I don't know what's more surprising: that the Pentagon just canceled a program that it spent over a quarter of a billion dollars developing, or that it doesn't cancel such weapons more often. whatever the case, the U.S. Navy just pulled the plug on the Extended-Range Guided Munition, a GPS-guided projectile that was designed to provide coverage to Marines storming a beach.
To date, the Navy had spent approximately $350 million on the weapon system, which was developed by Raytheon. Oh yeah, $350 million is peanuts compared to development costs of, say, the F-22 stealth fighter. But $350 million is still a lot of money. "The Navy says it has spent about $350 million on the Extended-Range Guided Munition, a high-tech projectile designed to be fired from Navy destroyers up to 50 miles offshore, since it launched the program in 1996," Reuters reports on the cancellation. "After years of problems, the time had come to move in a different direction, officials said. 'We were not seeing the return on the investment that we had hoped to see,' said Navy spokeswoman Patricia Dolan."
The long-troubled ERGM program led the Navy to conduct a "shoot off" with Alliant Techsystems' ballistic trajectory extended-range munition (BTERM). But that munition has also had problems. The ERGM problems long played into a larger issue over naval surface fire support; Battleship proponents argued that the big caliber guns of years past would have been far superior. There were even proposals to resurrect a couple of the old "battlewagons," something that appears rather unlikely. The irony off all this, of course, was that the ERGM was designed to be an interim solution until new destroyers were fielded with newer, long-range guns (and eventually, railguns). The ERGM cancellation, however, means the Navy now how an unmet requirement for naval surface fire support.
Then again, skeptics will point out: when was the last time Marines stormed a beach?
