Military researchers suggest large-calibre weapons firing fragmenting shells from battleships could neutralise low-cost drone swarms
3-MIN READ3-MINChao Kongin BeijingPublished: 3:00pm, 7 Sep 2026US 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.
