NICE: F-35 Ready For Missile Defense By 2025.

So F-35 fans have been talking up the plane’s missile defense potential. Congressman Duncan Hunter boasted last year that the stealth fighter could not only track ICBMs — whose fiery launch is “like an Act of God,” hard to miss — but also shoot them down with its current air-to-air missile. “You can shoot down missiles coming out of North Korea in the boost phase with CAPS (Combat Air Patrols) of F-35s and AMRAAMs, and I’ve got a map to show it,” he declared.

Maybe. The AMRAAM missile isn’t designed to chase an ICBM into space, so it would have a narrow window to kill one before it escaped the atmosphere. Greaves’s wording suggests using the F-35 to shoot ICBMs might require developing “a new fast missile,” which would take years to develop.

Then let’s get on that, pronto.