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Comment by _audakel | Hacker News Reader

first thought:

  "hit targets 80 miles away at $800,000 / round."

$10k/mile.... move the ships closer and get less expensive ammo?

second:

  "The official added that there was no sense the contractor was overcharging or anything.”

Really?

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The whole point of the Zumwalt and her sister ships is that they are stealthy and can do pinpoint strikes, especially in support of special forces. They're suppose to operate alone. Getting them closer to shore makes it that much easier to detect and fire on. If the rounds are as precise as they claim, then $800,000 / round is a bargain. For reference, a Tomahawk costs $1.4 million and has a much slower reaction time.

I dunno if it's that much of a bargain. A Tomahawk carries a 1000 lbs. warhead. These shells weigh a total of like 225 lbs., of which 25 lbs. or so is explosives.

This is a precision weapon (take out a building or a bunker) so a massive warhead is not the point. Its for Marine support

You can take out a bunker or a building with precision, without naval assets, or a railgun.

Are there any alternatives with the same reaction time though?

It would be cheaper to just have drones or manned craft nearby, waiting to fire. It would be cheaper to just have a missile boat ready to fire a tomahawk. It's not as though we're short on options of ways to deliver ordinance on a target. What we're short of are good reasons to do so, that aren't concocted for the worst possible reasons.

Think about it... what was the last war we actually needed to be involved in?

world war 2, also korea. I guess you could count vietnam if you think of it as a proxy war between the US and russia (same with us supporting the afghans back in the 70s). Oh, also the iraq war in 1991. The second one not so much. Afghanistan post 9/11 was probably needed, although we messed it up.

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.

Korea, I'd say was the last, and frankly that was pretty murky. Iraq in '91 I disagree with, but I can see the argument for it. '91 Iraq though showed the kind of adversary we faced though... and that was no adversary at all. Afghanistan sure as hell didn't require our failed invasion, and hopefully has shown us that outspending people with surplus AK's, in caves, is a bad idea.

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?

there is a very strong argument to be made that the US's complete domination of the iraqi's in 1991 directly led to the fall of the soviet union because it showed how strong the US had become since the end of the vietnam war and made it very clear to the russian people that the US would win any non-nuclear confrontation with them.

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.

Well a Tomahawk is also a precision weapon, which can take out a single building.

What it all boils down to is the kind of war you expect to fight. Over a prolonged shore engagement the Zumwalt guns will be far cheaper than Tomahawks, for a lot of reasons. But they're a pretty specialized tool - at shorter ranges the old 5"/62s would have done the job, and missiles will still be required for longer ranges.

The costs have escalated because the number of ships that would carry these guns and need this ammo has been reduced.

The R&D costs are fixed, and now those have to be amortized over fewer ships with fewer rounds.

"Just move the X closer and get less expensive ammo" is on its own an almost bottomless argument. I'm going to presume you're reasonable and don't think we should replace bombers with hordes of people on motorcycles throwing grenades.

A lot of the same differences show up here too: safer for the ships involved, vastly faster reaction time, precision.

Hordes of low tech guys on bikes, on foot and in cars gave the US et al one hell of of a bloody nose in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assuming your enemy will fight like you do is a bad idea.

A ship can only be moved so close to inland targets.

It's easy to decide that things you don't understand enough to have reasonable opinions on are unreasonable, but it's not terribly useful to actually exploring the real-world problems.

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.

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