Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) and the Dubai Air Show are starting to go together like Thanksgiving and turkey (as in, the bird that goes, "gobbledy-gobbledy"; not the country that goes, "What Armenian genocide?").
It was conveniently during the last Dubai Air Show in 2005 that THAAD finally started to atone for 13 years of failure to score a highly-publicized flight test intercept. I happened to be in a Lockheed press conference at the show when news of the intercept was announced. The sigh of relief from Lockheed's executives was palpably thunderous.
With the mid-east defense chiefs turning their spending priorities from massive fighter acquisitions to missile defense (paging Mr. Ahmadinejad!), it's no surprise that Lockheed's latest flight test was staged early this morning within a couple weeks of the big show.
It's your tax money, so you might as well enjoy the pretty picture:
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