The original note, as written at the time
A fast giant defence fighter aircraft that is large enough to swallow enemy aircraft and fired missiles.
Ongoing development
A fast, giant defence fighter aircraft large enough to swallow enemy aircraft and fired missiles.
The image is compelling and the engineering is almost perfectly hostile to it, which is what makes it worth thinking about.
To swallow an aircraft you must match its speed, close on it, and contain it — and containment means an opening, which means the largest structural discontinuity on the airframe is facing forwards at supersonic speed. That opening is a drag source and a radar reflector, and it is on the one face you cannot afford either.
To swallow a missile is harder still. A missile arrives at closing speeds measured in kilometres per second, and it may detonate on contact, which means the aircraft’s defence against a warhead is to be hit by it in a controlled way. That is a shield problem disguised as a mouth problem.
What the concept is actually reaching for is a defence that does not depend on interceptors being cheaper than the thing they intercept. That is a real and unsolved strategic problem: we currently shoot down inexpensive drones with expensive missiles, and the exchange rate loses.
So the honest version of the idea is not a mouth. It is a large aircraft carrying a cheap, dense, close-in defence — a wall of something rather than a bite.
The swallow is the wrong mechanism for a right instinct.