The Navy’s railgun may be back from the dead — for now
President Donald Trump announced that the Navy’s new “battleships” will each be armed with “state-of-the-art electric railguns.”
Jeff Schogol
Published Dec 23, 2025 4:03 PM EST
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.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-railgun-battleships/
