Not so critical
Back in 2021, the Navy said that adding hypersonic missiles to its weapons mix was urgent at critical:
The service previously described it as a critical capability that needed to be fielded before 2030.
Four years later….apparently it isn’t really.
The U.S. Navy has halted plans to acquire an air-launched, air-breathing hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile, citing cost and industrial base factors. The service says it is now taking a second look at its requirements with a new focus on affordability.
Kind of an ultra-fast turnaround given that less than three months ago the Navy announced plans to test hypersonic missiles on the USS Zumwalt amd USS Lyndon B. Johnson and has already made modifications for them. Interesting Engineering
Or is it that hypersonic missiles aren’t feasible? Kind of hard to believe that, given that the list of countries who have announced either having them or being close to installing them include China, Russia, India, and Japan.
Speaking of whom, another initiative the Navy deep-sixed (how appropriately phrased!) the railgun, is alive and well elsewhere, like in Japan.
Under the name “Research on Electromagnetic Acceleration Systems,” the research was conducted from FY 2016 through FY 2022. The target in this research was a muzzle velocity of 2000 meters per second and a barrel life of 120 rounds.
Having transitioned into the development of a full-fledged “gun system,” railguns are now poised for broader operational studies and steady technological maturation as a future defense asset Naval News
120 rounds? Man, those are hard on barrels. Even ultra-high speed varmint rounds (usually small caliber boolits pushed by lots and lots of powder for laser-like trajectories) typically take a coupla thousand rounds to wear out a barrel*. But the main fact: we’re dropping it, they re testing it.
Not just that, I see where even the President is taking note:
President Donald Trump on April 9 signed an executive order aimed at revitalizing an American shipbuilding industry that has fallen well behind production levels of its rivals from the People’s Republic of China.
The Navy wants a 381 ship fleet. We are currently completing about one – 1! – ship a year. We currently have less than 300 mission capable ships. I figure we should be about right in somewhere near the year 2100…unless a few ships age out between now and then. They do do that. (And in contrast China is building 50% of the world’s ships, about 700 annually.)
“Simply put, we need more ships delivered on time and on budget, and we are challenged in both of these arenas,” Dr. Brett Seidle, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. Fox News
Think Trump is doing well acknowledging the problem. Now we need facilities, skilled labor, and raw materials.
*My favorite was an extreme 4600 fps gem from P.O. Ackley, a .22 based on a .375 Weatherby Magnum called the .22 Eargesplitten Loudenboomer.
Category: Navy, None, Science and Technology
The Ukraine War is showing hypersonics are not all they were claimed to be and that masses of drones now rule the skies. I think the US military aviation community shouldn’t have resisted the drone tech so hard because now we are a bit behind. Forward thinking we could have been way ahead.
Hypersonics sound good until you actually want to hit something. The US has had hypersonic capabilities for decades, but we do favor actually hitting things. You have real limits to driving around hypersonic missiles around in the atmosphere. The Russians just shoot hypersonics at fixed targets.
Ponder that Ukraine spanked the Moskva with what amounted to a Harpoon knockoff. For anti-ship duty our present missiles are pretty lethal.
Rail guns, meh. I know a few things about the railgun at NSWC Dahlgren. We can make railguns, but they just aren’t practical yet. Barrel life is a real problem. The hope is that we can suspend the round within an electro-magnetic field so there is no physical contact with the barrel. That work continues. It isn’t easy. Maxwells equations sometimes are tough to translate to reality. You have to somehow manipulate the EM field as the round goes down barrel and there are some immutable physical limits there. A breakthrough is needed.
The reasons for rail guns are very sound (no more magazines that go boom) but its method of effect is purely 1/2*M*V^2, aka Kinetic Energy. Sometimes explosives are handy. Future Naval weaponry will likely be (in some cases is) a mixed bag…lasers, missiles, guns, rail guns, drones, etc.
Cheap throw away drones is certainly something the US knows about, but we historically (mostly) went for things that have long range and are useable. Our Switchblade drones have been around for quite some time, but we are just now buying them at scale.
I argue we are forward thinking…however, there is nothing like a war to focus your efforts. War is Darwin’s playground, and we need to learn from other people’s fights.
Honestly, buying throw away drones, at scale, should bring the Military-Industrial corporation lobbyists out in droves. Unleash the Deep State! Think of drones as $5,000 bullets, you would think the weapons sales folks would be hard at work. I can only imagine the entertainment budget…
Last thing I had read about the rail guns was that the “barrels” only lasted for 5 rounds. The video’s of the gun shooting showed stuff breaking off inside the rail area during firing. The next issue was the tremendous power needed to fire the “gun” and that was a major issue for the boat to handle.
The Rail gun as a concept has been around for more than a hundred years but no one has really been successful with it. Every once in a while they peer down the rabbit hole and try to make it work. “The forces in play are simply to great with currently available materials” is the normal result.
“Now we need facilities, skilled labor, and raw materials.” Rosie The Riveter…weeps.
You can’t wait until you “need it” to “have it”. For some reason(s) we are only building high priced, sub standard stuff that doesn’t work as advertised for our troops to take into harm’s way with them. But, hey…the MIC has gotten real good at providing Boards of Directors with a goodly amount of retired Flag Ossifers and their stocks are doing quite well so there is that.
Prepare
I have to wonder: is there something about those newfangled weapons systems that we don’t know (other than how many bazillions of dollars they’ll cost)?
For instance, hypersonic missiles sound interesting…unless we’ve already determined that they’re no harder to defeat than standard missiles…in which case all that expense is wasted.
Or railguns…sound awesome, but the question is, what kind of power requirements will they have to be effective and what kind of tradeoffs need to be made to accommodate those power requirements?
Having a ship that’s basically a couple of railguns and a massive power plant doesn’t seem very cost effective to me, versatility-wise.
Perhaps they’ve determined that although these science fiction weapons sound interesting, they’re just not enough more effective to justify the expense?
Personally, I’d rather have a bunch more ships with proven and tested weapons systems than a couple of ships with pie in the sky, “maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t” technology.
I think the issue with hypersonics is in terms of doctrine. The Russians and Chinese need super-missiles for killing our carriers. We don’t have the same level of targets.
Lasers are where the action is, since they can kill drones and missiles rapidly – including hypersonics. You can’t outrun light.
I agree but they have issues too.
Just a few, when missile ordinance is in phase VI and V a laser doesn’t do much and probably won’t save you. Then there is the problem of what happens to all that energy should it miss? You can’t exactly have it self destruct and useful energy travels quite far, probably a lot farther than most people think. Coatings can be applied to various attack options that make lasers much less effective, although this likely removes the advantage of cost with a cheap drone.
Lots of other issues; but lasers can be the solution to a lot of problems.
Lasers are line-of-sight, which is very limited at sea. Railguns fire ballistic projectiles far over the horizon. In theory, a railgun might put something in orbit.
We couldn’t fly sustained at very high supersonic until we worked out titanium for aircraft.
I think petawatt lasers in space or mounted on high altitude planes, and ground based or at sea is going to be the new cutting edge weapon. Also drone mounted lasers running around battle fields burning holes in everything. Also more sophisticated mines that can ground track targets, mobile mines that can go to the target. Also development of camouflage from thermal sights.
Habitual Linecrosser over on YouTube did a whole thing on why hypersonics aren’t that nig of a deal. He’s a now-former ADA guy, did a lot of work with Patriot, including the test shots that established the PAC-3 MSE as capable of intercepting ballistic missiles. Dude knows what he’s on about.
Using just public range info, he pointed out Patriot had over a minute from detection of an incoming hypersonic to impact. He further pointed out Patriot needs nowhere near that time to engage and kill the threat.
The point is, raw speed isn’t as useful, since SAM/AAM ranges have dramatically increased. In the late 70s, the F-14 Tomcat being able to launch an AIM-54 Phoenix ~100nm was a huge deal, much less guide six of them at once. Today, the AIM-120D AAMRAMs hold the new long-range kill record, an unknown range simply listed as longer than the ~125nm for Pheonix, the prior record holder. All current launch platforms for AAMRAM are capable of simultaneous engagements of multiple targets, a feature unique to the Tomcat in the 70s and 80s.
Kinda makes the hypersonic pointless when we can see them farther away than ever before, engage them sooner than ever before, and their lack of maneuverability means they aren’t dodging the interceptors.