US considers canceling electromagnetic gun program

According to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the country is considering stopping the railgun program.

According to this source, the reason for considering stopping the development of electromagnetic weapons is related to the extremely expensive cost of research and development. Replacing the railgun program will be a less expensive weapon that uses conventional ammunition instead of the hypervelocity ammunition currently being tested on the railgun.

Before making the plan public, DARPA also released a report saying the Pentagon wanted to shift away from its decade-long railgun program.

The enormous size of the American electromagnetic gun.

What makes the railgun special is that instead of relying on traditional explosives like gunpowder, the high-tech weapon uses electricity to launch a projectile at speeds of up to 5,600 mph, or seven times the speed of sound.

The US Navy has been working on electromagnetic weapons since 2005 with defense contractors such as General Atomics and BAE Systems. The tests have cost about $500 million, DARPA said.

To carry out this program, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) focused on developing new technologies and broke the world record for energy delivered with a prototype electromagnetic weapon in 2010. Researchers fired a 23-pound projectile at 32 megajoules, enough to propel a projectile 100 nautical miles.

In July 2017, the US Navy released a video showing that it could fire four to eight rounds in a minute. In 2013, the Navy's Naval Sea Systems Command asked ONR to develop a railgun that could fire 10 rounds per minute and had a magazine capacity of 650 rounds.

According to the plan announced in 2015, the US estimated that electromagnetic weapons would be installed on Zumwalt-class destroyers in the mid-2020s. However, a recent report showed that there were some challenges with this advanced weapon and that more research time was needed.

Because up to now, although it has consumed a large budget, whether this weapon will be successful or not (in case of continued investment), even American defense contractors cannot guarantee.

While the US is quite vague when talking about plans to stop the electromagnetic railgun program, according to Russian military experts, the problem for the Americans is related to the insufficient energy source to supply the gun and the US technology is not yet advanced enough to perfect the railgun weapon.

On the other hand, Russia believes that the American "miracle weapon" is not a groundbreaking invention. In the 1980s, Soviet experts created a rail gun with a fairly simple design but fully embodied the principles that the US is currently using.

The bullet is fired from the barrel by the strong difference in electromagnetic field strength, not by the pressure created by the explosion in the barrel. The bullet is launched from the barrel at supersonic speed. This is its biggest advantage over conventional guns.

And Russian military expert Konstantin Sivkov pointed out its major drawback is that, to create electromagnetic thrust strong enough to launch metal projectiles at supersonic speeds, a huge power source and a super-large gun barrel size are needed, leading to a system that is too bulky and heavy.

Therefore, electromagnetic railguns created with currently available technologies cannot be used in combat. Due to their large size, under current conditions it is impossible to install railguns on tanks or create a self-propelled vehicle equipped with railguns.

Expert Konstantin Sivkov commented that even a ship as huge as the Zumwalt-class warship would have difficulty providing enough power to operate the railguns. Therefore, although the Americans have had successful experiments with electromagnetic weapons, they are only considered insignificant successes.

According to Baodatviet