Posted on 07/06/2021 12:16:14 PM PDT by Yo-Yo
After more than 15 years and half a billion dollars in funding, the Navy’s dream of building an electromagnetic railgun capable of nailing targets up to 100 nautical miles away at velocities reaching Mach 7 has no hope of becoming a reality anytime soon.
The Navy announced on Friday that the service has “decided to pause” research and development of the much-hyped electromagnetic railgun (or EMRG) at the end of 2021 in light of “fiscal constraints, combat system integration challenges and the prospective technology maturation of other weapon concepts,” according to a statement provided to Military.com.
“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,” according to the Navy.
The death of the EMRG was all but certain as of early June, when the Navy’s fiscal year 2022 budget request revealed that the service had zeroed out two separate line items related to the superweapon’s research and development funding, as our colleagues at The War Zone reported at the time.
Indeed, the Navy’s requests for railgun funding have declined significantly in recent years, with the service requesting just $9.5 million to develop advanced tech associated with the weapon system in fiscal year 2021, down from around $15 million requested in fiscal year 2020 and roughly $28 million in fiscal year 2019.
Despite a successful test of railgun for the public in 2017 at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, insiders previously told Task & Purpose that the Navy’s supergun was clearly headed for an R&D “valley of death” between testing and procurement, wherein promising technology remains stuck in the research phase due to lack of resources or some other developmental challenge.
In the case of the EMRG, those developmental challenges included the stalled development of a universal common mount, a component critical to actually demonstrating the tactical feasibility of the supergun on a Navy warship beyond the static 2017 test firing of the weapon at Dahlgren.
“Transitioning military technology efforts from the research and development phase to the procurement phase can sometimes be a challenge,” as a Congressional Research Service report on the Navy’s directed energy efforts puts it. “Some military technology efforts fail to make the transition.”
Both the technical and budget shortfalls, however, come during a period of waning interest in its potential application. As Task & Purpose previously reported, the Defense Department has in recent years shifted its attention to the so-called hypervelocity projectile (HVP), a super-dense shell that has seen cheaper and less technically complex applications to conventional powder artillery compared to usage as the primary ammunition for the EMRG.
“The Navy feels it can get away with using the HVP in a conventional gun system, and the service can use conventional guns for lower-end threats and always return to missiles for higher-end threats,” as one source told Task & Purpose. “The service will only complete the integration when the need for the greater capability for a broader range of threats is required.”
Less than a year after declaring the Navy “fully invested” in the service’s much-hyped electromagnetic railgun, in February 2019 Adm. John Richardson, then the Chief of Naval Operations, telegraphed buyer’s remorse over the weapon’s troubled development, declaring the project “the case study that would say, ‘This is how innovation maybe shouldn’t happen.’”
“We’ve learned a lot and the engineering of building something like that that can handle that much electromagnetic energy and not just explode is challenging,” Richardson told an audience at the Atlantic Council at the time. “So, we’re going to continue after this — we’re going to install this thing, we’re going to continue to develop it, test it … It’s too great a weapon system, so it’s going somewhere, hopefully.”
Unfortunately for Richardson and other Navy leaders, the only place that the service’s EMRG is headed is into deep storage. And while that doesn’t mean the research will never see the light of day again, it does mean that the United States has officially lost the railgun wars: after all, one of China’s Type 072III-class landing ships was spotted roaming the high seas with its very own railgun turret as recently as December 2018.
That weakness I never thought of. If somebody is carrying a flame thrower, shoot the fuel supply.
That’s a good point.
That may not have been very problematic in the overall pictures.
The energy came from the ship, so that’s not a problem.
Failure of the hardware would have been a bigger problem, imo.
But it is a problem. We can say “the power came from the ship” but it’s not like ships just generally have a giant ton of spare electricity in the system. You’ve got to build that into the engine system. Then there’s the hardware having all that power going to the rail, which proved tough on the hardware.
They would have to reconfigure the ships to carry more fuel so they have the ever ready power to fuel railguns. That’s why I don’t see that as much of a problem, because the solution to that is nuclear. To me, the fuel is not the most difficult part of this weapon.
However, the idea that it would be a focus of an enemy attack or possibly needing the amount of parts to replace because it gets destroyed whenever it is used is a bigger problem to me.
Why don’t we do like everyone else and steal the technology from the Russians/China?
The problem is it’s a matter of on demand. You either need an engine that can ramp up production for brief periods, or you need to be running at a higher capacity and charging batteries for that need. We see this with California asking folks not to charge their electric cars. The available power in the circuit is finite, and once you start drastically altering demand things get complicated.
Competitor: the ramjet-powered artillery shell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vIPNElDkns
A ramjet is cheap and efficient, and by using air instead of carrying its own oxidizer can go further. But it needs to be traveling at over Mach 1 in order to start functioning. So you shoot it out of a cannon to give it its initial velocity.
The extreme range artillery round the army is reportedly developing might make the electromagnetic railgun concept redundant, or at least put it on a backburner for a few years. 130 km range for a precision guided high explosive round might work as well at sea as on land. The videos of static tests of a railgun projectile have not looked even close to ready to transition to a real weapon system.
When Harbor Freight has them for sale, I’ll get a few, one might work. One time.
How much budget is being redirected into combating global climate change?
All I wanted was some candy and railgun that shoots.
Some company now will come forward and say we solved the problem!!
Barrels kept wearing out.
They need the money for all of the anticipated gender correction surgeries after they ban the recruitment of heterosexual males.
"Seriously...Get Off My Lawn!"
I’m holding out for a nuke weapon or an F-15. SloJoe gave me a heads up I might need one.
Danger Death Ray?
I agree Yo-Yo. It never was practical. But the MIC made a few bucks screwing around with it for all those years for no reason. At the tune of a half billion dollars of our Grandkid’s future prosperity.
Next worthless project...
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