Sounds like a lot of collateral damage, just like a tomahawk strike or jdam.
On a side note, doesn't naval gunfire have a much lower trajectory than artillery?
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Electromagnetic Rail Gun Status?
- Thread starter Fog
- Start date
Sounds like a lot of collateral damage, just like a tomahawk strike or jdam.
On a side note, doesn't naval gunfire have a much lower trajectory than artillery?
Yes.
Ground based guns can be requested to fire High Angle in which case they will lob the rounds with a bigger charge behind it to achieve a bigger arc out of the flight of the round. This also adds flight time to the round so you have to account for that. This is adventageous when using Excaliber rounds or attempting to hit a target surrounded by obstacles which would prevent the rounds from impacting on target.
Yeah, except it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper than a Tomahawk strike and not require an entire CSG on scene to execute.
No, not necessarily.
This isn't SWO fiefdom at all. The requirements for increased land attack capability increased steadily in the mid to late 90s along with the development of JDAM and JSOW, etc. There have been a whole slew of thoughts for increased Naval Surface Fire Support beyond TLAM from land attack SM-2 (LASM) to Harpoon Land Variants to ERGM to rail gun with new advanced rounds. I think we are very capable at NSFS/NGFS - just ask CHAFEE how they did a few years back on Somalia. Steve Wilkens hits the nail on the head regarding team proficiency being a challenge. The 5 in cargo round with the Mk45 Mod 4 (5 in/62 mount) can reach out to 20 NM and is very impressive. However, the 5 in round is still small and limited compared to other munitions in our arsenal and lacks the precision that ERGM and GPS guidance were supposed to bring.
One has to wonder just how many JOs there would be on a reactivated Iowa or Wisconsin. What if we decided (for fun) to build a BBN today what would that look like... DDX on roids?
King of the who?
Just like everything else today, there isn't enough money to train crews on the systems we have in place already. When was the last time anyone worked with NSFS where the ship actually hit the target/island or made the right corrections before 6 hours had gone by? I'd hate to see the problems that would arise with a 200nm SWO weapon when they can't hit the correct target.
Maybe in the fight for funding these gee-whiz future weapons we should fight for funding to maintain some semblance of readiness with today's gear in today's missions.
Maybe in the fight for funding these gee-whiz future weapons we should fight for funding to maintain some semblance of readiness with today's gear in today's missions.
chefmike
New Member
Maybe I'm just being stupid, but shouldn't we be funding BOTH fully? And I don't even mean perfect-world. It has been done before, no? And even if not, might it not be important to stay "ahead" to some degree (maybe this isn't the example to die for) at some expense of operational funding / capacity?
You can't have everything. Like it or not, the military is as well-funded in real dollars as it's ever going to be. Add another thing, and you'd better have something you want to get rid of to offset it. I'm all about reducing the overhead of maintaining the empire, but I can't think of anywhere we can withdraw from right now to pay for tomorrow. That means hard choices, one way or another.
BTW, I'm guessing a hypersonic railgun shell isn't going to be a dumb weapon--forget the "up/down/left/right" talk-ons. This ain't your dad's NSFS. Proficiency won't mean the same thing.
And BBs aren't coming back. As beautiful as they were, the supply, engineering, and personnel overhead are too great for a niche weapon.