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Chao Kong

US President Donald Trump’s vision of new warships bristling with huge-calibre guns – widely mocked as a billionaire’s vanity project and a throwback to the battleship era of the second world war – has received an unexpected nod from military scientists in China.
In a paper published last month by the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Command Control & Simulation, the authors suggested that large-calibre naval guns could have a critical role in future warfare by countering the growing threat of cheap drone swarms.
According to Wang Lei and his team from the People’s Liberation Army’s Dalian Naval Academy, these guns could fire prefabricated-fragment shells that would explode near a drone swarm, creating a high-speed cloud of fragments capable of damaging multiple targets within an area.
The Trump-class battleship, announced in December as part of the president’s proposed “Golden Fleet”, is designed to combine an extensive missile capacity with nine large naval guns and other electromagnetic weapons.
The proposal has raised questions from experts and social media commenters alike about whether concentrating so much firepower on a single, extremely expensive platform makes sense in an era of long-range missiles and unmanned weapons.




One US online commenter ridiculed the plan as “designed by a rich moron with no concept of practicality or functionality”, while another joked that the ships would be “quite literally gold-plated”, in a mocking reference to their perceived wastefulness and extreme cost.
Another post described the concept as a “Swiss army knife” that tried to do everything but was “useless at everything”.
Criticism has also come from military analysts, with the privately owned US website Military.com arguing that battleships have long been vulnerable to aircraft, submarines and missiles.
Phillips O’Brien, a strategic studies professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, said the Trump-class plan appeared designed more to produce a “scary-looking vessel” than to address changing maritime threats.
The cost of the programme is another concern, with the US Congressional Budget Office estimating in August that the first nuclear-powered battleship could cost about US$23.4 billion and that a 15-ship programme could reach roughly US$275 billion.
According to the paper, which appeared online on August 18, rather than modelling a shell as a single projectile that must hit one drone, the PLA naval scientists used a statistical model commonly used to describe fragment-size distributions, together with a projection of how fragments spread through space.
In their example, the swarm consisted of 30 Russian-made Lancet-3 loitering munitions, each with a maximum take-off mass of about 12kg (26lbs) and a payload of up to 3kg.
The researchers assumed that one shell would produce 2,000 fragments, of which 1,589 would exceed the mass threshold required to cause damage.
Under the model’s assumptions, which included a 15 metre (49ft) fragment-cloud kill radius, the calculated probability of damaging an individual drone was 3.95 per cent – or about 1.19 drones per shell in the 30-drone swarm, according to the paper.


The researchers said the approach would still depend heavily on accurate detection and tracking, fire-control systems and programmable fuses, and suggested integrating the guns with electronic warfare, lasers and command-and-control systems.
But their proposal also faces opposition from China’s defence community, with one Chinese weapons and equipment specialist dismissing the study. “It is just a lousy paper written for promotion.”
The specialist, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of his affiliated institution and a potential conflict of interest, said he did not believe the paper provided convincing evidence that large-calibre guns would be effective against a drone swarm.
The naval research team has not responded to a request for comment.
The debate therefore remains unresolved, particularly over the cost and complexity of deploying such weapons on a giant warship.
The US Navy says it plans to order 15 Trump-class battleships between 2028 and 2056, although funding and industrial feasibility remain uncertain.
Funding for the programme was removed from a pending Senate appropriations bill, while US shipyards face severe labour shortages and questions remain over whether the industry can deliver the ships on schedule.
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Military researchers suggest large-calibre weapons firing fragmenting shells from battleships could neutralise low-cost drone swarms


Military researchers suggest large-calibre weapons firing fragmenting shells from battleships could neutralise low-cost drone swarms.


Chinese naval scientists fall in love with the ‘big guns’ on Trump-class warship

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Military researchers suggest large-calibre weapons firing fragmenting shells from battleships could neutralise low-cost drone swarms

Military researchers suggest large-calibre weapons firing fragmenting shells from battleships could neutralise low-cost drone swarms