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Allen McDuffee writes the US Navy's latest weapon is an electromagnetic railgun launcher that can hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7 with a range of 100 miles turning a destroyer into super-long-range machine gun able to fire up to a dozen relatively inexpensive projectiles every minute. The Navy says the cost differential $25,000 for a railgun projectile versus $500,000 to $1.5 million for a missile will make potential enemies think twice about the economic viability of engaging U.S. forces. "[It] will give our adversaries a huge moment of pause to go: 'Do I even want to go engage a naval ship?'" says Rear Admiral Matt Klunder. "Because you are going to lose. You could throw anything at us, frankly, and the fact that we now can shoot a number of these rounds at a very affordable cost, it's my opinion that they don't win."
Engineers already have tested this futuristic weapon on land, and the Navy plans to begin sea trials aboard a Joint High Speed Vessel Millinocket in 2016. Railguns use electromagnetic energy known as the Lorenz Force to launch a projectile between two conductive rails. The high-power electric pulse generates a magnetic field to fire the projectile with very little recoil, officials say. Weapons like the electromagnetic rail gun could help U.S. forces retain their edge and give them an asymmetric advantage over rivals, making it too expensive to use missiles to attack U.S. warships because of the cheap way to defeat them. "Your magazine never runs out, you just keep shooting, and that's compelling."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday April 11 2014, @02:59PM
The U.S. military is not as cost-effective as it could be, due to many functions that used to be performed internally being privatized. It's no accident, perhaps some general or congressman or whomever in a high position of power has a buddy they want to enrich.
" B-but muh big government is expensive and m-muh privatization is cheap! "
That may be true in some cases of government bureaucracy, but definitely not [pbs.org] in the military's case. Which is a shame, because a lot of high-tech jobs like PMEL in some cases have already been privatized. So instead of having a lowly E-1 or E-2 with aptitude receive bitchin' tech training while working for peanuts, now you have to pay a civilian over 20 bucks an hour to do the same thing, and any money left over goes right into the owner's pockets.
This is why, in spite of all the biggest and latest toys making the news here, the future of military contracting is not big and fancy toys, but austerity and maintenance of existing toys -- they just don't know it yet, ha.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Friday April 11 2014, @03:36PM
It's not because they're privatized. It's because the people spending the money don't care how many zeroes are on the check. The US is very good these days at digging the hole deeper no matter what approach is used.
I disagree. There's still huge money in R&D. It's high profit, lots of easy ways to generate a ton of costs to plump up the contract, and low accountability - you don't actually need a working product at the end. They'll continue that until the US is so messed up, it can't keep the lights on.
I gather the problem isn't even that. As I understand it, Uncle Sam is actually paying a contractor something like 50-75 bucks an hour to pay a civilian 20 bucks an hour to do the work. It's definitely not a shining example of privatization.