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Zumwalt's more of a technology demonstrator. And note, that they do plan to fit rail guns to the Zumwalt class later on, which is possible thanks to their incr

Zumwalt's more of a technology demonstrator. And note, that they do plan to fit rail guns to the Zumwalt class later on, which is possible thanks to their increased electrical capacity. They're not useless.

M_Grey 10y ago
They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat. All of this, for what? Our next adventure in the Middle East against an adversary armed with Russian surplus from the 80's? To stay ahead of the arms we sell to other countries, or the fantasy that a major war between superpowers would be conventional, rather than proxy or nuclear?
- GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
  You know why we're doing it. We need to deter a resurgent Russia and China. People like you thought that nukes made conventional militaries obsolete in the 50's. That was wrong then and it's wrong now. In order to maintain control of the seas and skies, we need to maintain our edge in aviation and in naval technology.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    "People like me"... always a non-starter; it tells me that you're arguing with a model of who I am in your head, that probably has more to do with the people you argued with in the past than anything to do with me. I don't think nukes end conventional militaries, but I think they end conventional conflicts between nuclear armed nations. That's why we're fighting Russia in a proxy war in Syria, and not with tanks in the Ukraine. As for China, how many times could our navy and air force obliterate them as it stands? Besides, they're just taking a page from our book, letting us front the R&D, then... stealing the designs. Much cheaper, much smarter.
    - johncolanduoni 10y ago
      "People like you" isn't a non-starter if they just mean "people who think nukes end the need for competitive conventional capabilities", and the justification for such a model can be gathered entirely in this thread.
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        The "like you" part may be completely unjustified - especially when M_Grey said "I don't think nukes end conventional militaries".
        johncolanduoni 10y ago
        He has however made it clear he thinks we don't need them to be competitive, which is why I used that word.
  - Agathos 10y ago
    It's a surface ship, so it doesn't have a prayer against a submarine. Russia, China, and any hypothetical technologically sophisticated foe all have submarines.
    - mcv 10y ago
      It most definitely has a prayer against a submarine. A carrier is never alone; it's always protected by a fleet that keeps an eye out for any threats, including submarines. That said, diesel-electric subs are definitely a weak spot for a carrier group.
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    Russian doctrine appears to be to overwhelm AEGIS et al with many, many missiles. After all, only one needs to get through to sink a 5 billion dollar (NOT including the aircraft and thousands of sailors on it!) carrier. Carriers are a prestige weapon now, like battleships in the 20th century: good for bullying brown people, useless in a "real" war. I don't see what the Zumwalt does about that.
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      Do you have citations for that?
    - gozur88 10y ago
      Carriers are not useless for "real" war. Not sure where you got that idea. We could probably spend that money more effectively, but for what government program isn't that true? And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored.
      - rangibaby 10y ago
        > Not sure where you got that idea. Like battleships, they are a big dumb target. The same way carriers and their aircraft made battleships obsolete modern anti-ship missiles have made carriers obsolete in a theoretical war between superpowers. Countries still covet them as a status symbol (or a way to spend taxpayer money), but I think that is about it. > And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored. That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
        gozur88 10y ago
        >Like battleships, they are a big dumb target. The same way carriers and their aircraft made battleships obsolete modern anti-ship missiles have made carriers obsolete in a theoretical war between superpowers. Yeah, except that's not actually true unless the war goes nuclear. Carriers are very well defended from air attack. The entire battle group is there to defend the carrier, which means aircraft-launched AA missiles, hundreds of SM-2s, plus point defense. Plus ECM and EM-type weapons. And that's assuming US forces aren't able to destroy any launch platforms, which is probably not a good assumption at this point. It's much harder to pull of a surprise attack than it used to be. >That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me. Yeah, that's pretty much the strategy everyone's been using since they switched from boarding actions to guns in the 1500s. The Russians can't actually mount that kind of attack any more without telegraphing it in a big way, since it would take nearly every remaining conventional bomber and naval asset in the Russian military to ensure success. Nobody else is capable at all unless the scenario posits a US carrier in shallow water off the coast of Shanghai. I'm not saying carriers are invulnerable. They're not. People make mistakes, and sometimes they're fatal. There are always variables that are impossible to evaluate without knowing the absolute latest top secret stuff. But a carrier group in the open ocean is a tough nut to crack, especially from the air, and attackers make mistakes too. It's far from obsolete.
  - Pokepokalypse 10y ago
    >We need to deter a resurgent Russia and China. . . . as if that has EVER worked. . .
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      You're getting down voted. Given that both China and Russia are currently well into extensive land/sea grabs and Russia is backing the opposition in a war the US is sponsoring (And not losing currently) I am unsure why.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    I believe the Russians have noticed this and are therefore resolved not to fight a conventional war with the US either. So what they're doing is expanding both "unconventional" and "deniable" warfare. Why fight a military when you can encourage a society's autoimmune response to destroy itself? https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-social-media-trump-russian https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-s... Not just Ukraine and Syria, where the influence is obvious, but I suspect we'll eventually find they have a hand in the collapse of democracy in Turkey. And there's the feeding of selective hacking attacks and pseudoscandals to the US press. They've even managed to get the director of the FBI to do their stirring for them. (Also, the Russian Navy is terrible and barely afloat, so clearly the Russians are going to do as much fighting as possible inland.)
- nradov 10y ago
  The US military leadership presumably intends to use them to re-fight the Pacific island-hopping campaign of WWII, except this time against China instead of Japan. The "Pivot to East Asia" starting in 2012 was the first step. They see the current Middle East conflicts as a minor distraction and are preparing for a major war in a couple decades. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    In this fever dream, do they not expect China, if pressed, to use nuclear weapons?
    - lsseckman 10y ago
      Additionally, won't most of the efforts & impact be cyber security? The ole "what good is an army with no orders"
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    The purpose of advanced weapons, in the context of a frenemy like China, is not to prepare for war but to prevent the temptation of war: deterrence. The "pivot to Asia" is primarily economic, which is why President Obama has pushed the TPP so hard. For the last 50 years (at least) the oil in the Middle East has been crucial to American economic security. That is rapidly becoming no longer true because of fracking, renewables, and improving efficiency. Oil is decoupling from U.S. economic growth, so the U.S. can (somewhat) decouple from the Middle East. So if oil is not going to be the limiting factor on future U.S. economic growth, what will be? Technology and trade are good bets, and Asia is ripe for enormous growth in both.
- gozur88 10y ago
  >They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat. Well... yeah. That's true of every new ship design. Well, not the useless part. This ship isn't useless either, though you can certainly make the case it's too expensive for what it does.
- mcv 10y ago
  > They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat. They're unproven because they're new. They apparently put a bunch of new tech on them, in order to prove them. Proven tech doesn't magically drop out of the sky, you've got to build and test it first. And as far as I understand it, that's what the Zumwalt class is for. I'm not saying they're good or an efficient use of money, I'm just pointing out that the "unproven" argument is out of place here. You need to start somewhere to prove them, or you'll forever end up using yesterday's technology. (Though I admit yesterday's military technology is looking pretty good these days.)
vilhelm_s 10y ago
What are the chances that the rail guns will ever be installed if they can't even afford bullets for the regular guns?
- Swizec 10y ago
  Isn't the point of rail guns that you can use any lump of feromagnetic material and it gets so mich kinetic energy that no explosives are needed? If yes, then those bullets should be really really cheap.
  - dmckeon 10y ago
    Heard a comment from a recently deployed logistics guy: "A great projectile for a rail gun would be a used-up double-A battery - we always have plenty of those."
  - trhway 10y ago
    >can use any lump of feromagnetic material and it gets so mich kinetic energy that no explosives are needed? If yes, then those bullets should be really really cheap. it isn't explosives that costs money. A typical $3K "dumb" bomb is made "smart" by bolting-on $25K JDAM guidance kit. When Lockheed Martin is done with that "lump of feromagnetic material" you'll wish it was made of gold instead :)
  - vilhelm_s 10y ago
    No, the rail-gun projectile will be a fairly sophisticated thing. It has to have a guidance system to be able to hit things at long range, so it includes a lot of electronics. (Similar, in fact, to the projectile in the article we are commenting on now.) But the projectile is not the most tricky part. The plan is to develop a single "hypervelocity projectile" which can be fired by both chemical and rail guns, so it seems likely that that part will work out. The rail gun itself needs a lot more research and development to get to a usable form. See e.g. this rather pessimistic article[0]. Meanwhile, the Navy doesn't care enough about the Zuwalt guns to even buy ammunition for them. How much will they spend on building a better gun? [0] http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/06/can-navys-electric-cannon-be-saved/128793/ http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/06/can-navys-elect...
desdiv 10y ago
>Zumwalt's more of a technology demonstrator. The navy originally planed 32 ships, so it was definitely not intended to be a demonstrator.
- defap 10y ago
  Pretty sure the parent was talking about USS Zumwalt specifically, not the Zumwalt class as a whole. It's not unreasonable to consider the first hull a demonstrator at this point. There'd be countless improvements made as the class design matured over the course of a 32 hull production run.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

M_Grey 10y ago

They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat. All of this, for what? Our next adventure in the Middle East against an adversary armed with Russian surplus from the 80's? To stay ahead of the arms we sell to other countries, or the fantasy that a major war between superpowers would be conventional, rather than proxy or nuclear?

GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
You know why we're doing it. We need to deter a resurgent Russia and China. People like you thought that nukes made conventional militaries obsolete in the 50's. That was wrong then and it's wrong now. In order to maintain control of the seas and skies, we need to maintain our edge in aviation and in naval technology.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  "People like me"... always a non-starter; it tells me that you're arguing with a model of who I am in your head, that probably has more to do with the people you argued with in the past than anything to do with me. I don't think nukes end conventional militaries, but I think they end conventional conflicts between nuclear armed nations. That's why we're fighting Russia in a proxy war in Syria, and not with tanks in the Ukraine. As for China, how many times could our navy and air force obliterate them as it stands? Besides, they're just taking a page from our book, letting us front the R&D, then... stealing the designs. Much cheaper, much smarter.
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    "People like you" isn't a non-starter if they just mean "people who think nukes end the need for competitive conventional capabilities", and the justification for such a model can be gathered entirely in this thread.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      The "like you" part may be completely unjustified - especially when M_Grey said "I don't think nukes end conventional militaries".
      - johncolanduoni 10y ago
        He has however made it clear he thinks we don't need them to be competitive, which is why I used that word.
- Agathos 10y ago
  It's a surface ship, so it doesn't have a prayer against a submarine. Russia, China, and any hypothetical technologically sophisticated foe all have submarines.
  - mcv 10y ago
    It most definitely has a prayer against a submarine. A carrier is never alone; it's always protected by a fleet that keeps an eye out for any threats, including submarines. That said, diesel-electric subs are definitely a weak spot for a carrier group.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  Russian doctrine appears to be to overwhelm AEGIS et al with many, many missiles. After all, only one needs to get through to sink a 5 billion dollar (NOT including the aircraft and thousands of sailors on it!) carrier. Carriers are a prestige weapon now, like battleships in the 20th century: good for bullying brown people, useless in a "real" war. I don't see what the Zumwalt does about that.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    Do you have citations for that?
  - gozur88 10y ago
    Carriers are not useless for "real" war. Not sure where you got that idea. We could probably spend that money more effectively, but for what government program isn't that true? And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored.
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      > Not sure where you got that idea. Like battleships, they are a big dumb target. The same way carriers and their aircraft made battleships obsolete modern anti-ship missiles have made carriers obsolete in a theoretical war between superpowers. Countries still covet them as a status symbol (or a way to spend taxpayer money), but I think that is about it. > And it would take more than one hit to sink a carrier. These are 100k+ ton ships, and the important bits are armored. That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me.
      - gozur88 10y ago
        >Like battleships, they are a big dumb target. The same way carriers and their aircraft made battleships obsolete modern anti-ship missiles have made carriers obsolete in a theoretical war between superpowers. Yeah, except that's not actually true unless the war goes nuclear. Carriers are very well defended from air attack. The entire battle group is there to defend the carrier, which means aircraft-launched AA missiles, hundreds of SM-2s, plus point defense. Plus ECM and EM-type weapons. And that's assuming US forces aren't able to destroy any launch platforms, which is probably not a good assumption at this point. It's much harder to pull of a surprise attack than it used to be. >That's why the Russian idea is to just bombard them with missiles until enough they poke enough holes in them to sink or disable them. It seems like a reasonable strategy to me. Yeah, that's pretty much the strategy everyone's been using since they switched from boarding actions to guns in the 1500s. The Russians can't actually mount that kind of attack any more without telegraphing it in a big way, since it would take nearly every remaining conventional bomber and naval asset in the Russian military to ensure success. Nobody else is capable at all unless the scenario posits a US carrier in shallow water off the coast of Shanghai. I'm not saying carriers are invulnerable. They're not. People make mistakes, and sometimes they're fatal. There are always variables that are impossible to evaluate without knowing the absolute latest top secret stuff. But a carrier group in the open ocean is a tough nut to crack, especially from the air, and attackers make mistakes too. It's far from obsolete.
- Pokepokalypse 10y ago
  >We need to deter a resurgent Russia and China. . . . as if that has EVER worked. . .
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    You're getting down voted. Given that both China and Russia are currently well into extensive land/sea grabs and Russia is backing the opposition in a war the US is sponsoring (And not losing currently) I am unsure why.
- pjc50 10y ago
  I believe the Russians have noticed this and are therefore resolved not to fight a conventional war with the US either. So what they're doing is expanding both "unconventional" and "deniable" warfare. Why fight a military when you can encourage a society's autoimmune response to destroy itself? https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-social-media-trump-russian https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-s... Not just Ukraine and Syria, where the influence is obvious, but I suspect we'll eventually find they have a hand in the collapse of democracy in Turkey. And there's the feeding of selective hacking attacks and pseudoscandals to the US press. They've even managed to get the director of the FBI to do their stirring for them. (Also, the Russian Navy is terrible and barely afloat, so clearly the Russians are going to do as much fighting as possible inland.)
nradov 10y ago
The US military leadership presumably intends to use them to re-fight the Pacific island-hopping campaign of WWII, except this time against China instead of Japan. The "Pivot to East Asia" starting in 2012 was the first step. They see the current Middle East conflicts as a minor distraction and are preparing for a major war in a couple decades. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  In this fever dream, do they not expect China, if pressed, to use nuclear weapons?
  - lsseckman 10y ago
    Additionally, won't most of the efforts & impact be cyber security? The ole "what good is an army with no orders"
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  The purpose of advanced weapons, in the context of a frenemy like China, is not to prepare for war but to prevent the temptation of war: deterrence. The "pivot to Asia" is primarily economic, which is why President Obama has pushed the TPP so hard. For the last 50 years (at least) the oil in the Middle East has been crucial to American economic security. That is rapidly becoming no longer true because of fracking, renewables, and improving efficiency. Oil is decoupling from U.S. economic growth, so the U.S. can (somewhat) decouple from the Middle East. So if oil is not going to be the limiting factor on future U.S. economic growth, what will be? Technology and trade are good bets, and Asia is ripe for enormous growth in both.
gozur88 10y ago
>They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat. Well... yeah. That's true of every new ship design. Well, not the useless part. This ship isn't useless either, though you can certainly make the case it's too expensive for what it does.
mcv 10y ago
> They're useless and expensive, and utterly unproven in anything like combat. They're unproven because they're new. They apparently put a bunch of new tech on them, in order to prove them. Proven tech doesn't magically drop out of the sky, you've got to build and test it first. And as far as I understand it, that's what the Zumwalt class is for. I'm not saying they're good or an efficient use of money, I'm just pointing out that the "unproven" argument is out of place here. You need to start somewhere to prove them, or you'll forever end up using yesterday's technology. (Though I admit yesterday's military technology is looking pretty good these days.)

vilhelm_s 10y ago

What are the chances that the rail guns will ever be installed if they can't even afford bullets for the regular guns?

Swizec 10y ago
Isn't the point of rail guns that you can use any lump of feromagnetic material and it gets so mich kinetic energy that no explosives are needed? If yes, then those bullets should be really really cheap.
- dmckeon 10y ago
  Heard a comment from a recently deployed logistics guy: "A great projectile for a rail gun would be a used-up double-A battery - we always have plenty of those."
- trhway 10y ago
  >can use any lump of feromagnetic material and it gets so mich kinetic energy that no explosives are needed? If yes, then those bullets should be really really cheap. it isn't explosives that costs money. A typical $3K "dumb" bomb is made "smart" by bolting-on $25K JDAM guidance kit. When Lockheed Martin is done with that "lump of feromagnetic material" you'll wish it was made of gold instead :)
- vilhelm_s 10y ago
  No, the rail-gun projectile will be a fairly sophisticated thing. It has to have a guidance system to be able to hit things at long range, so it includes a lot of electronics. (Similar, in fact, to the projectile in the article we are commenting on now.) But the projectile is not the most tricky part. The plan is to develop a single "hypervelocity projectile" which can be fired by both chemical and rail guns, so it seems likely that that part will work out. The rail gun itself needs a lot more research and development to get to a usable form. See e.g. this rather pessimistic article[0]. Meanwhile, the Navy doesn't care enough about the Zuwalt guns to even buy ammunition for them. How much will they spend on building a better gun? [0] http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/06/can-navys-electric-cannon-be-saved/128793/ http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/06/can-navys-elect...

desdiv 10y ago

>Zumwalt's more of a technology demonstrator. The navy originally planed 32 ships, so it was definitely not intended to be a demonstrator.

defap 10y ago
Pretty sure the parent was talking about USS Zumwalt specifically, not the Zumwalt class as a whole. It's not unreasonable to consider the first hull a demonstrator at this point. There'd be countless improvements made as the class design matured over the course of a 32 hull production run.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]