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Railguns Fried, Fizzle Before the Fourth of July
U.S. Navy image of railgun prototype firing
Military.com reports the Navy has finally ended the railgun program. What caught my eye was a reference to other services’ abandoned futuristic weapons. What each had in common was strong support over many years from the military-industrial complex: a uniformed proponent, Congressional support, and defense contractors. I started my military career in the 1980s just as the Sergeant York air defense gun system collapsed under spectacularly bad testing results, so can sympathize.
Railguns were supposed to be the new super cannon, a system in which you impart energy to a projectile at launch, then have it go ballistic the rest of the way to a target. Notionally, this is more efficient than packing propellent into the projectile, in the form of a rocket or missile. However, the big guns of World War II battleships set the peak for traditional cannon “tube” artillery. Railguns were supposed to be a revolutionary next step in rank and energy delivered to a target. They involve no combustion, instead relying on a set of rails electrically charged like one polarity of magnets, with the projectile holding the opposite charge being flung down the length of the rail, repelled by the rails’ charge.
Unfortunately, they have proved unworkable. The basic construction fails under single or repeated shots, destroyed by the energy imparted at initiation. At the same time, the energy budget for each shot is far beyond all but a handful of ships in the fleet. It just takes far too much electricity to charge capacitors to deliver the sudden burst of energy to the rails.
The railgun will now join the ranks of other costly, yet never implemented weapons programs like the Future Combat Systems, Comanche helicopter, and Next Generation Cruiser projects.
The end of the railgun program was foreshadowed last month when a White House fiscal budget for 2022 revealed the Navy pulled funding for the Gun-Launched Guided Projectile — a meter-long projectile first developed exclusively as a round for the experimental railgun.
“The decision to pause the EMRG program is consistent with department-wide reform initiatives to free up resources in support of other Navy priorities [and] to include improving offensive and defensive capabilities such as directed energy, hypersonic missiles and electronic warfare systems,” the Navy’s statement said.
The Future Combat Systems and Comanche helicopter were both Army dreams. The FCS was supposed to save lots of money by a common core platform on which everything from the successor to the M1A1 Abrams tank to infantry and self-propelled artillery vehicles would be built. It was doomed from the outset, but held out year after year as the Army’s mechanized future. The Comanche helicopter concept came along as the Soviet threat was crumbling. It was supposed to the Army’s stealth aircraft, a light scouting and attack helicopter that could survive in a Soviet technology high threat environment. A stealthy helicopter is still perfectly visible and slow enough for all manner of ground and air countermeasures. Still, the idea hung on from 1991 to 2004.
The Navy railgun advocates, like the “gun mafia” in the Army Air Defense Artillery community, wanted a futuristic gun, a 21st Century super battleship delivering hard science fiction style performance in competition with the aviators and missile crews. It appears, for now, that tubes or rails are just not going to outrange missiles, rockets, and air-delivered munitions. Yes, tube artillery will still have an important place, but will not really be the king of the battlefield or the seas. Further, the Navy will either have to accept the risk of pulling in closer to shore with naval guns or rely entirely on missiles and aircraft, facing enemy missiles and aircraft in a battle of range and lethality.
Published in Military
The problems seem to be in design, metallurgy, and chemistry, not physics. So I do believe we’ll se a rail gun project picked up again. Or, the project was taken off-book to hide emergent US capabilities.
Anyone who’s ever worked in an electrical powerhouse is told what happens if, for any reason, one of the huge Allis-Chalmers generators loses sync with the rest of the electrical grid it’s locked into: within a fraction of a second, it rips itself out of the building’s foundations and tears itself apart. Like a boiler explosion, it’s rare but terrifying. A rail gun has some similarities. The magnetic field propelling the projectile out of the barrel must be in perfect sync. The ring electromagnets (there’s a fancier name for them, which I do not know) have to be in sequence, like the “chaser” lights on old fashioned theater marquees. Under the wrong circumstances, instead of passing the projectile off to the next magnetic field in line, it can reverse the momentum and the displaced energy will destroy the device altogether.
So I have to say, maybe give these guys a break for working on a very difficult engineering project.
Yes, but so much of that came from “outside.” We adopted changes made by other countries who modified the design to suit themselves, which also made the Bradley much better, safer, and more effective. Very different than what would have been the result without that, indeed what WAS the result before those changes began.
I wonder how much better relative to, say, the West German Marder IFV that we could have simply licensed, produced on our shores with American workers, and turned out in larger numbers faster with for the same dollars, or produced the same number faster for less dollars, turning the savings to more OPTEMPO funding. In hull defilade, the Bradley turret looks like a bigger target than the smaller turret of the Marder. Of course, the Germans have since fielded a newer design, the Puma, that has a Bradley sized turret, so the Bradley designers may have gotten it right first.
I thought the overall best part of what’s shown in The Pentagon Wars is that the Bradley was originally supposed to carry like a dozen troops or more, an actual troop-transport. By the time they got done adding turrets and stuff, it can carry… what, 6 at most? That aren’t involved with driving the vehicle, operating the turret, etc.
Yes but, the concept of what a mechanized infantry platoon was supposed to be may have changed with the shift from APC (armored personnel carrier) to IFV (infantry fighting vehicle). The APC is a lightly armored all terrain taxi to the fighting positions, where everyone except perhaps the machine gunner/ assistant gunner bails out and fights as dismounts. The IFV has a team of three fighting from the vehicle with cannon and missiles. Each track holds 7 dismounts, the members of three rifle squads. Instead of four squads, you get three rifle squads, split among four vehicles, plus four mounted teams operating in pairs (two sections per platoon). I suspect you get a lot more lethality with the IFV platoon than with the slightly larger APC platoon.
Sure, but if they were trying to produce an armored personnel carrier, the Bradley “fails” and they still need to come up with an armored personnel carrier to do that job.
If you want to argue that armored personnel carriers are no longer needed, period, that’s a different case. But evidently they did want/need armored personnel carriers when the Bradley was started. They just didn’t end up with one.
Didn’t it start out and an APC?
Right. But the timing has to be in milliseconds.
As best I can recall, the Germans had an armored car in WWII called the Puma.
Luttwak’s take was that there are a lot of hand-held anti-tank that aren’t really much good against main battle tanks, but are hell on wheels against vehicles masquerading as AFV’s.
Some of that was addressed in “The Pentagon Wars” too. Such as, one of their “tests” they were supposed to conduct on the Bradley was using some kind of Lithuanian or something RPG that didn’t even go through a bunker door, rather than a Russian RPG that was much more powerful.
They also did the “testing” on setup Bradley prototypes that had basically empty fuel tanks, etc.
Yes, they also had Marders. The names were revived for modern equipment. Germans use predator mammal names for armored vehicles. Marder = marten. Their main battle tanks are spelled the same as “leopards.” A Fuchs wheeled command vehicle/ recon vehicle is a “fox.” The Flakpanzer Gepard is an anti-aircraft cannon “cheetah.”
I think the Marder was a TD.
Yes and–that higher turret silhouette provided room for the electronically stabilized firing platform, so you could be hauling at 40mph over broken terrain and your rounds were going exactly where you aim them. That is/was a game changer for maneuver warfare. And, as one of the guys that would barrel out the back to assault the objective, I’d rather have my overwatch and supporting fires provided by that ass-kicking 25mm chain gun Bushmaster than a 7.62 or even a .50 cal.
And there ya go.
That’s great, and I read the stories about when damaged Bradleys would come back for repair etc, the people would find “Thank you for saving my life” messages written inside, using chalk or whatever. But they still don’t have an Armored Personnel Carrier, if they actually need one. If they need one, they’ll have to start again.
By the way, my own personal favorite APC:
Let me check with Admiral Awesome of Space Force on that request.
Well, if you need to put 12 dismounts in a vehicle as opposed to 7, and all you have is a Brad, then you use an ancient, hallowed Army technique called “nut-to-butt.”