Will President Trump Put a Railgun on a New Battleship? (And Who Will Build It If He Does?)

It takes a long time to build a modern warship.

From the time the first steel was cut to the date it was commissioned, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford -- currently leading the fight against Iran -- took more than a dozen years to design, build, and float. And this was for a class of warship that defense contracting shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls (NYSE: HII) was already familiar with building.

Now President Trump wants to buy battleships for the Navy, a kind of ship America's shipbuilders haven't made since World War II. The order came down back in December, and so it will probably be a decade or more before we see USS Defiant (BBG 1) in the water.

But it's still not too early to begin thinking about how to invest in a U.S. Navy built on battleships.

Image source: U.S. Navy.

Battleships with railguns

When the Navy first announced BBG 1, it described a vessel between 840 and 880 feet in length and displacing more than 35,000 tons. Defiant will be fast, traveling at 30 knots and up. And Defiant will boast "superior firepower," including weapons both familiar (5-inch guns; cruise and anti-air missiles) and futuristic, including hypersonic missiles, laser cannon, and railguns.

What is a railgun, you ask? We actually answered this question years ago, back when the Navy last expressed an interest in building this weapon. Instead of gunpowder, a railgun uses electromagnetic energy to rapidly accelerate and launch projectiles between conductive rails. In theory at least, a railgun should be able to accelerate projectiles to Mach 7 -- 4,600 miles per hour -- to strike targets 110 miles away.

Crucially, the projectiles it fires are only about 18 inches long (so the ship can carry a lot of them) and cheap -- as little as $25,000 per shot.

A USS Defiant sporting a railgun would basically never run out of ammo, and it could fight as long as it had fuel to power its rails. (This is one reason many advocates of the ship think BBG 1 should be nuclear-powered.)

Who will build the American railgun?

Just months since the president floated the idea of building a railgun-armed battleship, the Pentagon has already revived efforts to design and build the weapon, which was mothballed under Joe Biden's administration. TWZ.com reports that sometime in 2025, the Naval Surface Warfare Center conducted a three-day round of test firings of its railgun prototype at the White Sands Missile Range.

It's not 100% certain this is the railgun the Navy would pursue to arm the USS Defiant. Over in Japan, where railgun research never stopped, the Ministry of Defense's Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency is leading testing, with Japan Steel Works serving as the lead defense contractor. Here in the U.S., though, BAE Systems (OTC: BAESY) has built the current prototype, while privately held General Atomics has also expressed interest in building railguns.

At this early date, it would appear those looking to invest in railgun technology have a simple choice to make: Invest in BAE Systems stock or don't.

Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends BAE Systems. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.