Getting To The (Intermediate) Finish Line.

As was expected it was confirmed today about Zircon:

Trials of launching a missile from a naval vessel are planned to start at the end of the year. The Admiral Gorshkov-class frigate, also known as Project 22350, from the Northern Fleet will be used," the source said adding that earlier trials included launching Zircon missiles from land.

The sobbing of Russian old-fashioned navalists and other missile age and Augmented Salvo Equations denialists can be heard all over the place, but if Kinzhal closed off Russia's littoral and near (and even some remote) sea zones, deployment of 1000+ kilometer range Zircon on ocean-going ships and, consequently, submarines is a whole other story altogether. It ends modern naval warfare as we know it. So, what's next? An operational singularity until some form of more-or-less effective counter will be developed and that means a very long time. I stress again, sticking lasers on ships is not going to do it for a number of huge technological reasons which must be addressed before any serious talk about lasers as effective weapon begins.

So, for US Navy the only way is to get on with own hyper-sonic anti-shipping weapons. How far behind the US is in this race? Who knows, some people say 10-15 years, which in modern times is a hugely long time, once one considers the dynamics of military-technological developments. The key factor, however, for the US is not R&D, it is institutional inertia and gridlock which continues to prevent the US Navy from actually facing reality and forces it to remain, despite all public invocations of Distributed Lethality, a solidly carrier-centric navy with no real prospects for change which is long overdue. Remember this, always:

They are easy to remember and calculate. It is a primer for understanding a ruthless dynamic of modern warfare which removed already old delusions of a dying empire about warfare it thought it could wage with impunity. 

It’s time to look beyond the stirring images of infantrymen storming machine-gun nests created by Hollywood and to see war for what it is and will be in the future: the ruthless extermination of the enemy with accurate, devastating firepower from the sea, from the air, from space and from mobile, armored firepower on land.

I guess, the future has arrived already and don't tell me that I didn't warn about it.