That was a 9.1G recovery not 5G. The jet bottoms out at 3.3K AGL.

That’s kind of the point. Kelly Johnson builds the A-12 mostly out of titanium. He has to invent ways to fabricate titanium. He puts a shock cone in front of the turbojet to turn it into a turbo/ram jet. The Sovs on the other hand throw two huge turbojets together and build the airframe mostly out of steel.

The Soviets were never super interested in elegance from an engineering perspective but they still made a jet that could get to 80k feet and M3.0+ (if you didn’t mind melting the engines) in the mid 60s.

I saw them at Jones beach about five years ago. It was an incredible show and we had great “seats” almost dead show center.

It’s not as simple as ammo down range > bigger bullets or we’d be equipping aircraft with six .30 cal Brownings (ROF ~7000+) and calling it a day. The US were mostly engaging fighter targets or medium bombers. A high rate of fire increased the chances of a damaging hit against a target with high performance.