Japan Built the Weapon the US Couldn't

In October 2023, something happened that

defense analysts have been waiting

decades to see. Out on the gray waters

off of the Japanese coast, a ship called

JS Auka fired a gun. Not a particularly

large gun, 40 mm, about the width of a

golf ball. But this gun didn't use

gunpowder. It did something really,

really cool. It used electricity. A five

megajoule pulse from a bank of

capacitors dumped into two parallel

rails in a fraction of a second

accelerating a small metal dart to

around 2,230 m/s. That's roughly Mac

6.5, about twice as fast as the fastest

rifle bullets. So, uh, really bloody

quick. It was the first time in history

that a rail gun had been fired from a

ship at sea. And then in 2025, they did

it again. Same ship, same gun, but this

time they actually pointed it at

something. the target vessel under toe

and they hit it many, many times,

putting many, many holes in it. This is

the weapon that navies have been

dreaming about for over a century.

Hypersonic projectiles that cost almost

nothing compared to missiles. Plus,

there's no explosive propellant to cook

off if you take a hit. You've got

unlimited ammunition. Theoretically, as

long as you've got electricity and some

metal, it's all rather fantastic.

Indeed, the United States Navy spent 15

years on somewhere north of half a

billion dollars trying to make a rail

gun work. They got some spectacular test

footage, but they never got a gun on a

ship with the program quietly shelved in

2021. China reportedly mounted something

rail gunshaped on a landing ship a few

years back, but we never saw anything

much come from it. And yet, here's

Japan, a country that technically

doesn't even call its navy a navy with a

working electromagnetic cannon bolted to

the deck of a test ship firing

hypersonic rounds into the hulls of

target vessels. So, how'd that happen?

How did a midsize naval power leaprog

everybody else? What does the gun

actually do? And what is it for? And

also, is this the moment rail guns

finally move from concept art to the

front line, or is this just another

really, really expensive America half a

billion dollars dead end. Today, we're

looking at Japan's electromagnetic rail

gun program, the experimental ship

JSuka, and what might be the most

significant development in naval gunnery

since the missile made big old guns

obsolete. Just before we continue with

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today's episode,

the big problem.

All right. To understand why Japan is

pouring resources into an

electromagnetic cannon, you need to

understand the problem that they are

trying to solve. And that problem starts

with those missiles we just mentioned.

You see, for most of the 20th century,

naval warfare was dominated by big guns

on big ships making big bangs.

Battleships lobbed shells the size of

small cars at each other from a long way

away, and whoever had the bigger gun and

the thicker armor generally won. But

after World War II, guided missiles

changed everything. Suddenly, you didn't

need a 16-in gun and a crew of thousands

to sink a capital ship. You needed a

relatively little missile with a

guidance system launched from a

destroyer, an aircraft, or even just a

truck on the shore. The gun age gave way

to the missile age, and navies around

the world raced to fill their ships with

vertical launch cells packed with guided

weapons. Here's the thing about

missiles, though. They are really,

reallying

expensive. A single SM2 interceptor

costs somewhere north of a million

dollars. The newer SM6, which can handle

faster and more complex targets, runs

closer at $4 to5 million per shot. A

modern destroyer can only carry so many

of these as well. Typically between 90

and 120 vertical launch cells, which is

an extraordinary amount of money, and

those cells have to be able to handle

everything from air defense to

anti-ubmarine rockets to land attack

cruise missiles. Oh, and you can't

reload them at sea. Once you've fired

what you've got, you're heading back to

port to get some more. Now, think about

what happens if someone decides to throw

a lot of missiles at you all at once.

This is something that military planners

have a word for. It's called a

saturation attack, and it's become the

defining nightmare of modern naval

warfare. The idea is a really simple

one. A ship can only engage, say, a

dozen incoming missiles at the same

time. If you launch 50 missiles, some of

those missiles are going to get through.

And if each of your interceptors costs

$4 billion while the attacker's cruise

missile cost a few hundred,000 each,

well, you've got an economic program

really fast, don't you? And well, this

is the strategic environment Japan finds

itself in. To the west, China has spent

two decades building up one of the

largest missile arsenals on the planet,

including anti-hship ballistic missiles

designed specifically to keep American

and Allied warships at arms length, plus

hypersonic glide vehicles that can

maneuver unpredictably at speeds up to

Mac 5. To the north, North Korea keeps

adding to its own stockpile of ballistic

missiles. Japan, of course, sits within

range of all of it, and its maritime

self-defense forces are central to any

plan for defending the sea lanes and

island chains that define the region.

And that brings us back to the topic

today, that rail gun. You see, on paper,

an electromagnetic gun solves almost

every problem in that equation. The

projectiles, they're hypersonic, fast

enough to catch most airborne threats.

They're inner metal. No explosive

warhead, which means no volatile

propellant magazine waiting to blow the

up inside your boat if you take a hit.

And the ammunition is really cheap. A

shaped metal dart costs a tiny tiny

fraction of what a guided missile costs.

And your magazine depth is limited only

by how much electricity your ship can

generate and how many slugs you can

stack in it. That means that defending

against a saturation attack stops being

a question of uh-oh, do we have enough

interceptors and starts being a question

of h can we keep the capacitors charged?

If so, we're going to be fine. So, yeah,

that's the promise. But these things do

have a tendency to not really work very

well at all.

Rail guns 101.

Okay, so let's now talk about how these

things actually work, shall we? A rail

gun is at its core quite a simple idea.

You take two parallel metal rails,

usually copper or a copper alloy, and

you run them down the length of a

barrel. At the back, you place a

conductive projectile, called an

armature, by the way, that bridges the

gap between the two rails, completing an

electrical circuit. Then you dump an

absolutely enormous amount of energy

into that whole thing. When that current

flows up one rail, crosses the armature,

back down the other, it creates a

powerful magnetic field between the

rails. That magnetic field interacts

with the current flowing through the

armature. And the result is something

called a Lorent force. A shove of pure

electromagnetic energy that accelerates

the projectile forward along the rails

and out of the barrel at tremendous

speed. And well, off it goes to ruin

someone's day. Simple in theory, right?

I mean, I feel like Mark Rob could

probably build one of these in a

weekend. The problem is simple in theory

and actually works reliably are very

different things when you're talking

about the kind of energies involved

here. A conventional naval gun fires

shells at maybe 800 to 900 m/s. Fast,

yep, but certainly not fast enough to

catch a hypersonic missile. A rail gun

can launch projectiles at 2,000 m/s or

more. It's 2 km a second. Like that's

like 1.5 m Americans. That's Mac 6 or

Mac 7 depending on the design. which is

fast enough to intercept things that

conventional guns simply cannot touch.

And it means the projectile carries

enormous kinetic energy even without an

explosive payload. A small metal dart

moving at those speeds hits with the

force of a much larger conventional

round. And because you're not limited by

the sizes of expensive missile tubes,

your effective magazine is as deep as

your power supply and your stack of

slugs. In theory, you could fire

hundreds of rounds in a sustained

engagement and not run dry. But you're

probably beginning to see the problem.

All of this just sounds perfect. And

rail guns have sounded perfect for a

really longass time. The basic physics

has been understood since the 19th

century. Scientists and military

planners have been kicking around

practical rail gun concepts since at

least the 1940s. So why isn't every navy

in the world already using them?

The physics tax.

Well, the first problem's power. To

accelerate a projectile to max 6 or

seven, you need to dump an enormous

amount of energy into those rails in a

really short period of time, several

megajoules delivered in a matter of

milliseconds. That kind of instantaneous

power does not come from a standard

ship's electrical system. You need

massive banks of capacitors that can

charge up slowly and then discharge all

at once, plus the switching gear and

cabling to handle currents that would

just vaporize ordinary wiring. Early

rail gun power systems were the size of

shipping containers. Fitting them onto a

warship alongside everything else a

warship needs was a challenging to put

it mildly. The second problem is what

happens inside the barrel when you

actually fire the thing. You've got a

metal projectile sliding along metal

rails at hypersonic speeds with millions

of amps of current flowing through the

contact points. The friction is immense.

So is the heat. Every single shot

ablates the surface of the rails,

gouging and warping the metal, degrading

the precise engineering that the whole

system depends on. Fire enough rounds

and your rails get pretty ruined, which

isn't great for future usage. And that

leads directly to the third problem, the

rate of fire. If your barrel is

essentially a consumable that wears out

after 30 or 40 shots, then your

effective rate of fire drops to whatever

pace lets you swap barrels in the middle

of a fight, which is to say no pace at

all. A rail gun that can fire one

spectacular shot and then needs

maintenance isn't really much of a

weapon. A rail gun that can fire

continuously, shot after shot, minute

after minute, while enemy missiles are

streaking towards your ship, now that's

a weapon. And for decades, nobody could

figure out how to make the barrels last

long enough to matter.

The cautionary tales.

All right, so the most famous attempt

was the US Navy's electromagnetic rail

gun program, which ran in earnest from

the mid-200s through to 2021. They built

test rigs that could hurl projectiles at

max 7. They produced dramatic footage of

Sabat streaking downrange in balls of

fire. They talked about 100 nautical

mile ranges and rates of fire that would

make a conventional gun crew weep with

envy. The goal was an enormous one. A

150 mm 32 megajjoule monster that could

replace traditional naval gunfire

support entirely. And to that, all we

can say is, "Holy [ __ ] that would be

ridiculous." But alas, reality showed

up. The barrels wore out after a few

dozen shots of full power. The power

systems were enormous beasts that didn't

fit neatly onto existing ship designs.

The rate of fire never got close to what

you would need for practical air

defense. In 2021, the Navy pulled the

plug and redirected the money toward

hypersonic missiles. No American warship

ever sailed with a working rail gun on

deck. The Americans weren't the only

ones trying, though. China reportedly

mounted something rail gunshaped on a

landing ship called the Hayang Shan back

in 2018. Photos did circulate online

showing a large turret with cables

snaking across the deck, and defense

analysts spent weeks trying to figure

out what they were looking at. After the

initial excitement, nothing followed. No

announcements, no test footage, no

operational deployments. Then over in

Europe, the French German Research

Institute of St. Louis, known as ISL,

has been quietly plugging away at

electromagnetic launch technology for

years, operating small caliber lab

launches, and contributing to the

theoretical groundwork. And yeah, it's

useful research, sure, but these are all

laboratory experiments rather than

anything approaching a deployable

weapon. And that's really the key point.

Until very recently, nobody had publicly

demonstrated a rail gun firing from a

ship that was actually floating in the

ocean, dealing with all the vibration,

power fluctuations, and environmental

chaos that comes with being at sea. That

particular milestone belonged to exactly

one country that wasn't any of the usual

suspects. And you know who it is, cuz

the title of this video, we've mentioned

it many times. It's Japan.

Japan's rail gun program.

Japan's rail gun story starts much

earlier than most people actually

realize. Back in the 1990s, researchers

of what would eventually become ATLA,

the Acquisition Technology and Logistics

Agency, Japan's Defense R&D arm, were

already tinkering with electromagnetic

launch at the ground systems research

center. These were not weapons in any

practical sense. They were tiny 16 mm

Bortest rigs, the kind of thing you'd

find in a university physics lab,

designed to help engineers understand

the basic behavior of projectiles under

electromagnetic acceleration. It was

foundational work. The sort of slow,

methodical research that doesn't make

headlines, but quickly builds the

knowledge base you need before you can

attempt anything more ambitious. For

years, that's where Japan's rail gun

program stayed. Small scale academic

papers, incremental progress. Nobody was

talking about putting these things on a

ship. That changed around 2015, 2016.

The Japanese Ministry of Defense had

been watching what was happening

elsewhere. the American program with its

impressive test shots and equally

impressive problem and why they decided

it was time that they got serious.

Officials conducted a formal survey of

global rail gun work, assessed where the

technology stood, and kicked off a

full-scale development program with

actual military applications in mind.

The stated goals were clear and

pragmatic. First, increase projectile

velocity. Second, improve rail

durability, solve the barrelware problem

that had plagued everyone else. And

third, build a mediumcaliber rail gun

that could eventually be deployed on

ships or land-based platforms. This

wasn't blue sky research anymore. This

was a weapons program with a

destination.

The 40 mm gun that changed everything.

The centerpiece of the new program was a

40 mm medium caliber rail gun. And this

is the weapon that would eventually make

history on a Suzuka. The projectiles it

fires are essentially metal darts about

16 cm long, weighing roughly 320 gram,

about the same as a full can of soda.

The Atl has tested two main types. A

single piece steel dart and a composite

armor-piercing round. Neither one

contains any explosive filler because

that's just unnecessary at these speeds.

That 320 g dart leaves the barrel

carrying roughly the same kinetic energy

as a heavy car traveling at highway

speeds, except all of that energy is

concentrated into a nose. was the size

of a single finger dip. But the real

headline wasn't the speed, it was the

durability. Atler announced that the

40mm prototype had fired 120 consecutive

rounds of velocities above 2,000 m a

second with limited rail damage.

120 shots, all at operational speeds,

and the barrel was still usable

afterward. For a technology that had

killed programs because barrels wore out

after a few dozen firings, this was a

real breakthrough. Whatever the Japanese

team were doing differently was

absolutely working. Two engineering

obsessions defined the Japanese approach

and they explain why this program

succeeded while others stalled. The

first was barrel life. Naturally,

Atlas's engineers attacked the erosion

problem from multiple angles,

experimenting with rail materials,

armature designs, and the way current

flows through the system during firing.

The details remain closely guarded, but

symposium photographs showed rail

segments near the brereech, the area

that typically takes the worst

punishment. They were looking remarkably

clean after those 120 shots. The worst

damage in earlier American tests had

occurred at precisely that critical

start point where the current density is

highest. The Japanese had clearly found

ways to manage the thermal and

electrical stresses that defeated those

earlier designs. The second obsession

was miniaturization. A rail gun is

useless if the power system is so

enormous you can't fit it on a ship.

Japan's answer was a power module built

around ceramic film capacitors and

gallium oxide power electronics

components that can handle extreme

voltages and currents while taking up

far less space than older technologies.

The whole system was designed to fit

into a standard shipping container which

made it much easier to transport and

install on a test vessel. But that's

just the starting point. All's official

roadmap calls for shrinking the charger

volume by around 50% over 5 years and

reducing capacitor volume by roughly 90%

over the next decade. If they hit those

targets, future versions could fit

comfortably on frontline destroyers or

even land-based vehicles.

Learning from other people's expensive

mistakes.

Now, Japan didn't figure this all out in

isolation. From late 2023 through mid

2024, Atlas secounded an engineer to a

US Navy research institute to study

American electromagnetic weapons up

close. A Japanese researcher walking

through the tests where the Americans

had spent years chasing the rail gun

dream, pouring over the data from a

program that had ultimately been shelved

trying to extract every possible lesson

about what went wrong and why. Why did

the materials fail? What power

architectures proved unworkable? I mean,

the Americans might have given up on

their rail gun, but the knowledge they

accumulated is really expensive

knowledge that shouldn't die with the

program. And then in 2024, Japan signed

a trilateral cooperation agreement with

France and Germany, working through the

ISL research institute. The agreement

covers knowledge sharing on rail guns

and hypersonic projectiles, giving Japan

access to decades of European research

while contributing its own breakthroughs

to the partnership. By 2022, the program

had matured enough to enter a new phase,

officially designated research on future

rail gun in Ministry of Defense

documents. The timeline runs through

roughly 2026, and the focus has shifted

significantly. Early work, you see, was

all about the launcher itself. Could you

build rails that survived? Could you

generate enough power? Could you achieve

the velocities you needed? Now, though,

the emphasis is on turning that launcher

into a complete weapon system. That

means continuous fire rather than single

shots. the ability to keep pulling the

trigger without waiting minutes between

rounds for capacitors to recharge. It

means fire control integration,

connecting the gun to radars and

targeting computers so that it can

actually hit something that's moving at

hypersonic speeds. And it means

projectile stability and aerodynamics,

ensuring the rounds fly true after

leaving the barrel instead of tumbling

around and losing energy. They're aiming

for a small caliber shipbased anti-ship

prototype around 2027. By 2028, the goal

is a medium caliber air defense version

suitable for ships, land-based

platforms, or vehicles. But before any

of that could happen, Japan needed to

prove the concept worked at sea. They

had a gun that performed impressively on

land. Now they needed a ship big enough,

weird enough to bolt it onto and sail it

out into the ocean.

JSU, the floating laboratory.

JS Assuka is one of the strangest ships

in any Navy's fleet, and that is

precisely why she was perfect for this

job. Launched in 1994 and commissioned

the following year, Assuka is Japan's

dedicated experimental vessel, a

one-of-a-kind ship whose entire purpose

is to test equipment that isn't ready

for frontline service yet. She's around

151 m long and displaces somewhere

between 4,250 and 6,200 tons, depending

on what's bolted onto her at any given

time, which varies, of course, depending

on her role. The propulsion system is a

cog lag arrangement combined gas turbine

electric and gas turbine. If you're

wondering, I wasn't writer, but uh I

guess now I know. Built around two

General Electric LM2500 gas turbines,

the same gas engines that power warships

all over the world. She can move when

she needs to, but speed, it's not really

the point. The point is providing a

stable, well equipped platform where

engineers can try things that might not

work. Over her three decades of service,

she's been the testing ground for an

extraordinary range of technologies. The

FCS3 radar system, which now forms the

backbone of air defense on Japan's Aegis

equivalent destroyers that was tested on

AUKA. The QQQ series sonar system, also

tested on a Suka. The Type 07 vertical

launch antiubmarine rocket, the Type 12

torpedo, the type 12 surfaceto- ship

missile, all of them were on this

experimental ship before they entered

flight line service. By the early 2020s,

the rail gun program was ready for

exactly that kind of test. and Assuka

was ready to receive the strangest cargo

of her long career. Installing the rail

gun on the Asuka, it's definitely not a

subtle operation. If you look at

photographs of the ship in her current

configuration, the first thing you

notice is the turret sitting on the rear

deck ahead of the superructure. It's a

boxy angular housing weighing roughly 8

tons with a 6 m barrel protruding from

the front. It looks less like a

traditional naval gun and more like

something from a science fiction stat.

All hard edges and industrial purpose.

Behind the turret, clustered on the

deck, sits several large shipping

containers. One houses the charger units

and power electronics, the gallium oxide

switches and control systems that manage

the flow of electricity. Three more hold

the capacitor banks capable of storing

the energy needed and dumping into the

rails in the instant of firing. The

power flows exactly how you'd expect.

The Suka's gas turbine generators feed

electrical power into the charging

system. The chargers slowly fill the

capacitor banks over seconds or minutes.

Then when the trigger is pulled, all of

that stored energy dumps into the rails

in milliseconds, accelerating the

projectile from zero to max 6.5 before

it clears the barrel. Asuka was ideal

for this precisely because she was built

to handle the unexpected. Unlike a

frontline destroyer, where every square

meter is accounted for, Auga has room

for containerized equipment that doesn't

fit anywhere else, plus a complement of

technical staff whose entire job is

babysitting experimental systems. When

something goes wrong, and with cutting

edge technology, things always go wrong.

There are engineers on board who can

diagnose the problem, tweak the

settings, and give it another shot, if

you'll excuse the pun.

Admirals on deck.

The program's importance definitely

wasn't lost on Japan's senior naval

leadership. In April 2025, Vice Admiral

Katsushi Amachi, commander of the

self-defense fleet made a point of

visiting Auka personally to inspect the

rail gun installation and observe

preparations for the upcoming sea

trials. He came back again later in 2025

after the system had proven itself.

Around the same time, Chief of Staff

Admiral Saito also boarded the

experimental ship to see the weapon

firsthand. Japan's top naval officers

were personally investing their time and

attention in a weapon system that most

of the world's navies had just given up

on. And the rail gun isn't even the only

experimental weapon the Asuka is

carrying. Elsewhere on our deck, housed

in distinctive dome modules sits a 100

kowatt laser weapon developed jointly by

Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Atler. The

lasers designed to track a bird through

targets at the speed of light, drones,

small boats, possibly even incoming

missiles, which is very cool, but

definitely something that we could touch

on in another video. With the hardware

in place and the admirals suitably

impressed, there was only one thing left

to do. Sail the ship out, charge those

capacitors, and pull the trigger.

Probably not literally, it's probably a

button. In October 2023, Atla made an

announcement that rippled through

defense circles around the world.

Working alongside the Japan Maritime

Self-Defense Force, they had

successfully conducted the first

shipboard firing of an electromagnetic

rail gun in history. And to be clear

about what this test was and wasn't,

sailed out to a designated test area.

The crew charged the capacitors and they

fired the 40mm rail gun into open water.

There was no specific target. grounds

simply screamed out over the waves and

splashed down somewhere really, really

far away. The objective was to prove the

whole integrated system worked in a

maritime environment. These were

questions you can only answer by

actually going out to sea and testing

the thing. And the results were good

enough to move forward. After the

initial sea trials, the program shifted

into what Atl calls the gun system

phase, working toward continuous fire

capability, improving projectile

stability, and integrating fire control

systems that could track targets and

adjust aim in real time. The rail gun

had proven it could fire from a ship.

Now, it needed to prove it could

actually hit something.

Summer 2025, the real milestone. In mid

2025 at ATL's annual defense technology

symposium, Japan revealed that Ahsuka's

rail gun had fired and hit an actual

target vessel undertoe. The symposium

materials included images of a

barge-like ship peppered with impact

holes. Clear evidence that hypersonic

projectiles launched from a moving

warship had found their mark many, many

times. Real gun on a real ship firing

real rounds at a real target floating in

the ocean and hitting it. The details

showed a picture of a weapon system that

was genuinely mature. Nozzle velocities

during the sea trials range from 2,00 to

2,300 m/s achieved consistently across

multiple firings. The thin stabilized

darts maintained stable hypersonic

flight throughout their trajectories.

Danish radar firm Ybel Scientific, which

provided instrumentation for the tests,

confirmed their equipment to track

projectiles at hypersonic speeds over

engagement ranges of several kilometers.

The rounds were flying true. They were

hitting where they were aimed and the

barrels were surviving. For a technology

that defeated some of the world's best

funded defense programs, that was a

remarkable combination to achieve. But

here's the question that hangs over all

of this. Rail guns have reached

promising stages before, and they've

stalled before. So, what makes Japan's

program different? What are they doing

that might actually get this weapon

across the finish line? Part of it comes

down to a design philosophy that

diverges sharply from what the Americans

tried. The US Navy rail gun program

aimed big. really big. They were chasing

a 150 mm 32 megajel monster capable of

hurling guided projectiles over 100

nautical miles. Essentially replacing

traditional naval gunfire support with

an electromagnetic alternative. The

requirements called for high rates of

fire and barrel lives measured in

thousands of rounds. Specifications that

pushed the technology far beyond what

anyone had actually demonstrated. Japan

looked at that approach and went the

other direction. Their 40mm gun wasn't

designed to replace battleship

bombardment. It was designed for defense

and medium-range strike. The focus is on

intercepting incoming missiles and

engaging surface targets at ranges

measured in kilometers rather than

hundreds of kilome. And that difference

matters enormously from an engineering

standpoint. Managing a 5 megaj shot is

hard. Managing a 32 megajou shot is

really a lot harder. And it's not just

six times harder. It's exponentially

harder. just ways that it gets more

complicated across every subsystem. The

capacitors need to store more energy.

The rails need to handle more currents.

The barrel takes more punishment with

every firing. By starting smaller and

focusing on a more achievable goal,

Japan reduced the engineering risk at

every stage. They built something that

actually works, proved it at sea, and

now have a foundation that they can

scale up over time. Atlas's development

plan calls for eventually reaching

around 20 megajoules per shot, which

would mean significantly higher

velocities and longer ranges. But

they're walking there nice and slow.

Flight stability and eye control

challenge.

Okay, so getting a projectile out of the

barrel at max is only half the problem.

The other half is making sure it

actually goes where you pointed it. Rail

gun rounds leave the muzzle at enormous

speeds, but that speed works against

them. If the projectile isn't

aerodynamically stable, a round that

begins to wobble or tumble loses energy

rapidly as it trajectory becomes

unpredictable. At hypersonic velocities,

even tiny asymmetries in shape or weight

distribution compound into major

deviations by the time the round reaches

its target. The fin stabilized darts

Atler has developed address this through

careful shaping and small stabilizing

fins that deploy after launch, keeping

the rounds flying point first rather

than tumbling end over end. As far as

anyone could tell, Republic information,

Japan's current projectiles are

unguided. No onboard sensors, no

steering fins, no terminal guidance,

just a precisely shaped piece of metal

relying on its initial aim and

hypersonic speed to reach the target.

That puts enormous pressure on the fire

control system to get the trajectory

right from the start. Because once the

round leaves the barrel, there's no

correcting course. But Japan has decades

of experience developing advanced radar

and fire control systems for its Aeus

equipped destroyers, including the

domestically produced FCS3 and OPS-48

radar suites. Systems that were, as it

happens, desta before they enter

frontline service. The Asuka is a

really, really busy boat. Integrating a

rail gun into that existing ecosystem of

sensors and targeting computers is still

a significant challenge, but Japan isn't

starting from scratch. The building

blocks are already sitting in documents

and design offices across the country.

What the rail guns for?

Okay, fantastic. The gun works. But

proving a weapon functions is different

from proving it's useful. So where would

Japan actually deploy this thing? Well,

the most obvious application is air and

missile defense. Instead of firing a

multi-million dollar interceptor at

every incoming cruise missile, drone, or

hypersonic threat, you fire a hypersonic

metal dart that costs a tiny fraction as

much. The idea is to create an

additional layer in the defensive stack.

Something that sits alongside

conventional missile interceptors,

taking shots that would otherwise drain

the ship's expensive missile infantry

against a saturation attack involving

dozens of incoming threats. The ability

to engage some of them with cheap, fast,

plentiful rail gun rounds could be the

difference between surviving the salvo

and running out of interceptors halfway

through. The key word there is could.

Hitting a maneuvering missile at Mac 3

or faster is significantly harder than

hitting a ship under toe. But if Japan

can make it work, even partially, the

strategic implications are significant.

And here's where it all comes together

strategically. If China's doctrine

relies on overwhelming Japanese and

Allied ships with more missiles than

they have interceptors, then adding a

layer of cheap, fast, plentiful rail gun

shots to the defensive mix dilutes that

strategy. As for where the rail gun

might actually end up, Japan has been

relatively open about its ambitions.

Defense analysts and official documents

point to several potential platforms.

Future large destroyers sometimes

referred to by the provisional

designation 13 DDX which could be

designed from the outset with the power

generation to accommodate

electromagnetic weapons. Land-based

batteries for island and coastal defense

as well. And if Atller hits its

miniaturization targets, even

vehicle-mounted systems could

potentially become possible. But all of

that lies in the future. Right now, the

SUKA remains the only platform carrying

a working rail gun. The experimental

ship is the stepping stone and the stone

she's laying down lead toward a very

different kind of navy. But will it

actually end up in use? I mean, we've

seen these things come and go many

times. Research on future rail gun

program continues through the mid2020s

with stated aims of deploying a small

caliber anti-ship prototype around 2027

and a medium caliber by 2028. That's a

lot of progress, but skepticism persists

in some defense circles about whether

rail guns make sense at all compared to

the alternatives. They prove missiles

keep getting better and they have the

advantage of being mature, proven

technology. High energy lasers are

advancing rapidly and don't have barrel

wear problems. Some analysts argue that

the money going into rail guns might be

better spent accelerating those other

systems instead. Japan has clearly

decided that the bet is worth making

though. They've cleared hurdles that

have defeated better funded programs and

demonstrated capabilities that nobody

else has matched. But credible road map

and deployed weapon system, they're

different things. and the gap between

them is filled with a shitload of

challenges. Thank you for watching.