The US Navy spent about sixteen years and nearly a billion dollars on an electromagnetic railgun. In 2021, it shelved the program. Now the same weapon is being drawn onto the bow of America's newest warship. Why?
Why it was abandoned
The Navy cited budget pressure and the difficulty of fitting the gun into a ship's combat system, as its money moved to hypersonic missiles. Barrel wear was the long-standing technical problem: the forces involved destroyed the rails after too few shots, and few ships had enough electrical power.
The interceptor maths
Missile salvos changed the argument. Firing an expensive interceptor at every incoming threat is not sustainable, and a gun projectile that costs a fraction of a missile looks very different when the threat is volume.
Japan solves the barrel problem
Japan kept working on the technology and became the first country to fire a railgun from a ship at sea. Meanwhile General Atomics never stopped development in the United States. The video follows how those threads come together on the USS Defiant.
Written by the WarTechX team from the research behind the video. Figures are rounded public numbers; full sources are listed in the video description on YouTube.
