Navy's laser and railgun programs on the chopping block

The Navy is fighting for them. [Link]

Lawmakers have traditionally left military research budgets intact, tinkering at the margins only when they feel money is being seriously misspent or the R&D projects are seriously off-track. Rarely, if ever, do they go after a service’s top research priority.

Last Friday, however, the Senate Armed Services Committee broke with tradition, and declared that Carr’s babies, the Free Electron Laser and the Electromagnetic Railgun, weren’t fit to grow up any more. The panel said funds for the programs should be terminated.

Neither project was in trouble — in fact, both had recently broken records in their respective fields. But in Washington’s new atmosphere of austerity, the ray gun and the railgun were suddenly considered futuristic luxuries, not the “game-changers” Carr had touted for so long.

The recommended recommended cuts took the Navy by surprise, according to ace naval reporter Sam LaGrone at Jane’s. Carr’s shop has said nothing since then, referring all questions to Big Navy.

Big Navy, at least, isn’t throwing in the towel.

“The programs were part of the president’s budget and we hope to see them in the final bill,” says Lt. Cmdr. Justin Cole, a Navy spokesman. “We will continue to work with Congress to answer any questions they may have about the programs in an effort to secure authorization and funding for their continuation.”

But the strongest advocate for both the Free Electron Laser and the railgun has been Carr himself. He told Danger Room in February that technology had basically maxed out the possibilities for hitting “maneuvering pieces of metal in the sky with other maneuvering pieces of metal.”

The solution, as Carr sees it, is hypersonic guns and multi-wavelength lasers. They’d allow the Navy’s surface ships to fire at targets from hundreds of miles away and burn incoming missiles out of the sky. For the Senate panel to put them on the chopping block is to ask the Navy to rewrite what it considers the future of surface-ship defense.