October 30, 2025: Sixteen years ago the U.S. Navy decided that it could not replace the current 9,70o-ton Burke class destroyers with the new 15,600 -ton Zumwalt class design. What the Zumwalts lacked was a main gun that worked.

In 2013 the new 155mm Long Range Land Attack Projectile/ LRLAP GPS guided shell performed as expected and was fired out to 83 kilometers. It was only two years earlier, after six years of development, that the first successful test firing of the 155mm AGS took place. The navy wanted to replace existing 127mm guns on some warships with the AGS, if only because the 127mm gun has a much shorter range of 24 kilometers and uses only unguided ammo.

Designed for use on the new DDG 1000 Zumwalt destroyers, the AGS fires GPS guided shells up to 190 kilometers. Testing revealed that the shells worked at only about half the planned range. GPS guidance enables the shells to land inside a 50 meter circle. The AGS shells carry 11 kg of explosives. The AGS uses a water cooled barrel so it can fire ten rounds a minute for extended periods. Each AGS was accompanied by 335 rounds of ammo, which was loaded and fired automatically. The AGS shell was originally supposed to enter service in 2015. That has now been delayed indefinitely.

In early 2016 the navy revealed that the cost per shell had escalated to nearly half a million dollars, which was about ten times what the cost was supposed to be. By the end of 2016 the cost per shell was up to $800,000 and rising. Exactly why the costs had gone so far over budget had to do with the inability to make an ambitious AGS shell design work. This sort of thing is quite common in the peacetime military. This is especially true when the item in question depends on new technologies that have no track record of success and efforts to make them work end up as expensive failures.

Meanwhile, Chinese weapons designers have apparently solved the AGS problem with a novel new electromagnetic railgun cannon that can launch shells at speeds of over 8,000 kilometers an hour. That’s nearly 1,400 meters a second. The novel new barrel was designed to handle the high temperatures and pressure on the barrel without losing any precision, shell speed and range. The new railgun barrel incorporates a system to bleed off pressure in excess of what the rail gun needs to safely launch one 60 kg shell after another. These shells currently travel as far as 400 kilometers in about six minutes and arrive moving at speeds of nearly 5,000 kilometers an hour. Current anti-missile systems cannot handle incoming objects moving at those speeds, especially at such a small target.

For this to work, ships must be capable of producing enormous quantities of electrical energy on a continual basis. The conventional propulsion systems for generating that much electricity would require large quantities of fuel. The most obvious solution to that is only using the new electromagnetic cannon on nuclear-powered ships. The only such ships have been built by Russia and the United States. Germany, Japan and France have built and operated a few such ships, and could build large warships. While China has not done this, most of the world’s commercial shipping is built in China. China is also the largest builder of military warships for its own growing navy and exports.

So while Chinese shipbuilders are working out the design of nuclear-powered surface warships armed with electromagnetic cannon, other nations have an opportunity to reverse engineer the Chinese design. If all this takes place, we won’t know if the new Chinese rail gun is a reality, or another innovation that initially looked good but never survived the development stresses to become a stable, mass produced product.