Warthog: The fastest plane we will ADMIT to having in development, subby.

Exactly.  Who knows what's going on in the black world.  Mach 10 isn't out of the question for scramjets.

akallen404: To be fair, it's the same movie that implies that Iran has access to Su-57s but the US Navy also doesn't have enough enough 5th Gen fighters to pull off a deep penetration strike on short notice and ALSO isn't on good enough terms with NATO to ask France to do it (the Rafale being literally built for the kind of mission they were trying to pull off in the movie).

So it's more of a "Not too distant future" alternate history scenario. Which, to be fair, the first one ALSO kind of was...

They got so much wrong with that mission.  Why weren't those SAM batteries hiat by Tomahawks or Mavericks a few seconds after things went loud?  Sneak in through the canyon, yes, but the defenses should have been down before they were over the target.  And you can't drop from as low as they did--your bomb isn't going to arm (and that's a good thing, if it did go off it would blow you out of the sky.)  And why wasn't the rest of the carrier's air wing out there just below the horizon?

I won't fault them for not asking France, though--Europe has shown considerable reluctance to do anything about radical Islam.  They would prefer to keep their heads down to keep the terrorists from hitting them.  And I think the problem was they needed to operate from a carrier due to a lack of air bases in the area.  I also think the Tomahawk could do the mission even without GPS--it's got optical image matching also.  Stunts like flying through the pedestrian door of your target can't be done by GPS.

DoBeDoBeDo: Maverick makes way more sense in a world where drones and cruise missiles don't exist.

I think the idea was that the unmanned stuff couldn't be used because GPS was jammed.  Just because it's the primary guidance doesn't mean it's the only option!

dionysusaur: Is the Mach number a sea-level speed, or is it altitude/density dependent?

Depends on the air.

snowjack: With enough altitude, high speeds become much easier to achieve, since the skin of the plane become less likely to melt off in the thin air. The unmanned X-43 reached mach 9.64 (about 6400 mph) after a 10-second scramjet boost, at an altitude of 100,000 feet. It still got really hot, even with its special insulating exterior surfaces and water-cooled leading edges. And scramjets only work above about mach 4.5, so they needed a Boeing Stratofortress to get it up to altitude, and a rocket booster to get it moving fast enough for its engine to start working.

Yeah--I don't consider a mach 10 plane out of the question--but it's going to be very, very high up to do that kind of speed.