The US Navy says they are abandoning their rail gun project. The Hill. The project would have created a ship weapon that would use large amounts of electricity to launch a projectile at seven times the speed of sound. The project was to be used on the Zumwalt class destroyers but the project was shelved. The project had $500 million spent on it. The project had largely failed as the range was not better than enemy missiles. The money that would have been spent on the project will be spent on hypersonic missiles to keep pace with China and Russia.
My Comment:
I've got mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand it's always wise to not throw good money after bad. This program never got the results it was promising. They could never get the range they wanted and reliability was always a problem.
And I think there is a point about the Russians and Chinese beating us in terms of hypersonic weapons. Both countries have a major advantage in those weapons and we need to close the gap. If we have to choose between them and hypersonic weapons I think we have to choose the hypersonic weapons. Those weapons are a major threat to our nuclear deterrent and if we lose that advantage than we could lose any nuclear war that could happen. That's not acceptable.
On the other hand, these weapons were a lot better than our conventional shells and missiles on our ships. It also makes the Zumwalt class pretty redundant, which was probably going to happen anyways. And given how many trillions of dollars the US government has spent I bet they could find more money to complete this program.
The good news is that the research that was already done can be kept. Perhaps this technology could be revisited in the future, maybe when we have developed hypersonic weapons. Being able to use railguns to target surface ships and land targets may remain a dream for now but someday we might actually be able to do so.
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