nobody names a new computer system Skynet!
• Populsion looks mostly the same - Still pumping large volumes of kerosene to make the getty-up go. Is suborbital ScramJet that pie-in-the-sky? I'd rather have bombs on target in an hour than a nifty plane that can open my beer and scale a fish
• Global War On Terror is a Sideshow - As much as the president and the politicians talk about how important Iraq and the WOT is, the money tells a different story. We're still building huge weapon systems for war with -- who? China? Somalia? The Burger King? Beats me, but it must be very important to have to spend all of that money. Yes -- if major war starts up there will be no time to build an infrastructre, but a simple question -- are we balanced? Is war about making the other guy want to stop fighting? Or is it about some kind of air supremacy doctrine? They don't necessarily mean the same thing.
• Bigger is Better - We're still building big honking weapon systems. Take one out, and we just wasted a lot of production capacity. If somebody cracks stealth, are we going to end up with a couple of hundred billion dollars worth of neat black airplanes? Sounds like a strategy put together by idiots with too much money in their pocket.
• Incremental Sells - Instead of 20 little programs that are massively experimental (perhaps using DARPA as an broker) contractors and consultants learned long ago that you sell little advances, not big ones. Nobody wants to be the guy who approved $20 Billion for the Giant-Attack-Frenchfy-Machine. It may sound super cool in the briefing room, but the DoD is about making it to retirement, not being risky.
• Weapons Still the Same - Yep, we got big old cans of kick-ass dropping from the plane. No lasers, no aera-denial weapons, no DEWs. You'd think with our frustration at having to watch a lot of civilians to find terrorists that maybe the Air Force would come up with some kind of massively deployed sensor arrray with redundent communications and autonomous ability. Or that maybe there could be some kind of psyops weapons that would need a platform. But nope. We're still hauling explosives around the world in the hopes that we can blow up enough stuff to make people stop fighting. Let's hope it works! It hasn't worked a lot in the past, but you never know.
• Same clunky speeds - Here we are forty years after the X-15 and we are still tooling around the block at Mach 2. Is nobody pushing the envelope any more? Looks to me like we are stagnating or heading backwards. Are the production fighters of 2050 going to be Sopwith Camels flown by robots?

Actually, considering what we are spending, that last idea might not be so far-fetched.