President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the Navy will build “battleships” again was not the only blast from the past. If they are ever built, the ships would each feature an electromagnetic railgun, even though the Navy paused the program four years ago.
Railguns use electricity to create a magnetic field to launch a projectile at up to 5,600 miles per hour, or more than seven times the speed of sound. Unlike traditional artillery, they do not require chemical propellants such as gunpowder to fire rounds.
On Monday, Trump announced that the Navy would build between 20 and 25 of a new class of ships as part of his “Golden Fleet” shipbuilding effort, and that each vessel would bristle with a variety of armaments including “state-of-the-art electric railguns.”
The Navy also released a mock-up of the first vessel in the new battleship class, which shows the surface combatant is expected to have a 32 megajoule railgun on the bow of the ship. A railgun with that much power could fire a projectile more than 100 nautical miles, according to the Office of Naval Research.
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However miraculous the railgun’s capabilities might sound, the Navy has never been able to integrate railguns into the fleet and in July 2021, the service announced it was hitting the pause button on the program to make funding available for other weapons systems, such as hypersonic missiles and directed energy weapons.
One can be forgiven for thinking that was the end of the railgun altogether, but reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Although the Navy pushed pause on its efforts to put railguns on ships back in 2021, it has continued research into the weapon system itself, including its projectile, said Michael Fabey, a naval analyst with Janes, an open-source defense intelligence provider.
The Navy did not provide a comment for this story.
The railgun may have been resurrected, but some significant technical issues would need to be worked out before it can become a viable weapon for Navy ships.
One such issue is how to generate enough power for railguns, said retired Navy Capt. Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher with the RAND Corporation.
“What might make the railgun feasible for the battleship as conceived is that the ship is large and is expected to have the electrical power generation capacity to meet railgun demands,” Martin told Task & Purpose.
Another challenge would be finding a way to build a launching system that can withstand the heat and recoil of firing a projectile, he said. Solving that problem would likely require technological advances that would have to be made as part of the new battleship’s design and construction.
But President Trump said on Monday that he expects the Navy to produce the first two ships in about two-and-a-half years, and that’s not a lot of time to overcome any of the inherent challenges of building a new ship design. The USS Gerald R. Ford, America’s newest aircraft carrier, took eight years to build and then faced several technical challenges afterwards, and the ship didn’t make its first deployment in 2022 — more than five years after it was commissioned.
Even though the railgun has technical obstacles to overcome, it would be an effective weapon against the type of anti-ship ballistic missiles that China would use against the U.S. Navy in a war, said retired Capt. Brent Sadler, of the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C.
Sadler said he believes work on railguns should be accelerated with a focus on new types of warheads that it could fire.
In the meantime, a solution for one of the technical problems facing the railgun might be to change barrels frequently after firing until materials can be developed to build a gun barrel that can survive hundreds of projectile launches, he said.
Still, it’s unclear whether the railgun — and the new battleships — will ultimately become casualties of the Navy’s fraught shipbuilding record that has most recently seen the cancellation of the Constellation-class frigate.
For the moment, the railgun may be back from the dead — or near dead — but it’s a long way off from doing any live-firing from the deck of a warship.
