I guess your reflexes must not be that fast or you would have caught it.
No problem. :)
At least they’re nice to look at.
Oh wait.
Should’ve just brought back some Iowas. Couldn’t have been more expensive to pull them out of mothballs.
We’re saving those for when aliens attack and knock out our communications such that we are forced to rely on calling out our retaliatory attacks based on an old-fashioned system of grids and coordinates.
If that bit about the ammo is correct…the mind, it boggles. Um, hello, one of the great values of tube artillery is plain economics–shells are cheap compared to missiles. And another value is quantity–you can lob a lot more shells than missiles at the enemy. Here, we stand that on its head. We make artillery rounds as expensive as missiles (well, as they used to be, nowadays missiles are obscenely expensive), and then don’t make any. Even if they did produce the rounds, you know there would never be enough to make a 155mm system an effective ground support mechanism. I don’t care how much fancy guidance and sub-munition stuff you cram in there, it’s still a fairly small round, equivalent, what, to a destroyer or light cruiser round (6" or so)? Eight inch (203mm) and up were the rounds you wanted for really digging the enemy out of whatever holes they were in, and sometimes there’s just no substitute for weight of metal.
I cannot even fathom the logic at work here, across the board.
Is the weapon in question the naval “rail gun”? I’m trying to find some description of what’s mounted on the Zs and failing.
No clue. But given that it has no ammo, it might as well be a slingshot. Or you could just say it’s an Alien Death Ray™ and call it a day. Maybe Putin would be scared by that.
Well, depends. Are you a traitorous piece of shit owned by the Russians? Then you’d end them for exactly the reasons you describe.
It was supposed to be a rail gun, but that is still not ready, so this was the fill-in conventional gun. It’s apparently not ready either.
We could have built ~3000 new schools across the US for the cost of this program. It could have paid for well over half of the Federal Highway Administration’s budget for FY 2018. It could have paid for Medicaid and CHIP in Utah for a decade.
Instead, we have ships with no ammo and no plans to get any.
Yeah, the price of a tomahawk is $1.87, so these rounds would still be cheaper. But I’m not sure what would make them cost so much.
But not cheap enough, as one cruise missile can do a lot more than one 155mm shell, no matter how fancy (barring a mini-nuke, which I assume would cost more anyhow). For artillery to be useful you really have to have volume, which means cheap projectiles, relatively.
I suspect this program is one of those kitchen sink things where different constituencies lobbied to get their thing included, and no one had the authority or willpower to actually manage the entire program as a single, effective entity.
I have to assume that these shells were more than traditional rounds. It’s the only way they could cost that much, so it’s possible they damage could even have been greater.
I don’t really know though.
I’m sure there damage/effectiveness, on paper, was supposed to be much better than a normal round. No doubt about it. The question is, is that purported superiority enough to offset the lack of quantity? In other words, if for the price of one round you could throw ten normal rounds down range, does it balance out? I’m skeptical, though like you, I also have no particular knowledge of the specifics here.
Generally, though, fire support for troops comes down to blowing stuff up, and while precision is certainly nice–all those WWII cases of gajillions of tons of ordnance leaving defenders and defenses intact come to mind–quantity has a quality of its own as they say.
Apparently the original proposed cost for the LRAP round was around $60k, which would have been good, but ballooned to $800k.
However, it looks like that tweet is outdated, and the Navy decided to go with the Excalibur rounds, which have already been tested and deployed in combat.
They cost around $70k per round, and are still GPS guided. They only have about half the range though, at 30 miles. Still, this would suggest that the overall weapons system is not as big a failure as that original tweet would suggest.
In ten of why precision is so useful, it’s mainly that gps targeting means you can hit an exact target on the first shot. It reduces the chances of collateral damage, and gives the target less chance to react, as traditional artillery fire relies on walking the fire onto the target.
It is about a year old data, and mostly from the Wikipedia article.
Since I always look for excuses to link to The Warzone.
Again, that’s somewhat out of date. They are apparently going to use Excalibur rounds.
Yeah, that at least puts it in the realm of (by today’s standards) acceptability. One round for that price that has a very high chance (assuming good targeting intel, of course) of actually hitting the target is probably worth a dozen rounds sort of lobbed around the general area.
Still, the whole thing doesn’t exactly put Navy procurement in the best of lights.