Abstract: Fatigue and wear are two key factors affecting gun barrel life. Progress in anti-wear and fatigue technologies for gun barrel is summarized in this paper. Furthermore, evaluation of erosion-wear life and fatigue life of gun barrel is reviewed. It lacks reasonable scientific evidence to predict gun barrel residual life according to the increase in length of chamber or wear of radial diameter of the commencement of the rifling. And the phenomena of accelerating crack formation and propagation under fatigue-wear interaction has not been considered. Barrel health monitoring is an important means to certify the safe service when the traditional life prediction methods could not accurately assess the failure time of gun barrel. Comprehensive information of projectile, gun and propellant can be reflected by the strain of the gun barrel outside surface. Strain increment is presented as the damage characteristic of gun barrel in this study. Based on the measured strain data and local strain method, the relationship between the barrel health, outside surface strain and barrel life (round) is established. It is pointed out that gun barrel health monitoring has great theoretical significance and application value in design, experiment, usage and maintenance of gun.