New Warship’s Big Guns Have No Bullets
defensenews.com
defensenews.com
The program has been cut down because of problems, though not with the guns. Except that now there are much fewer ships and the rounds will be so expensive the navy won't buy them. They can use old rounds but they won't work better then the cheaper old rounds on the cheaper old ships using cheaper guns.
And the point of the ship is .. what?
If you are a US taxpayer you should weep.
And note, that they do plan to fit rail guns to the Zumwalt class later on, which is possible thanks to their increased electrical capacity. They're not useless.
People like you thought that nukes made conventional militaries obsolete in the 50's. That was wrong then and it's wrong now. In order to maintain control of the seas and skies, we need to maintain our edge in aviation and in naval technology.
I don't think nukes end conventional militaries, but I think they end conventional conflicts between nuclear armed nations. That's why we're fighting Russia in a proxy war in Syria, and not with tanks in the Ukraine. As for China, how many times could our navy and air force obliterate them as it stands? Besides, they're just taking a page from our book, letting us front the R&D, then... stealing the designs.
Much cheaper, much smarter.
That said, diesel-electric subs are definitely a weak spot for a carrier group.
And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored.
Like battleships, they are a big dumb target. The same way carriers and their aircraft made battleships obsolete modern anti-ship missiles have made carriers obsolete in a theoretical war between superpowers. Countries still covet them as a status symbol (or a way to spend taxpayer money), but I think that is about it.
> And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored.
That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
Yeah, except that's not actually true unless the war goes nuclear. Carriers are very well defended from air attack. The entire battle group is there to defend the carrier, which means aircraft-launched AA missiles, hundreds of SM-2s, plus point defense. Plus ECM and EM-type weapons.
And that's assuming US forces aren't able to destroy any launch platforms, which is probably not a good assumption at this point. It's much harder to pull of a surprise attack than it used to be.
>That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
Yeah, that's pretty much the strategy everyone's been using since they switched from boarding actions to guns in the 1500s.
The Russians can't actually mount that kind of attack any more without telegraphing it in a big way, since it would take nearly every remaining conventional bomber and naval asset in the Russian military to ensure success. Nobody else is capable at all unless the scenario posits a US carrier in shallow water off the coast of Shanghai.
I'm not saying carriers are invulnerable. They're not. People make mistakes, and sometimes they're fatal. There are always variables that are impossible to evaluate without knowing the absolute latest top secret stuff. But a carrier group in the open ocean is a tough nut to crack, especially from the air, and attackers make mistakes too. It's far from obsolete.
Well, that hints at the point, doesn't it? No, Russia or China, or whoever the US Navy Brass dreams about re-fighting the battle of Leyte gulf with again, isn't going to try to hit a US carrier group in the middle of the South Pacific. They are probably perfectly happy with preventing said carrier group from parking outside Archangelsk, the Baltic Sea, the South China sea or wherever it is that they want to flex their military muscle..
So in the end I guess the question is whether a carrier group is a cost-effective power projection tool in the age of supersonic (or even ballistic, if we choose to believe those Chinese things are real) anti-ship missiles, submarines and whatnot. Or are they just like battleships in WWII?
A CBG can hit hardened targets from a thousand miles away.
carr[ies] a warhead big enough to inflict significant damage on a large vessel, providing the Chinese the capability of destroying a U.S. supercarrier in one strike.
Additionally, Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21
[2] http://www.usni.org/news-and-features/chinese-kill-weapon
Only the "D" version. It's a complex system that involves satellites, which can be shot down, and multiple communications links that can be attacked. And it's expensive, which is why they don't have many.
>Additionally, Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.
This is wrong. All US CBGs have ballistic missile defense.
. . . as if that has EVER worked. . .
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-s...
Not just Ukraine and Syria, where the influence is obvious, but I suspect we'll eventually find they have a hand in the collapse of democracy in Turkey. And there's the feeding of selective hacking attacks and pseudoscandals to the US press. They've even managed to get the director of the FBI to do their stirring for them.
(Also, the Russian Navy is terrible and barely afloat, so clearly the Russians are going to do as much fighting as possible inland.)
The ole "what good is an army with no orders"
The "pivot to Asia" is primarily economic, which is why President Obama has pushed the TPP so hard.
For the last 50 years (at least) the oil in the Middle East has been crucial to American economic security. That is rapidly becoming no longer true because of fracking, renewables, and improving efficiency. Oil is decoupling from U.S. economic growth, so the U.S. can (somewhat) decouple from the Middle East.
So if oil is not going to be the limiting factor on future U.S. economic growth, what will be? Technology and trade are good bets, and Asia is ripe for enormous growth in both.
Well... yeah. That's true of every new ship design. Well, not the useless part. This ship isn't useless either, though you can certainly make the case it's too expensive for what it does.
They're unproven because they're new. They apparently put a bunch of new tech on them, in order to prove them. Proven tech doesn't magically drop out of the sky, you've got to build and test it first. And as far as I understand it, that's what the Zumwalt class is for.
I'm not saying they're good or an efficient use of money, I'm just pointing out that the "unproven" argument is out of place here. You need to start somewhere to prove them, or you'll forever end up using yesterday's technology. (Though I admit yesterday's military technology is looking pretty good these days.)
it isn't explosives that costs money. A typical $3K "dumb" bomb is made "smart" by bolting-on $25K JDAM guidance kit. When Lockheed Martin is done with that "lump of feromagnetic material" you'll wish it was made of gold instead :)
But the projectile is not the most tricky part. The plan is to develop a single "hypervelocity projectile" which can be fired by both chemical and rail guns, so it seems likely that that part will work out.
The rail gun itself needs a lot more research and development to get to a usable form. See e.g. this rather pessimistic article[0]. Meanwhile, the Navy doesn't care enough about the Zuwalt guns to even buy ammunition for them. How much will they spend on building a better gun?
[0] http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/06/can-navys-elect...
It seems fairly feasible to fix the energy usage by just throwing more energy at it (and the Zumwalt demonstrates that capacity is relatively portable), but the wear on these things is going to be a massive cost even if they reduce the problem 10x from where it is now.
[1]: http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21174/navy...
But since the entire advantage of artillery is having the ability to put rounds on targets more cheaply than other methods, once you're paying $800k for a round you may as well use aircraft or missiles.
The railgun will probably get deployed just because it gives them capabilities far beyond AGS. It will have almost double the range and, in theory anyway, could be used against land, surface, and air targets (including ballistic missiles).
So a rail gun on the Zumwalt would basically do the same thing as the AGS. It would maybe have longer range, depending on how many megajoules they can make the gun output, this is still an open problem. And the magazine would have space for twice as many rounds, since they don't need to store the propellant. Given that the Navy apparently just decided that they don't even want the AGS, I don't think they care at all about the capabilities they'd get by installing railguns on the Zumwalts.
They may still install it as basically a pure research project, but if money is tight...
OTOH, only the third one is getting the railgun if it happens at all.
The navy originally planed 32 ships, so it was definitely not intended to be a demonstrator.
To funnel money into select pockets, in the name of "national security", to make politicians and some of their constituents happy, and to maintain the fiction that we require this ever-evolving arsenal in the face of threats which are decades behind us.
All while ignoring that China, Russia, and whoever else we fantasize about large-scale conflict with, have nuclear weapons just like us. It's nonsense, but there is so much money to be made from nonsense... just ask any successful religion.
Furthmore, can't the same be said about the ad industry that effectively bankrolls the internet because everyone wants to get rich building something that people won't actually buy directly but whose money they can get at through a back door into their pocket (because all ad money is baked into something else the consumer buys)?
Of course, it can be said that there is value created by having a strong military in that it protects our nations ability to innovate and create value.
like when that guy simultaneously attacked the world power of Britain despite being under sanctions
they left our men to perish without fire
support because of your rules of engagement
I don’t retreat one iota from what I said there.
McChrystal, with his ROE, is a murderer
http://www.captainsjournal.com/category/general-mcchrystal/
http://www.captainsjournal.com/2011/02/17/reprimands-in-mari...
"Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.”
As Kipling put it the last time we were in that part of the world. The Western militarys spend the $80,000 because whilst the soldier firing it may not make $80,000 in a year the cost to recruit and train, as well as the future economic worth of the citizen, is far greater.
and this is why US lose so few servicemen lives while killing tens of thousands of those "kids". Sending in troops with M-16, Vietnam style, without support of those $100M aircraft launched from those $10B carriers would result in comparable, on the scale of thousands, losses of those troops. Speaking pure economically, morals/politics aside, a cost of 1 life used for various calculations in US by government, insurance, etc. is about $7M, thus 1 thousand lives comes to $7B - very well comparable with the cost of campaign where $100K/100M/10B military tech is used instead of wasting servicemen lives. Wasting money instead of human lives - not a bad choice. For example, in Russia (where i'm originally from) they usually do it the other way and it isn't a good thing.
Same as any prototype or sufficiently advanced aircraft like the F-117, pave the way for future generations like the Beast of Kandahar, demonstrate or invalidate a series of bold ideas.
In particular, the number of innovations crammed in the Zumwalt makes it relatively cost-effective from a "things we had to try" point of view: new low RCS hull, new composite bridge, new launch system (VLS), new centralised control systems (TSCE). All of this stuff can now be iterated upon and integrated in newer ships. That the new gun system has "failed" in practice is itself a lesson probably worth the dollars spent on it.
Not to mention: look up the name of its first captain [1].
There's few institutions that can do R&D with a multi-decade horizon and the armed forces are one of them. Is there waste in the process, sure, the ghost of Admiral Rickover must be turning in his grave, but it is not totally wasted, unlike a certain aircraft that is somehow manufactured in a full 45 states (have the remaining ones managed to get a piece yet, I haven't followed).
[1] http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/ddg1000/Pages/bio1.aspx - shame the USS Enterprise was inactivated in 2012.
The F-117 had an incredibly useful operational life, though. I can't imagine these three destroyers having anywhere near the relative effectiveness that the F-117 program brought to the table for its time.
That being said I'm not sure the F-117 was that useful in actual combat, certainly it was used because it was there but did it change anything? It flew a large number of sorties in the first Gulf War but some say these could have been flown cheaper and just as well with conventional aircraft [1], and bombed a few targets in Yugoslavia (so far away from the kind of conflict it was designed for that TV crews were filming it taking off, live) until Zoltan Dani worked out how to shoot one down using equipment worth a fraction as much thus pointing out its edge was gone in less than two decades after launch.
As far as I understand it, Have Blue's main value was to pave the way for stealth research, its operational value being what happened to it in combat rather than the targets it took out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Opera... "On the first night they failed to hit 40% of the air-defense targets they were assigned, including the Air Defense Operations Center in Baghdad, and 8 such targets remained functional out of 10 that could be assessed. [...] many other aircraft hit targets in the downtown area, with minimal casualties when they attacked at night like the F-117"
Tax payers are forced.
I deliberately and provocatively overly simplify the issue here, but I claim that every problem we face can be solved by better education that simply requires people to ask "Is that really the way you say it is?" in every single step of every single fact they ever face.
You can't. People that are receptive to the politics of fear are that way because of brain structure; they simply are unable to respond to reasoned arguments.
To make the point: Would you rather suffer from pest or cholera for the next 4 years?
Following your argument you cannot complain because you chose it.
It sounds like we both agree on the problem and disagree on the solution.
If I understand correctly, you want to fix the people by educating them / making them think more!?
I think the problem is also solvable by fixing the system via direct feedback. This could be implemented via continuous elections (instead of once every 4ys) , directed tax payments (dedicated to specific areas/projects/representatives), direct elections (no intermediary), ...
Of course, today's politicians would never allow any of this to happen, so the problem is still somehow the politician.
How about not pissing around where we are clearly not wanted?
Spreading democracy is great and all, but it's pretty clear that the various places we've been trying to spread it aren't interested in the least. How about we let them stew in their own mess for a while and put our efforts into fixing issues at home for a while?
Maybe stop trying to be the world's policeman for a while. Let the UN sort it out and when they inevitably fail, then we can think about it. And if the UN doesn't, well, at least we haven't wasted the money in the meantime.
People talk endlessly about their values. They talk about self-reliance, decency, honor. But we betray our values if we don't know what really is true. We work against our best interest and our dearest of things when we are mislead the moment we stop asking what really is. No matter what the values.
How about some self-reliance of thought for a change.
Make no mistake, it is a 30-year project to fix peoples. You need to educate a single generation before things start to get better. But then they will. Happens every time and in every country and in every culture. Skip that and no matter what you try, everything falls apart eventually if the people don't want to ask what really is true. Everything else is built on top of that. Nothing else is sufficient anymore, not in this age we now find ourselves in.
PS. I agree - I am greatly in favor of shortening any feedback loops in any system, societal, political, business, software development - it is what makes systems robust against changing environments.
If the point of these expensive weapons systems is to inefficiently defeat imaginary enemies, then clearly they are a waste of money and the real motive is corporate welfare.
But if the point is 'we don't know what the world will be like in 2050, and the only way to find out and start preparing for it is to build a lot of hardware that doesn't end up getting directly used' then that could be a valid justification. I'm not making any claims about whether that actually is the justification. I'm just saying that if it is, it's the one that would work.
That is one of the ironic features that sounds great but is totally impractical. The moment this thing starts launching shells all that stealth doesn't matter anymore. Be as radar stealthy as you want, the giant balls of fire and shockwaves will give you away in seconds ... less than seconds if the enemy radar tracks the shells. Counter-fire from land units could be inbound before your first shells land. So I doubt the ship will every fire whilst relying upon stealth. That confluence of conflicting features (stealth+artillery barrage) makes it difficult to wrap my head around exactly what this ship is meant to do.
These guns would have always needed cheap non-guided shells. Artillery isn't always about hitting targets or even destroying much of anything. Sometimes it is about area denial. A ship may shell the area behind a beach during landing to ensure the enemy cannot mobilize a defense. That's not killing the enemy but denying him the ability to move. In such cases volume and rate of fire matters far more than accuracy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Land_Attack_Project...
It's a paradox.
I worked in space systems as an intern. We built the latches - plates that go onto satellites so the robot arm can hold them. It's just a simple piece of metal but they cost $200 000 each. Because they buy so few and a lot of R&D goes into them.
That's partly why the F35's cost so much.
You want 50 jets of one type, instead of 400 of varying types? Well, all those workers still have to get paid ... so, it ends up costing 'the same'.
happened to the stealth fighter too, but this one is absurd because of the ammunition cost and ship costs combined. maybe that new fancy rail gun of theirs will save the Navy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze#Production is interesting because it shows how clearly mass production can save money on truly expensive items.
The US Navy is so out of control is costs its frightening and the truly sad part is no past President or predicted one will fix it
* CGX: ASW/ASuW/AD workhorse * DDGX: land attack platform * LCS: cheap platform for everything else
CGX got canned for being near $10B estimated. DDGX got canned according to CNO Roughhead because it's inadequate for the future and too expensive.
Only LCS survived. It has two different classes (Independence from Austal USA and Freedom from Lockheed Martin) with very similar problems, mostly with engines. Their whole operating concept was just retconned. Now they have very lightly armed ships that cost almost as much as Arleigh Burke class destroyers.
Combined with 10 B/each Gerald R. Ford class carrier program it looks like USN is having massive problems with all of its surface vessel programs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LessCredibleDefence/comments/52a095...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/440kj1/dis...
This is misleading.
The design of the Zumwalt class is multi-role, oriented around a few core missions: battle against surface ships, air defense, and naval gunfire support (e.g. "shelling land targets from sea"). Air defense capabilities aren't as prevalent in the Navy's vision for the Zumwalts today as they were when the class was first coming off the drawing board -- there was a time when the Navy would cheerfully say that Zumwalt-class ships would be able to shoot down ballistic missiles, a claim they don't make today. But anti-air is still part of the overall bag of roles the class is (theoretically) supposed to fulfill.
On the question of naval gunfire support, it's true that the Zumwalts are supposed to do that too. But that's complicated by the fact that the Navy, institutionally speaking, doesn't think of naval gunfire support as a mission that exists in the real world anymore. They believe that ground attack missiles have put an end to the days of ships firing guns at shore targets forever. So they have been noticeably unenthusiastic about including any gun capabilities on new ships, including the Zumwalts.
Congress and the Marine Corps disagree with this assessment, however, and Congress found a way to make the Navy pay attention to the subject by legally mandating the Navy to provide certain levels of gunfire support capability over time. The Zumwalts got guns as part of a deal that would allow the Navy to retire the previous ships they'd used to meet those requirements, the World War 2-era Iowa-class battleships.
The Navy had wanted to retire the Iowas pretty much from the moment they came out of mothballs in the 1980s, so they were willing to live with guns on the Zumwalts if that was the price of being able to do so. But the Zumwalts only ever had 6-inch (155mm) guns, as compared to the Iowas' 16-inch guns, so it's difficult to see them as a direct replacement in the gunfire support role. (The Navy argues that the increased accuracy of the Zumwalts' Advanced Gun System makes up for the decrease in weight of iron they can throw, but that's arguable.)
There's a decent discussion of the various issues in play in the naval gunfire debate on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_gunfire_su...
Not to mention that there are future artillery technologies, rail guns etc, that the Navy is planning to install on these ships.
The gun that is supposed to be on the Zumwalt class cruisers is a railgun (http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21174/navy...) which we last heard about in June of this year. Since that time there hasn't been a whole lot of news, except we did get the Zumwalt commissioned. We also saw some discussion about the Navy's 150kilowatt laser (http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post...) which would also be an excellent fit for the electrical capacity of the Zumwalt class.
So what is the chance that LRPS was there to throw others off the scent of what the real ordinance load of the Zumwalt might be? I agree its pretty low but the Zumwalt is one heck of a power plant to be driving around with guns powered by explosives.
The F-35 can't fight. No matter what the Pentagon says, it simply is not combat operational today. It can't fire its gun. It can't track objects. And it's a dog in the air. Good thing that we put all our eggs in that basket, and the convinced all our allies to join us in this hand basket.
The USS Ford is $13 billion dollars, and has problems with it's electromagnetic catapults, it's dual-band radar (so bad, that the radar has been dropped on follow-on ships), and is way over budget, and full of preventable errors.
The Littoral Combat Ships are jokes. Made of aluminum with a modular bay that the Navy has recently dropped after deciding that this flagship feature was in the end impractical. The ships are underarmed, and in the official description of the Navy, "not survivable." Oh did I forget to mention that the LCS came out of a competition where the Navy decided to buy both competing designs, and both designs suck?
Then there's the Osprey that has notorious accident record, and then in deployment in actual combat it was discovered that it actually can't defend itself. (Shoot it from the front or the sides, because the only gun it might be carrying is in the back.)
Finally, the weirdest of all is the announced conversion of the UCLASS unmanned combat vehicle into a tanker.[1] Yes tankers, are important, but its at the expense of a next genertion combat platform in order support legacy Super Hornets, and the craptastic F-35. Maybe, just maybe, this is a ruse. But who knows?
[1] https://news.usni.org/2016/02/01/pentagon-to-navy-convert-uc...
I wish people would stop going on about the gun. The gun doesn't matter. It shouldn't be there at all. Eventually they'll fix the software, and the gun will work, and it still won't matter.
The gun on the A version has three seconds worth of ammo, and that's only true because it takes a second to spin up. It's an anachronism.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_and_incidents_involv... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harrier_Jump_Jet_famil...
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
-- President Eisenhower, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech
(Adjust for inflation; insert your own cost substitute for the $800,000 artillery shells. Eight Teslas? Solar panels for 160 homes?)
One of the paradoxes of the Cold War was that it led to talk of disarmament, multilateral or otherwise. It seems that will to talk has been lost.
One of the paradoxes of the Iraq War was not only the spending of multi-million-dollar munitions to destroy civilian buildings occupied by enemy infantry, but the need to spend the same money again to rebuild the buildings in an attempt to rebuild the peace.
(I don't know whether there's any building which was rebuilt by the coalition only to be blown up by the coalition again, but perhaps there's such an example in Mosul.)
That makes it seem like less money than it is. Try:
- 4 Modern Homes in the USA
- 50 Ford Fiestas.
- 333 new 15" Macbook Pros
- 16,000 Kindle Fire Tablets (!)
- 80,000 Acres of Rainforest (or, y'know, a days worth - https://www.rainforesttrust.org/10-for-1/)
- 800,000 lbs of potatoes
- Bread to feed one person for 1,900 years (or I guess, 1,900 people for 1 year each)
Though I have no idea how expensive it is to fire a massive laser compared to older weapons.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5343/the-navys-new-stea...
It was designed to operate close to hostile shores, yet its stealth features were compromised, and it has no long-range air defense or CIWS.
"hit targets 80 miles away at $800,000 / round."
second:
"The official added that there was no sense the contractor was overcharging or anything.”
Think about it... what was the last war we actually needed to be involved in?
but overall warfare isn't really about the price of the tools used, especially when the US spends more than the next 5 countries combined. Our strategy is and has been to outspend our enemies and maintain military advantage through sheer economic attrition.
As for outspending, we're doing that, and as a result we're basically killing our economy. How many trillions can we flush down the desert before we start to look like Russia after economic collapse?
Iraq was considered a top-tier military force at the time and we went through them like a knife through butter. This is especially important because just 2 years earlier the soviets had finished their withdrawal from afghanistan after suffering a humiliating and demoralizing defeat.
The R&D costs are fixed, and now those have to be amortized over fewer ships with fewer rounds.
I admit, I am assuming you don't know much, if anything, about building modern high-precision ammunition for guns meant to mount on warships.
A lot of the same differences show up here too: safer for the ships involved, vastly faster reaction time, precision.
I remember when i first learned about these guns it looked to me like somebody decided to go for a money saving trade-off - land attack with weaker round at shorted distance at supposedly cheaper price per round than a cruise missile. Looking at that one, i can't help to remember another trade-off - to save money F-35 engines aren't made stealth ...
I mean, it's still crazy to be spending so much per round, but it's believable.
The new gun can't shoot at other ships....
If the ships and weapons are performing as specified and there were no significant delays, that's a successful program.
Lockheed Martin, no surprise there.
I wonder what it would cost China or Russia to produce something similar.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-army-...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1101874/U-S-gives-Vi...