"Future U.S. Weapons of War That Should Be Canceled Now" Topic

"The Pentagon spends billions of dollars developing weapons every year, but often that money is squandered on projects that never bear fruit. Part of the problem is the Pentagon's byzantine acquisition process—but many weapons are simply ill conceived where a system is overburdened with competing requirements. In other cases, the Pentagon simply fails to fully take into consideration the kinds of threats it might be facing in the future.

Here are five examples of programs that should be canceled…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

1. "refine the current Ohio SSBN instead of a clean-slate design"

No real argument here. The Flight I/II/IIA/III refinement of the Burke DDGs has worked out really well for the USN. Proof that sometimes evolutionary is better than revolutionary.

2. Better USN UCAV

The article just critiqued the Navy for cramming untested tech into the SSBN design, but then advocates a bigger, more capable, stealthier UCAV? Does not compute.

3. LCS

We've covered the LCS in depth here on This Grate Site (tm). Not much to add here…

4. M1A3 Abrams

Disagree. The US is not primarily a land power. Our tanks really only need to be "pretty good", which they are. I understand his point about keeping the tank engineers employed. This is why I like the Russian approach of constantly churning out R&D prototypes for stuff, but not really putting much new hardware into operational service. We're still doing a terrible job of controlling costs though (FCS program, I'm looking at you!).

I agree with Noble on all counts, actually!

And Tango, didn't you already post this back on the 26th? You've Tango'd yourself!! :)

-Will

The M1A3 … Being an old former Mech Inf Cdr, I'd like the best MBT available supporting me. At one time or another way back in the day. I had M60s or M1IPs. '79-'90, back then they were pretty good.

I know GE had a contract years ago to try to create a Railgun system to fit to the M1A2. Dunno how that has been going. General Atomics has their smaller "Blitzer" system they have in the pipe for arty use.

I did?.
I'm getting old! (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Actually that was me.

No, the Ohio needs major upgrades to handle future requirements. Not least of which is the fact that by treaty the US has a limit on deployed nuclear warheads. That's why the Ohio Replacement Sub is planned to be the same overall size but only about half the birds carried (designs are varying between 12 and 16 birds).

Also, just to keep up with the Navy's fitness standards, the ORS would need a dedicated work-out space. Two treadmills and two exercise bikes is NOT enough for a crew of 180 to maintain their fitness levels.

And with the inclusion of females in the crew, you need to include female berthing and toilets/showers. Because an existing Ohio has TWO crew heads, each with 2 showers and ~4 porcelain thrones. Having a crew of ~160 using one while the 20 females use the other just doesn't work for any extended period of time.

So I'd be willing to guess that a refit to address those issues would cost very nearly as much as building a new design from scratch (the SSGN refit only modified the existing tubes, didn't remove half of them!). Not to mention that refitting the subs would take them out of service for ~4 years each.

Whoops, so it was. Apologies all!

-Will

Not sure why we're worried about treaties when the Russians have already broken them on numerous occasions (with us and Ukraine), say they won't be bound by them, and even just yesterday were bleating on about how their nuke missiles can't be stopped by our defenses.

Seems to me they are advocating for us to conduct a first strike, under the "…use them or lose them…" doctrine, though, of course, we won't do that.

Any harm here my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand