thermoregulation of the barrels is one of the largest issues, the second being the lack of ambient temperature superconductors for capacitors. You can only fire modern railgun barrels but a few times before you warp the barrels and/or coils. the Q from the air friction from the round propelled down the barrel does what propellant nominally does to conventional guns. Ambient temperature superconductors and a novel cryogenic cooling schema--for the superconductors as well as for the barrels--would greatly extend the service life of the barrels as well as decrease the recharge time between shots. Another idea is to change the CONOPS--instead of STRIKE, consider shooting small, frangible / flak rounds against incoming targets. As Sal stated, consider the fragility of missiles. Destroying and/or damaging flight surfaces using flak traveling at mach 7 could do the trick right nicely.
I was down in Florida earlier this year and met with one of the founders. Superconductor technology has been revolutionized over the past five years. The Navy threw in the towel too early. As our host says - lack of commitment.
and not enough creativity. This is what happens when we replace engineers with "Program Analysts." Sigh. I'd kill NAVSEA tomorrow and replace it with the legacy "Navy Materiel Command," and bilge 75% of the program analysts / acquisition professionals, hiring engineers in their stead. I can teach an engineer to acquisition; I can't teach an "Acquisition" to engineer.
Superconducting magnets are irrelevant for a railgun. A railgun does not use magnets. The magnetic field in a railgun comes directly from the current flowing through it, and even if you were to build the rails and the projectile both from superconducting materials, it is at the faying surface where the projectile makes contact with the rails where there will still be resistance, hence arcing, hence rail erosion, hence more arcing, hence more rail erosion, hence barrel life issues.
Nice description and generally correct with the exception of the use of the definitive adjective "irrelevant". Superconductivity offers improvement in both duty cycle and efficiency. In the case of duty cycle, superconductivity enables energy storage in the form of magnetic fields rather than electrostatics (capacitors or Caps). With zero resistance to current flow, "recharging" X joules of energy into a superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) system can occur more quickly than the same sized capacitor storage. It remains to be seen if SMES would have lower volume and/or less mass than a Cap bank of the same capacity. Weight and volume of systems being a consideration in ship construction.
Superconductivity increases energy delivery efficiency in two ways. First, upstream of the energy storage system (whatever type), the ships AC must be converted to DC for storage. Superconducting diode bridge rectifiers and associated DC connectors between the rectifier and storage reduces losses with the added bonus of a lighter load on the ship service chilled water system. Superconductor connectors between the energy storage system and rails have effectively zero resistive losses. Once the arc is created, it introduces a resistance into the system. In a non-superconductive system, the sum of the resistance in the circuit is the arc plus the two feeders supplying each rail.
Absolutely agree with the erosion issue. Back in 1995 when I attended a railgun symposium at the National High Magnetic Field Lab, there was general agreement across the lecturers and audience members that materials development in a high pressure, ionizing plasma environment was an area that was under-resourced at the time. Perhaps our Japanese friends have sown more seeds addressing that issue and now reap a fruitful harvest.
In summary, can there be railguns without superconductivity? Sure! High school students enter them into science fair projects. Is railgun weaponization possible without superconductivity? That remains to be seen.
Thank you to our host for promoting such intelligent, polite, and open discussion.
Railguns operate on entirely different principles. Current flows up one rail, through the projectile ('armature') and back down the other rail, force on the armature is a Lorenz force, F = iL x B where i is the current, L is the distance between the rails, and B is the magnetic flux density (x is cross product). If the armature doesn't touch the rails, there's no current flow and nothing happens.
Maglevs are essentially long synchronous linear motors: in addition the providing the centering and levitation forces, the "rails" also contain coils that are energized with AC, varying frequency with train speed, to move the train down the rails.
Now, another thing you can do with a railgun is have the projectile itself be non-conductive, but behind it there's a conductive "pusher" armature that you pass so much current through that it flashes to plasma, which is conductive, and as that heats up it expands explosively and pushes the projectile down the barrel, but being exposed to superheated plasma also isn't very good for your barrel life.
After a review of the play, the call on the field is overturned. Phanatic is correct. Railguns use Lorentz Force vice Gauss guns which use electromagnets. Phanatic, thank you for the correction. Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for leading you astray.
ONR's S&T funding line took us to a shore-based demonstrator. Many flags took the drive to Dahlgren for a look see and a cup of Kool-Aid. But the search for the deep pockets in OPNAV to move to sea based development, including solving the remaining barrel, projectile, and power problems came up empty. We had infatuation but not commitment; it wasn't love. Something else always won out in the POM build. We've been riding the grit of ancestors who could commit and then deliver without running the program aground on the way. Will we see that again? It's not on the horizon.
In addition to the ShinMaywa US-2, one thing that caught my eye at DSEI Japan 2025 was HAMA's UAV seaplane. The current Hamadori 3000 is already in production, the 6000 prototype is going through trials, and they have a follow-on to that which remains vaporware.
Potential use on DDG 1000 Class ships. Removing the 155 and putting in the CPS, also retained the space from the removal of the rear mount could easily place a railgun here. The below spaces that once housed the ammo for the 155 could now be storage batteries, charged by ships power.
Shades of the Stavridis novel Ghost Fleet! Power, barrel cooling (rate of fire), and munition (projectile) guidance are problematic. If you end up in a yardarm to yardarm fight exchanging broadsides (like the aforementioned novel), that will work. Would love to see USN getting some use from the DDG1000 class, worked on the project in 2001-2002...
Let's remember that the 155mm AGS fires a gun-launched rocket-boosted gliding missile, not a conventional projectile as we think of these. The AGS is really a high volume trainable missile launcher. The 155mm AGS was cancelled because it required a purpose-built platform to carry it and because the unit price of each individual round was excessively expensive relative to the numbers which could be reasonably produced.
In any case, the DDG-1000 doesn't have nearly enough onboard power generation capacity to support a railgun which could come close to replicating what a conventional 127mm/5-inch system with its 5-inch projectile ammunition can do -- let alone to exceed what a single 5-inch system can do in terms of volume of fire, sustainability of fire, and variety of ordnance types which can be handled.
As a former futurist who was also a wargamer and operator, the projectile was a major problem. Excalibur artillery rounds aren't cheap, but making a similar round for the velocities of a railgun are technically...challenging. Think steerable hypersonic projectiles sensors and steering mechanisms at carrier catapult shots times...many, many lots of initial Gs. If it isn't a "precision" munition, you're now looking at a tank "silver bullet SABOT" type round (large metal slug, etc) that is essentially line of sight. Power generation, barrel life, cooling, etc are all challenges. Targeting for incoming vampires / TBMs is a shorter reach technologically, so perhaps by reducing the scale (size) to increase rate of fire is a way to get "over the hump" of development and usability. Once things get into the fleet at scale, good things can happen. Been out of the game a while, welcome updates and corrections!
SALTY GATOR’s suggestion of considering the railgun for self-defense and HVU defense could solve the steerable vane problem. I’m picturing in my little brain updated VT fuzed projectiles forming a barrage box, a la WW2, to defeat any missile upgraded to be capable of las-second maneuvering. Just a thought.
Reactive armor is a "point of contact" (too late for a surface combatant, likely) type of defensive tool. A better mating of sensors with "strips of ball bearings" is sometimes seen in science fiction as armored vehicle defense. You don't want to be on deck when it goes off, however...
I have wondered for a while why you couldn't have parvanes holding a mast that puts a net of detcord/ charges on it out as a spaced reactive type armor for ASCMS coming in sideways. Not a solution for all or even most bad incoming stuff, but would potentially mess up a fairly large threat we face. You can make the whole thing launchable from a deck mount and have it in the water and blocking in less than a minute.
Alan Gideon: "SALTY GATOR’s suggestion of considering the railgun for self-defense and HVU defense could solve the steerable vane problem. I’m picturing in my little brain updated VT fuzed projectiles forming a barrage box, a la WW2, to defeat any missile upgraded to be capable of last-second maneuvering. Just a thought."
------------------------------------
In the world of systems engineering, of which DOD 5000 is the absolute pinnacle of expression, there is this natural tendency to get very deep into the process detail weeds, and also into the deep details of the technical issues.
Unless the systems engineering team keeps the larger picture in mind, the combined effect is to cause the overall goals of both the systems analysis effort and the larger design effort to be lost.
I give you the Constellation Class frigate, a 7500+ ton vessel which embarks a 57mm gun system as opposed to a 127mm/5-inch system. In other words, a design choice which is completely absurd. (We know why this happened, but I won't go into the gory details here.)
OK ... Not to say that a 57mm system doesn't have its uses. It certainly does for some requirements. And it works reasonably well for that limited set of requirements.
What if we want to combine the benefits of a 57mm system with the benefits of a conventional 127mm/5-inch system? (We dismiss the possibility of using a railgun because there is no current prospect that it can replicate what a conventional 5-inch gun can do, let alone exceed what a 5-inch gun can do.)
The fact remains that if the 127mm/5-inch system and the 57mm system are both being used for ship defense as opposed offense, then both must have 360 degree coverage if these are to be used against the PLAN in the western Pacific. Which means that the ship must have two 5-inch systems and two 57-mm systems, one pair forward and one pair aft.
Oops! A warship which can carry two of each gun system type, one pair forward and one pair aft, is no longer a frigate. It's a destroyer as we currently think of that term.
Can the DOD 5000 process solve this vexing issue by itself?
Not a chance. Senior DOD leadership has to make the tough decisions. DOD 5000 and the contractors which serve the Military Industrial Complex cannot make the tough decisions for them.
Here is the upshot. No surface combatant we are currently designing today has a prayer of surviving the opening days of a major conflict at sea with China if that warship happens to be operating inside the first island chain when the balloon goes up.
And yet if we don't have some number of USN warships patrolling the waters inside the first island chain, then the war deterrence value of the US Navy's presence in the western Pacific is significantly reduced or even lost altogether.
And as a retired systems engineer and naval architect, I absolutely concur with the need for an end-to-end analysis. Not only do all of the physical and electronic goesintas and goesoutas have to match, the entire ship's mission package, speed, displacement, manning, TTPs, and place in the overall battle force has to balance. But then, that requires a higher level of thinking than current Navy unionist planning will achieve prior to the first shots being fired.
The key problem to solve, not addressed in the Japanese press release, is sustainable rates of repeated fire. That is a “whole of design” issue, rather than tweaking some minor component or parameter.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see it happen, but I am not holding my breath.
Much the same story on laser weapons. I wrote a PSP paper at the War College on directed energy. I later had responsibility for a chemical laser effort in the Army. As a senior OSD person once told me, lasers have all the potential of Brazil-- and they always will. 20+ years later, the Army is once again on the cusp.
Lasers require precision targeting to allow for sufficient "dwell" for them to be effective. The higher the power, the less "dwell" is required...but also the greater the plasma bloom, etc. AND power generation input into the laser to get the desired output. Similar to railgun, but not a single "one shot" equation to be solved, but a tracking problem requiring precision over a period of time. The sensors required for lasers have been a bonanza of targeting data for other, non-laser sensors, perhaps unsurprisingly when one thinks about it. That's why getting something into the fleet can help solve problems outside of the JCIDS (cough) process...unintended benefits vice consequences...
The problem with lasers is that to reach their maximum theoretical effectiveness, the platform which carrys them must be designed from the keel up to handle them. IMHO, upgrades to the basic designs of the embarking platforms is the only means of solving the kinds of problems that placing lasers at sea involves.
For just one example, in today's combat environment, if the lasers don't have 360 degree coverage, it's pointless to be carrying them. This is true of all shipboard defensive systems regardless of their theoretical effective range.
This is the fundamental problem with building Burkes to the edge of doom. The Burkes don't have enough carrying capacity in terms of displacement and power generation capacity to embark the variety of defensive systems modern warfare demands.
Pretty sure all of that is more recent than Rumsfeld. The 1000 mile or km? Gun was one of the Army’s ideas when they weee oicking up long range fires in general. Typhon, the longer barrel 155mm artillery guns, etc.
It has always amazed me how the solution to many problems lie OUTSIDE the normal channels of science and engineering. In WWII there were many examples of ingenuity exercised by common folk just solving problems that just baffled your average engineer.
Today the common narrative is we have a finite number of engineers trained and ready to solve problems across the MIC to address all of our problems when anything but is the truth. This Ivy League MIC group IS NOT INTERESTED in finding folks that JUST SOLVE PROBLEMS. In fact the average Ivy League engineer is trained to extract maximum financial advantage from the process. If there is a simple and easy way to do it . . . they do NOT want to hear it.
This process is systemic and institutionalized. Should any common problem solvers ever be identified and hired they will be BOUND by agreements where their personal intellectual property will become a company asset (PERIOD)! God will judge them!
Ah, the "Iron Triangle" of DoD (senior active duty and government officials), the congress (jobs in districts, political donations, votes), and the Military Industrial Complex (TM) desire to extract maximum financial advantage from the military procurement process. All three of these are very happy with the way things work today...kind of a self licking ice cream cone of you scratch my back and I'll kiss your a...butt. For fun and profit. There are scents of change in the wind, but changing this system will not be easy and will take a decade or more.
It seems that an approach not yet tried is a hybrid rail gun. Either add a rail gun segment to the end of a conventional gun barrel, or perhaps better, a lower powered rail gun as the first stage of projectile acceleration followed by a rocket assisted projectile after leaving the rail gun. Reduce the rail gun power to a sustainable level then accelerate the already moving projectile with chemical energy. Might be worth investigating on a small scale weapon.
“Be still my beating heart…”. Such lovely poetry. Thank you!
How about your poor “Listening ears” with your dreams of the “Railgun”?
Did you enjoy the Russian movie “White Tiger”, about the Tankman, suffering third degree burns over 90% of his body?
So many veterans I know suffer “Hearing Loss”.
CDR Salamander, I must defer to you military men since I’m just an educated and informed Registered Nurse.
Please be careful, hydrate, protect head, eyes and ears!
Copied below is from today’s TASS.
Tanks on ground; ships at sea, Nurse Jane cares - God Bless you!
—-…—- copy TASS///…—-
“Former senior NATO official Stefanie Babst supported the idea of buying new tanks for the Bundeswehr.
"Of course we need tanks," she said. "They are an important tool, critical for the defense of cities, villages and our country in accordance with NATO guidelines. However, without effective air defense systems, we can do almost nothing against drone and missile attacks. Germany urgently needs to improve this system."
The analyst called for building more unmanned weapons systems controlled by artificial intelligence.“
Railgun as an operational weapon is not out of reach in the long term. We are about 9 years since I got the DARPA brief that estimated another 20-30 years before the technology existed that would make it a viable weapon at sea (but power needs to come from nuclear reactor). So that means we are about 11-20 years out from that. This is my way of saying that dont count on railgun rescuing the Navy from a Taiwan scenario anytime soon. That said, it is certainly worth continuing to develop. The biggest problem is how to aim the damn thing in a dynamic environment. It is best used against fixed, not moving targets. At least as envisaged now. The whole concept was supposed to underwrite a "winchester free" asset that could hit targets ashore in an air-sea battle paradigm. That is about as specific as I can get.
John T. Kuehn, MS Systems Engineering (with honors) Naval Postgraduate School
thermoregulation of the barrels is one of the largest issues, the second being the lack of ambient temperature superconductors for capacitors. You can only fire modern railgun barrels but a few times before you warp the barrels and/or coils. the Q from the air friction from the round propelled down the barrel does what propellant nominally does to conventional guns. Ambient temperature superconductors and a novel cryogenic cooling schema--for the superconductors as well as for the barrels--would greatly extend the service life of the barrels as well as decrease the recharge time between shots. Another idea is to change the CONOPS--instead of STRIKE, consider shooting small, frangible / flak rounds against incoming targets. As Sal stated, consider the fragility of missiles. Destroying and/or damaging flight surfaces using flak traveling at mach 7 could do the trick right nicely.
I was down in Florida earlier this year and met with one of the founders. Superconductor technology has been revolutionized over the past five years. The Navy threw in the towel too early. As our host says - lack of commitment.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/magcorp-joined-electromagnetic-launch-inc-210500623.html
and not enough creativity. This is what happens when we replace engineers with "Program Analysts." Sigh. I'd kill NAVSEA tomorrow and replace it with the legacy "Navy Materiel Command," and bilge 75% of the program analysts / acquisition professionals, hiring engineers in their stead. I can teach an engineer to acquisition; I can't teach an "Acquisition" to engineer.
Superconducting magnets are irrelevant for a railgun. A railgun does not use magnets. The magnetic field in a railgun comes directly from the current flowing through it, and even if you were to build the rails and the projectile both from superconducting materials, it is at the faying surface where the projectile makes contact with the rails where there will still be resistance, hence arcing, hence rail erosion, hence more arcing, hence more rail erosion, hence barrel life issues.
Nice description and generally correct with the exception of the use of the definitive adjective "irrelevant". Superconductivity offers improvement in both duty cycle and efficiency. In the case of duty cycle, superconductivity enables energy storage in the form of magnetic fields rather than electrostatics (capacitors or Caps). With zero resistance to current flow, "recharging" X joules of energy into a superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) system can occur more quickly than the same sized capacitor storage. It remains to be seen if SMES would have lower volume and/or less mass than a Cap bank of the same capacity. Weight and volume of systems being a consideration in ship construction.
Superconductivity increases energy delivery efficiency in two ways. First, upstream of the energy storage system (whatever type), the ships AC must be converted to DC for storage. Superconducting diode bridge rectifiers and associated DC connectors between the rectifier and storage reduces losses with the added bonus of a lighter load on the ship service chilled water system. Superconductor connectors between the energy storage system and rails have effectively zero resistive losses. Once the arc is created, it introduces a resistance into the system. In a non-superconductive system, the sum of the resistance in the circuit is the arc plus the two feeders supplying each rail.
Absolutely agree with the erosion issue. Back in 1995 when I attended a railgun symposium at the National High Magnetic Field Lab, there was general agreement across the lecturers and audience members that materials development in a high pressure, ionizing plasma environment was an area that was under-resourced at the time. Perhaps our Japanese friends have sown more seeds addressing that issue and now reap a fruitful harvest.
In summary, can there be railguns without superconductivity? Sure! High school students enter them into science fair projects. Is railgun weaponization possible without superconductivity? That remains to be seen.
Thank you to our host for promoting such intelligent, polite, and open discussion.
Why would the projectile need to make contact with the rails? There are a number of "Maglev" trains that do not make contact with their rails.
Railguns operate on entirely different principles. Current flows up one rail, through the projectile ('armature') and back down the other rail, force on the armature is a Lorenz force, F = iL x B where i is the current, L is the distance between the rails, and B is the magnetic flux density (x is cross product). If the armature doesn't touch the rails, there's no current flow and nothing happens.
Maglevs are essentially long synchronous linear motors: in addition the providing the centering and levitation forces, the "rails" also contain coils that are energized with AC, varying frequency with train speed, to move the train down the rails.
Now, another thing you can do with a railgun is have the projectile itself be non-conductive, but behind it there's a conductive "pusher" armature that you pass so much current through that it flashes to plasma, which is conductive, and as that heats up it expands explosively and pushes the projectile down the barrel, but being exposed to superheated plasma also isn't very good for your barrel life.
What "coils"? It's a railgun, not a coilgun, it doesn't have coils.
The issue isn't warping barrels, it's rail erosion.
After a review of the play, the call on the field is overturned. Phanatic is correct. Railguns use Lorentz Force vice Gauss guns which use electromagnets. Phanatic, thank you for the correction. Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for leading you astray.
ONR's S&T funding line took us to a shore-based demonstrator. Many flags took the drive to Dahlgren for a look see and a cup of Kool-Aid. But the search for the deep pockets in OPNAV to move to sea based development, including solving the remaining barrel, projectile, and power problems came up empty. We had infatuation but not commitment; it wasn't love. Something else always won out in the POM build. We've been riding the grit of ancestors who could commit and then deliver without running the program aground on the way. Will we see that again? It's not on the horizon.
In addition to the ShinMaywa US-2, one thing that caught my eye at DSEI Japan 2025 was HAMA's UAV seaplane. The current Hamadori 3000 is already in production, the 6000 prototype is going through trials, and they have a follow-on to that which remains vaporware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzTerRVICCA&list=PLZ5dmKKH0J6YqGXA8HP41yAr0SitgKGdN
Looks like you quoted yourself twice, CDR?
Potential use on DDG 1000 Class ships. Removing the 155 and putting in the CPS, also retained the space from the removal of the rear mount could easily place a railgun here. The below spaces that once housed the ammo for the 155 could now be storage batteries, charged by ships power.
Shades of the Stavridis novel Ghost Fleet! Power, barrel cooling (rate of fire), and munition (projectile) guidance are problematic. If you end up in a yardarm to yardarm fight exchanging broadsides (like the aforementioned novel), that will work. Would love to see USN getting some use from the DDG1000 class, worked on the project in 2001-2002...
Let's remember that the 155mm AGS fires a gun-launched rocket-boosted gliding missile, not a conventional projectile as we think of these. The AGS is really a high volume trainable missile launcher. The 155mm AGS was cancelled because it required a purpose-built platform to carry it and because the unit price of each individual round was excessively expensive relative to the numbers which could be reasonably produced.
In any case, the DDG-1000 doesn't have nearly enough onboard power generation capacity to support a railgun which could come close to replicating what a conventional 127mm/5-inch system with its 5-inch projectile ammunition can do -- let alone to exceed what a single 5-inch system can do in terms of volume of fire, sustainability of fire, and variety of ordnance types which can be handled.
As a former futurist who was also a wargamer and operator, the projectile was a major problem. Excalibur artillery rounds aren't cheap, but making a similar round for the velocities of a railgun are technically...challenging. Think steerable hypersonic projectiles sensors and steering mechanisms at carrier catapult shots times...many, many lots of initial Gs. If it isn't a "precision" munition, you're now looking at a tank "silver bullet SABOT" type round (large metal slug, etc) that is essentially line of sight. Power generation, barrel life, cooling, etc are all challenges. Targeting for incoming vampires / TBMs is a shorter reach technologically, so perhaps by reducing the scale (size) to increase rate of fire is a way to get "over the hump" of development and usability. Once things get into the fleet at scale, good things can happen. Been out of the game a while, welcome updates and corrections!
SALTY GATOR’s suggestion of considering the railgun for self-defense and HVU defense could solve the steerable vane problem. I’m picturing in my little brain updated VT fuzed projectiles forming a barrage box, a la WW2, to defeat any missile upgraded to be capable of las-second maneuvering. Just a thought.
Reactive armor is a "point of contact" (too late for a surface combatant, likely) type of defensive tool. A better mating of sensors with "strips of ball bearings" is sometimes seen in science fiction as armored vehicle defense. You don't want to be on deck when it goes off, however...
I have wondered for a while why you couldn't have parvanes holding a mast that puts a net of detcord/ charges on it out as a spaced reactive type armor for ASCMS coming in sideways. Not a solution for all or even most bad incoming stuff, but would potentially mess up a fairly large threat we face. You can make the whole thing launchable from a deck mount and have it in the water and blocking in less than a minute.
Alan Gideon: "SALTY GATOR’s suggestion of considering the railgun for self-defense and HVU defense could solve the steerable vane problem. I’m picturing in my little brain updated VT fuzed projectiles forming a barrage box, a la WW2, to defeat any missile upgraded to be capable of last-second maneuvering. Just a thought."
------------------------------------
In the world of systems engineering, of which DOD 5000 is the absolute pinnacle of expression, there is this natural tendency to get very deep into the process detail weeds, and also into the deep details of the technical issues.
Unless the systems engineering team keeps the larger picture in mind, the combined effect is to cause the overall goals of both the systems analysis effort and the larger design effort to be lost.
I give you the Constellation Class frigate, a 7500+ ton vessel which embarks a 57mm gun system as opposed to a 127mm/5-inch system. In other words, a design choice which is completely absurd. (We know why this happened, but I won't go into the gory details here.)
OK ... Not to say that a 57mm system doesn't have its uses. It certainly does for some requirements. And it works reasonably well for that limited set of requirements.
What if we want to combine the benefits of a 57mm system with the benefits of a conventional 127mm/5-inch system? (We dismiss the possibility of using a railgun because there is no current prospect that it can replicate what a conventional 5-inch gun can do, let alone exceed what a 5-inch gun can do.)
The fact remains that if the 127mm/5-inch system and the 57mm system are both being used for ship defense as opposed offense, then both must have 360 degree coverage if these are to be used against the PLAN in the western Pacific. Which means that the ship must have two 5-inch systems and two 57-mm systems, one pair forward and one pair aft.
Oops! A warship which can carry two of each gun system type, one pair forward and one pair aft, is no longer a frigate. It's a destroyer as we currently think of that term.
Can the DOD 5000 process solve this vexing issue by itself?
Not a chance. Senior DOD leadership has to make the tough decisions. DOD 5000 and the contractors which serve the Military Industrial Complex cannot make the tough decisions for them.
Here is the upshot. No surface combatant we are currently designing today has a prayer of surviving the opening days of a major conflict at sea with China if that warship happens to be operating inside the first island chain when the balloon goes up.
And yet if we don't have some number of USN warships patrolling the waters inside the first island chain, then the war deterrence value of the US Navy's presence in the western Pacific is significantly reduced or even lost altogether.
And as a retired systems engineer and naval architect, I absolutely concur with the need for an end-to-end analysis. Not only do all of the physical and electronic goesintas and goesoutas have to match, the entire ship's mission package, speed, displacement, manning, TTPs, and place in the overall battle force has to balance. But then, that requires a higher level of thinking than current Navy unionist planning will achieve prior to the first shots being fired.
The key problem to solve, not addressed in the Japanese press release, is sustainable rates of repeated fire. That is a “whole of design” issue, rather than tweaking some minor component or parameter.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see it happen, but I am not holding my breath.
End to end thinking required.
Much the same story on laser weapons. I wrote a PSP paper at the War College on directed energy. I later had responsibility for a chemical laser effort in the Army. As a senior OSD person once told me, lasers have all the potential of Brazil-- and they always will. 20+ years later, the Army is once again on the cusp.
Lasers require precision targeting to allow for sufficient "dwell" for them to be effective. The higher the power, the less "dwell" is required...but also the greater the plasma bloom, etc. AND power generation input into the laser to get the desired output. Similar to railgun, but not a single "one shot" equation to be solved, but a tracking problem requiring precision over a period of time. The sensors required for lasers have been a bonanza of targeting data for other, non-laser sensors, perhaps unsurprisingly when one thinks about it. That's why getting something into the fleet can help solve problems outside of the JCIDS (cough) process...unintended benefits vice consequences...
The problem with lasers is that to reach their maximum theoretical effectiveness, the platform which carrys them must be designed from the keel up to handle them. IMHO, upgrades to the basic designs of the embarking platforms is the only means of solving the kinds of problems that placing lasers at sea involves.
For just one example, in today's combat environment, if the lasers don't have 360 degree coverage, it's pointless to be carrying them. This is true of all shipboard defensive systems regardless of their theoretical effective range.
This is the fundamental problem with building Burkes to the edge of doom. The Burkes don't have enough carrying capacity in terms of displacement and power generation capacity to embark the variety of defensive systems modern warfare demands.
I write a Substack on military laser weapons and would LOVE to hear your thoughts, if you're up for it!
I vaguely recall that idea of a big gun for the Army being killed by Donald Rumsfeld twenty years ago. Do I have that right?
Pretty sure all of that is more recent than Rumsfeld. The 1000 mile or km? Gun was one of the Army’s ideas when they weee oicking up long range fires in general. Typhon, the longer barrel 155mm artillery guns, etc.
Ok. I remember some meeting chaired by Paul Wolfowitz or maybe it was a press conference where the big gun idea was written off.
Thanks for citing my article! 😎🤩
YOU MISSPELLED MY NAME
It has always amazed me how the solution to many problems lie OUTSIDE the normal channels of science and engineering. In WWII there were many examples of ingenuity exercised by common folk just solving problems that just baffled your average engineer.
Today the common narrative is we have a finite number of engineers trained and ready to solve problems across the MIC to address all of our problems when anything but is the truth. This Ivy League MIC group IS NOT INTERESTED in finding folks that JUST SOLVE PROBLEMS. In fact the average Ivy League engineer is trained to extract maximum financial advantage from the process. If there is a simple and easy way to do it . . . they do NOT want to hear it.
This process is systemic and institutionalized. Should any common problem solvers ever be identified and hired they will be BOUND by agreements where their personal intellectual property will become a company asset (PERIOD)! God will judge them!
Ah, the "Iron Triangle" of DoD (senior active duty and government officials), the congress (jobs in districts, political donations, votes), and the Military Industrial Complex (TM) desire to extract maximum financial advantage from the military procurement process. All three of these are very happy with the way things work today...kind of a self licking ice cream cone of you scratch my back and I'll kiss your a...butt. For fun and profit. There are scents of change in the wind, but changing this system will not be easy and will take a decade or more.
Right. Need uniformed people with a credit card and a mission to solve a problem when they identify a potential solution.
If we can fund the Wuhan lab we can surely fund the development of the rail gun by Japan. I’m sure we’d get a much better ROI on the latter.
It seems that an approach not yet tried is a hybrid rail gun. Either add a rail gun segment to the end of a conventional gun barrel, or perhaps better, a lower powered rail gun as the first stage of projectile acceleration followed by a rocket assisted projectile after leaving the rail gun. Reduce the rail gun power to a sustainable level then accelerate the already moving projectile with chemical energy. Might be worth investigating on a small scale weapon.
Christian Orr spelled my name wrong
Good Morning CDR Salamander!
“Be still my beating heart…”. Such lovely poetry. Thank you!
How about your poor “Listening ears” with your dreams of the “Railgun”?
Did you enjoy the Russian movie “White Tiger”, about the Tankman, suffering third degree burns over 90% of his body?
So many veterans I know suffer “Hearing Loss”.
CDR Salamander, I must defer to you military men since I’m just an educated and informed Registered Nurse.
Please be careful, hydrate, protect head, eyes and ears!
Copied below is from today’s TASS.
Tanks on ground; ships at sea, Nurse Jane cares - God Bless you!
—-…—- copy TASS///…—-
“Former senior NATO official Stefanie Babst supported the idea of buying new tanks for the Bundeswehr.
"Of course we need tanks," she said. "They are an important tool, critical for the defense of cities, villages and our country in accordance with NATO guidelines. However, without effective air defense systems, we can do almost nothing against drone and missile attacks. Germany urgently needs to improve this system."
The analyst called for building more unmanned weapons systems controlled by artificial intelligence.“
Railgun as an operational weapon is not out of reach in the long term. We are about 9 years since I got the DARPA brief that estimated another 20-30 years before the technology existed that would make it a viable weapon at sea (but power needs to come from nuclear reactor). So that means we are about 11-20 years out from that. This is my way of saying that dont count on railgun rescuing the Navy from a Taiwan scenario anytime soon. That said, it is certainly worth continuing to develop. The biggest problem is how to aim the damn thing in a dynamic environment. It is best used against fixed, not moving targets. At least as envisaged now. The whole concept was supposed to underwrite a "winchester free" asset that could hit targets ashore in an air-sea battle paradigm. That is about as specific as I can get.
John T. Kuehn, MS Systems Engineering (with honors) Naval Postgraduate School