Weapons

The U.S. Navy’s Railgun Is Nearly Dead in the Water

The U.S. Navy’s $500 million electromagnetic railgun—capable of slinging projectiles at hypersonic speeds—lacks funding and has no coherent plan to deploy on warships. The Navy is instead pursuing an offshoot of the railgun, a hypervelocity projectile it can fire from existing gun systems.

The electromagnetic railgun (EMRG) is a weapon that uses electricity instead of gunpowder to send projectiles downrange. Railguns use magnetic fields created by high electrical currents to accelerate a projectile to Mach 6, or 5,400 miles an hour. The velocity is sufficient to give the EMRG an effective range of 110 nautical miles, or 126 miles on land.

The Office of Naval Research began development of the gun in 2005, and by 2012 a technology demonstrator was firing projectiles at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division in Virginia. In 2015, the program was apparently doing so well the Navy announced plans to test the weapon from the USNS Trenton, an Expeditionary Fast Transport. In 2017, the Navy released a video of the Dahlgren gun firing multi-shot salvos.