[wild_weasel]

I don't want to be doing Mach 3 and be close enough to terra firma to use TF.

My point was: you have to slow down to drop stuff, way down, and THAT'S where a big fat missile twice as fast as you has its shot. If your boiling air at Mach 3 (and it does BOIL the air as it comes out of the nozzle by the way)...SAMs are just big fireworks, especially with ECM and a little maneuvering.

I LOVE the SR-71 and I think it would easily survive today, they even had plans to put missiles and stuff on those things, but there's a reason why they didn't. Metallurgy, guidance, and aerodynamics are only so flexible at those speeds.

Point taken on the altitude issue. Going fast enough to make MANPADS useless and being low enough to make SAMs useless has its merits. The B-1 was really supposed to do that type mission. And F-16 guys practice something similar even though they won't actually do it in combat. F-15Es could, they are great at interdiction, but nowadays, why risk the lives of pilots and crew and a multi-million or billion dollar aircraft to do what a cruise missile already does and was, from inception, designed for?

I hate UAVs as much as the next guy, and i want to fly low and fast and blow stuff up like the next guy, but I'm also an engineer. Hence, I look at things from the perspective of form follows function. The XB-70 was kind of the next iteration of the idea of the B-58 Hustler (which had a fatal pitch mode by the way, killed several pilots. I think it was due to Mach tuck but I can't remember). Making FAST bombers is a really tough thing to design for. Fast bombers are getting left in the dust for stealth bombers, "who needs speed when you can't be seen?" sort of thinking. I think they still have a place, and I hope haul-ass bomb haulers stay, but its a tough spec to design to.