Defense Programs Embarrassing Failures: Problem not Mentioned in the US President’s State of the Union Address
In his first State of the Union Address, President Trump emphasized the achievements while openly ignoring some burning issues, such as the huge national debt, exceeding $20 trillion. One of the problems he ignored was the inefficiency of defense research and development programs, known for boondoggles, resulting in enormous sums of money going down the drain. More evidence keeps on surfacing to corroborate this fact. The lobbyists-dominated process leads to one failure after another and nothing is done to address the problem. The issue is largely hushed up in the United States.
Remember the praises sung to glorify the railgun – the “best weapon in the world”? It appears to be dead in the water. And what to do about the much-vaunted Hyper Velocity Projectile (HVP) the railgun was supposed to fire? With big money involved, something must be invented. Vincent Sabio, the HVP program manager at the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, has come up with an idea to arm Army artillery systems with the projectile, providing an additional layer of defense to the existing missile defense (MD) systems. He believes the HVP is much cheaper than surface-to-air missiles and can be easily installed on mobile platforms. It needs no trucks, trailers or silos to make it less vulnerable. The HVP-based MD system will be fire-tested in a year.
Even if the projectile is not as accurate as expected and the probability to kill (PK) is not up to par, air space could be saturated with great numbers of HVPs costing only about $85,000 a round to reliably counter incoming air targets, including sea-skimming and land-hugging threats. But is this price final? The initially estimated cost was $25,000 a round. It keeps on rising.
Nothing has been reported about the ability of HVP to achieve great accuracy under the conditions of electronic countermeasures. If the enemy is Russia, it acquires special importance. The operational range is only 43 nmi (80 km) from 155-mm tube artillery and 70 nmi (130 km) from ship-based advanced gun systems (AGS) – nothing to brag about. A new Russia’s artillery system offers comparable capabilities and strikes with much more destructive projectiles delivered with great accuracy. The Russian new howitzer capable of 70km range is already in service. The US is just starting the production of its new sophisticated howitzer destined to outgun whatever Russia and China have. So, it may be a superweapon but that’s where the US military is trailing behind Russia’s armed forces it plans to outgun.
Saturate the airspace with great numbers of HVPs? It will require great numbers of launchers to make the whole process really cumbersome. Each launcher has a cost as well as the radars the targets cannot be detected and the projectiles cannot be guided without. And what about energy requirements? It was a problem when a railgun was to be installed on board of USS Zumwalt, the lead ship of a new class of destroyers. Inevitably, it will be a problem for ground-based HVP launchers deployed around assets they are supposed to protect……more here