Wednesday, May 13, 2026

The Right Gun for the Drone Age


Rethinking Naval Medium-Caliber Armament

Stephen L Pendergast LT USNR

Seventy-five years of procurement choices have left the surface fleet with a gap precisely where the drone swarm threat lands hardest — between Phalanx's two-kilometer wall and the unaffordable economics of the vertical launch system. Closing it requires confronting decisions that were made with a different threat in mind.

May 2026 Surface Warfare · Weapons · Force Structure

The U.S. Navy enters the drone age with a critical gap in its surface combatant gun armament: no fielded medium-caliber weapon combines the rate of fire, programmable proximity fuzing, and pre-fragmented warhead technology required to engage drone swarms at acceptable cost. The Mk 45 5-inch gun — the primary weapon of the Arleigh Burke fleet — fires 16–20 rounds per minute against a threat environment that demands hundreds. The Phalanx CIWS reaches only two kilometers. Between those layers, the Navy relies on vertical launch system missiles costing $450,000 to $4.2 million per shot against targets costing $20,000 to $40,000. The BAE Systems Bofors Mk110 57mm gun firing the six-mode programmable, proximity-fused 3P round — already in service on Littoral Combat Ships and designated for the cancelled FFG-62 and its NSC-derived FF(X) replacement — fills this gap at approximately $27 per round for the 40mm variant. It is not on the ships doing the most fighting. The Arleigh Burke class, carrying the combat load in the Red Sea and expected to escort amphibious ready groups into the contested littoral, carries neither the Mk110 nor any equivalent. Correcting this mismatch is an urgent warfighting requirement, not a future acquisition aspiration. The path runs through containerized solutions now and a fundamental rethink of medium-caliber armament philosophy for the next destroyer design cycle.

The Navy has fought with the guns it has. In the Red Sea, destroyers armed with the Mk 45 5-inch gun and Phalanx CIWS have engaged Houthi one-way attack drones — and done so at a cost that the Secretary of the Navy described publicly as not sustainable. Understanding why requires going back to a fundamental mismatch between threat economics and weapon economics that postwar procurement systematically created.

The Historical Arc: How We Got Here

The Pacific War bequeathed to the U.S. Navy a coherent layered anti-aircraft architecture built around complementary gun calibers. The 5-inch/38 dual-purpose gun, fitted with the Variable Time (VT) proximity fuze beginning in 1943, provided medium-range anti-aircraft fire that was, by war's end, devastating against Japanese aircraft. The Bofors 40mm gun — firing at rates of 120 rounds per minute in twin and quad mounts — provided the intermediate layer. The 20mm Oerlikon covered the close-in zone. Every major combatant from destroyer to battleship carried all three layers.

The VT fuze, developed at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory under physicist Merle Tuve and requiring nearly a year of work by James Van Allen to make five miniaturized vacuum tubes survive 20,000g setback and 28,000 rpm spin inside a 5-inch shell, gave the medium-caliber layer its decisive edge. By 1943, VT-fuzed shells representing 25 percent of anti-aircraft ammunition accounted for 51 percent of Japanese aircraft kills — roughly three times the effectiveness per round of conventional timed fuzes. A proximity fuze that detonates when the shell passes near its target is simply more lethal than one that requires a direct hit on a fast-moving, maneuvering aircraft. That principle has not changed. The aircraft have gotten smaller, cheaper, and more numerous.

What changed was the postwar procurement philosophy. Guided missiles made the layered gun architecture seem obsolete by offering engagement at ranges guns could not reach, against targets moving too fast for optically-directed gun fire. The RIM-2 Terrier, RIM-8 Talos, and RIM-24 Tartar replaced the 5-inch and 40mm as the primary anti-aircraft weapons of the fleet. The introduction of the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System and the Standard Missile family completed the transformation. The Bofors 40mm batteries that had filled the middle layer of Pacific War air defense disappeared from U.S. warships. The Phalanx CIWS, introduced in the 1980s as a last-ditch close-in weapon, provided a terminal gun layer but at only 20mm caliber and approximately two kilometers of effective range. Between Phalanx and the VLS cells, the Navy left an engagement band empty.

This was a rational choice given the threat of the 1970s through 2010s: high-speed aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic reentry vehicles that missiles were better suited to engage than guns. What was not anticipated was the emergence of a low-cost, low-speed, high-volume threat — the mass-produced drone — that would attack in the specific altitude and range band where the Navy's gun layers are either absent or economically ruinous to engage with missiles.

The Red Sea Ledger: An Unsustainable Exchange

Beginning in October 2023, Houthi forces in Yemen launched sustained one-way attack drone and cruise missile campaigns against commercial shipping and U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea. By April 2024, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro stated publicly that the cost of Navy intercepts had approached one billion dollars. Vice Admiral Brendan McLane, Commander of Naval Surface Forces, specifically cited USS O'Kane as having protected a merchant convoy against hostile UAVs by employing its 5-inch gun — an endorsement of the gun's utility, but also an implicit acknowledgment that VLS missiles were too expensive a solution for the problem.

The mathematics are not kind. The Shahed-136 one-way attack drone, manufactured by Iran and deployed in large numbers by Russia against Ukraine and by Houthi forces against Red Sea shipping, costs an estimated $35,000 per unit at the median of published intelligence estimates, with some production-era estimates as low as $20,000. Against it, the Navy has routinely expended Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles at approximately $400,000 per round, Standard Missile 2 rounds at approximately $2 million each, and Patriot PAC-3 rounds at approximately $4.2 million. The SM-6, used for terminal defense against ballistic threats, runs to approximately $4.3 million per round.

The production rate asymmetry compounds the cost problem. Patriot PAC-3 interceptors are manufactured at approximately 650–740 rounds per year globally, shared across all allied operators. Russia was producing Shahed-type drones at rates reaching 125–300 per day by mid-2025, with China simultaneously reporting orders approaching one million kamikaze drones for near-term delivery. Producing one thousand high-reliability interceptors per month, as the Center for a New American Security's September 2025 "Countering the Swarm" study observed, is not a winning strategy against an adversary generating five thousand drone sorties in the same period. The economic model of guided missile air defense — premised on a world where the defender's interceptor is cheaper than the attacker's weapon — has been inverted.

"Our small surface combatant inventory is a third of what we need. We need more capable blue water, small combatants to close the gap and keep our DDGs focused on the high-end fight."

Admiral Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations — Surface Navy Association Symposium, January 2026

What the Right Gun Looks Like: The 3P Standard

The engineering solution exists and is in production. The Bofors 3P (Pre-fragmented, Programmable, Proximity-fused) round, manufactured by BAE Systems in 40mm and 57mm calibers for the Bofors Mk4 and Mk3 gun families respectively, addresses the drone swarm problem on the correct terms: high rate of fire, low cost per round, and a fuzing system that does not require a direct hit on a target that a gunfire control system cannot guarantee it will hit.

The 57mm round as fired from the Mk110 carries 2,400 pre-fragmented titanium pellets in a 975-gram projectile with 120 grams of Octol explosive. The fuze is programmed individually for each round while it is still in the breech, in two steps: a DC initialization followed by a high-frequency data transmission in the milliseconds before firing. The fire control computer sets one of six modes — gated proximity, proximity, pre-set proximity, time, impact, or delay — based on continuous target track data. In gated proximity mode, the fuze detects a target within a narrow solid angle around the projectile's flight axis and detonates at 8–12 meters standoff distance; the gating rejects sea and ground clutter that would cause false detonation in a simpler omnidirectional proximity sensor. The round self-destructs if no target is detected, preventing unexploded ordnance from reaching friendly ships or civilian areas. The system is ECM-immune by design. The 40mm variant costs approximately $27 per round; the 57mm significantly more, but still measured in hundreds of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands.

This is not a developmental concept. The Mk110 57mm system, designated internationally as the Bofors 57 Mk3, is in service with the navies and coast guards of eight nations: Sweden (Visby-class corvettes, the platform for which the Mk3 was originally designed in 1995), the United States (LCS Freedom and Independence classes; USCG National Security Cutters and Offshore Patrol Cutters), Canada (Halifax class), Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom (Royal Navy Type 31 frigates currently under construction), and others. The 3P round is designated Mark 295 Mod 0 in U.S. service. BAE Systems received a $26 million contract from NAVSEA to equip Constellation-class frigates with the Mk110 before that program's cancellation.

The 40mm Bofors Mk4 system, firing the same 3P round family, is deployed on Swedish and Finnish naval vessels and in the truck-mounted Tridon Mk2 land configuration, which was deployed to Ukraine for counter-drone operations against Russian Shahed drones in 2024–25. A 2025 analysis calculated a cost-per-kill ratio for the Tridon Mk2 approximately 185 times more favorable than a Patriot intercept against the same Shahed threat category. BAE Systems introduced the Bofors 40 Mk4 to the U.S. market for the first time at Sea Air Space 2025, pitching containerized and palletized naval configurations for the gap on U.S. surface combatants.

The Platform Mismatch: Right Gun, Wrong Ships

The Mk110 is on the ships least likely to fight. The ships most likely to fight lack it entirely.

The Littoral Combat Ship — the platform on which the Mk110 was fielded — was conceived as the littoral warfighter, the ship that would operate close to shore against the asymmetric threats of mine countermeasures, fast-attack craft, and submarine hunting in the shallow water zone. Whatever its other failures, the LCS had the right gun for the drone age built in from the start. The program's execution, however, proved catastrophic: propulsion casualties, gearbox failures, structural cracking in Independence-class aluminum trimarans, mission module packages that never achieved operational maturity, and a survivability assessment that the Navy's own analysis concluded was inadequate for contested littoral operations. The Navy began pushing for early LCS retirements; the program that had the right gun is being walked off the stage.

The Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyer — 73 in service, the backbone of the surface fleet — carries the Mk 45 5-inch gun and Phalanx CIWS. The Mk 45 is an excellent gun for its designed missions: naval surface fire support, anti-ship engagement, and engaging individual aircraft or cruise missiles at range with VT-fuzed rounds. It is a poor gun for drone swarms. Its rate of fire of 16–20 rounds per minute is structurally inadequate for volume-of-fire engagements; its shell weight of approximately 32 kilograms per complete round is grossly overmatched against a 10-kilogram FPV airframe; and its magazine capacity of approximately 600 rounds, while substantial, is consumed in approximately 30 minutes at maximum sustained rate — against an adversary that can generate swarms numbering in the hundreds.

The Hypervelocity Projectile (HVP), a guided sub-caliber round originally developed for the cancelled electromagnetic railgun program, is being adapted for the Mk 45 by BAE Systems. USS Jason Dunham tested HVP against drone targets in a fleet trial in August 2024 with confirmed effectiveness against Group 3 UAS threats. The House Armed Services Committee acknowledged HVP among four systems evaluated as capable of defeating Group 3 drones more cost-effectively than VLS missiles. But HVP is a guided round seeking a direct hit — a fundamentally different solution from the proximity fuze approach of the 3P, with commensurately higher unit cost and a seeker that adds a single point of failure absent in a passive proximity fuze. It fills a niche above the 3P's swarm layer, not within it.

The amphibious force is in the most precarious position. The America-class LHA — the primary amphibious assault ship, the ship that must go over the beach in a contested environment — carries no medium-caliber gun at all. Its gun armament is limited to two Phalanx CIWS and two Rolling Airframe Missile launchers. An LHA approaching a defended shore with a Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked has a two-kilometer gun solution and a short-range missile solution. The San Antonio-class LPD carries one Mk 45 5-inch gun, one Phalanx, and one RAM launcher. The Wasp-class LHD is similar to the America class. None carries a medium-caliber programmable proximity gun. All are intended, in Marine Corps doctrine, to operate in exactly the environment — contested littoral, within range of shore-based drone launches — where the gap is most dangerous.

The FFG-62 Cancellation: Lost Opportunity and Its Successor

The Constellation-class frigate (FFG-62) was, before its cancellation, the intended correction to this mismatch. Designed around the Italian-French FREMM parent design and modified extensively to U.S. survivability standards, it specified the Mk110 57mm gun, a 32-cell Mk 41 VLS, a robust anti-submarine warfare suite, and the AN/SPY-6(V)3 Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar. This was the ship that would escort both carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups — putting the 3P capability where the threat is. BAE Systems received a $26 million contract from NAVSEA to equip the class with the Mk110.

The program collapsed under its own weight. Fincantieri Marinette Marine, selected in April 2020 on a fixed-price incentive contract for detailed design and construction, accepted extensive Navy-directed design changes that progressively eroded commonality with the FREMM parent from approximately 85 percent to under 15 percent. Construction of USS Constellation began in August 2022; by April 2025 the ship was approximately 10 percent complete with the design still not finalized. A 2024 Navy shipbuilding review found the program 36 months behind its original 2026 delivery schedule, with first ship delivery now projected no earlier than 2029 at a unit cost approaching $1.5 billion — up from the original $1.28 billion estimate. The yard struggled to hire welders and skilled tradesmen in a tight Wisconsin labor market, and workforce rollover from Freedom-class LCS and Saudi MMSC programs created further scheduling conflicts.

On 25 November 2025, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced the cancellation of the last four ships in the six-ship contracted program. Only USS Constellation (FFG-62) and USS Congress (FFG-63), already under construction, would be completed. Phelan was blunt about the arithmetic: "The Constellation-class frigate was canceled because, candidly, it didn't make sense anymore to build it. It was 80 percent of the cost of a DDG-51 and 60 percent of the capability. You might as well build destroyers."

The replacement announced on 19 December 2025 is the FF(X), based on the U.S. Coast Guard's Legend-class National Security Cutter hull produced by Huntington Ingalls Industries at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The FF(X) specifications, released at the Surface Navy Association Symposium in January 2026, specify a Mk110 57mm main gun, a Mk 38 Mod 4 30mm secondary gun, a Mk 49 RAM launcher with 21 Rolling Airframe Missiles, and a modular payload stern station accommodating either 16 Naval Strike Missiles or 48 Hellfire missiles for counter-UAS operations. The initial Flight I design carries no VLS cells, a deliberate sacrifice of area air defense capability in exchange for a hull that can be built quickly on a proven production line. CNO Caudle stated the goal of having the first ship launched by 2028; the FY2026 defense appropriations legislation allocated $242 million for long-lead items. Fifty to sixty-five hulls spanning multiple flights are planned.

The FF(X) thus delivers, on a survivable and producible hull, the gun combination — 57mm Mk110 with 3P and 30mm supplementary — that the threat environment requires. The observation from Admiral Caudle that the small surface combatant inventory stands at one-third of what the Navy needs underscores both the urgency of the FF(X) program and the depth of the gap that must be filled while it matures.

"The Constellation-class frigate was canceled because, candidly, it didn't make sense anymore to build it. It was 80 percent of the cost of a DDG-51 and 60 percent of the capability. You might as well build destroyers."

Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan — Statement on FFG-62 Cancellation, 25 November 2025

Precedent: What the Pacific War Got Right

The current gap is historically novel. In the late Pacific War, every major combatant from destroyer escort to fleet carrier carried all three gun layers: the 5-inch VT-fuzed medium gun, the 40mm Bofors intermediate gun, and the 20mm Oerlikon close-in gun. Fletcher-class destroyers — the archetypal war-era destroyer — carried one or two 40mm twin mounts in addition to their 5-inch battery. The combination worked. VT-fuzed 5-inch rounds engaged aircraft at range; the 40mm layer swept the intermediate band; the 20mm handled the stragglers. When kamikaze attacks began in late 1944, the layered architecture was stressed but held because the Bofors 40mm layer specifically was capable of destroying aircraft before they reached the ship at a rate of fire no guided weapon system could match.

The Arleigh Burke, the most capable destroyer the world has seen, carries nothing between Phalanx at two kilometers and the VLS at many tens of kilometers. That gap did not exist on a Fletcher-class destroyer. The threat that has re-opened it — cheap, slow, numerous drones — is in some respects more like the kamikaze than like the Soviet anti-ship missile the Burke was designed to defeat. The kamikaze was a one-way attack weapon, cheap relative to the ships it targeted, arriving in numbers, flying low and slow compared to conventional aircraft. The Navy built hundreds of Bofors mounts to answer it. The answer to the drone is the same gun, eighty years later, in solid-state form.

The Path Forward: Recommendations

Immediate and Near-Term Actions Required

  1. Containerize and palletize the Bofors 40 Mk4 for Arleigh Burke installation now. BAE Systems presented containerized configurations at Sea Air Space 2025. The Navy should accelerate evaluation and fielding of containerized Bofors 40 Mk4 systems on DDG-51 Flight II and IIA ships as a near-term bridge pending long-term solutions. The containerized architecture allows rapid installation without major structural modification and rapid removal for reloading or reconfiguration.
  2. Specify the Mk110 57mm / 3P as the standard medium-caliber gun for all future surface combatants without exception. The FF(X) program has correctly specified the Mk110. This specification should be locked, protected from weight and cost reduction trades, and extended as a firm requirement to any DDG-51 Flight IV design or Burke successor. The 3P round must be procured in depth for both LCS and FF(X) inventories at rates that reflect combat consumption assumptions, not peacetime demonstration quantities.
  3. Install medium-caliber programmable proximity gun capability on the America-class LHA and Wasp-class LHD. These ships are the amphibious assault platforms most likely to operate in the contested littoral environment against drone threats and lack any medium-caliber gun capability. A containerized Bofors 40 Mk4 or a dedicated sponson-mounted Mk110 installation should be evaluated for both classes. An America-class LHA going over the beach in a drone-saturated environment with only Phalanx at 2 km and RAM is unacceptably exposed.
  4. Procure the Mark 295 Mod 0 (3P 57mm) at volume consistent with wartime consumption rates. The 3P round's utility is a function of magazine depth. Current procurement quantities reflect a peacetime demonstration posture. The FY2026 and FY2027 budgets should establish multi-year procurement contracts that build combat reserve stocks across the LCS, USCG NSC, and FF(X) programs.
  5. Accelerate FF(X) Flight II specifications to include VLS and improved sensor capability. Flight I is an acceptable rapid-fielding compromise. Flight II must add at minimum a 16-cell Mk 41 VLS for ESSM and VLS-ASROC to give the frigate the anti-air and anti-submarine depth required for escort of amphibious ready groups in contested environments. The LCS's failure to deliver capable mission modules must not be repeated through complacency about Flight II development timelines.
  6. Continue HVP development for the Mk 45 as a complementary, not alternative, capability layer. HVP addresses a different band of the engagement problem — guided engagement of individual high-value threats above the 3P swarm layer — and deserves continued investment. It does not substitute for proximity fuze volume-of-fire capability and should not be used to justify delay in the containerized Bofors solution.

The Genealogical Argument

There is something fitting about the solution. The VT proximity fuze, developed at Johns Hopkins APL using miniaturized vacuum tubes that James Van Allen spent a year engineering to survive 20,000g and 28,000 rpm in a 5-inch shell, was ranked by the APL alongside radar and the atomic bomb as one of the three most valuable technology developments of the Second World War. Its first operational use was by the 5-inch guns of USS Helena against Japanese aircraft south of Guadalcanal on 5 January 1943. The proximity fuze principle — detonate near the target, not on contact — multiplied the effectiveness of naval gun fire against aerial threats by a factor of three.

The Bofors 3P round is the direct descendant of that principle, implemented not in five hand-selected glass vacuum tubes but in solid-state ASIC electronics, MEMS inertial sensors, and a miniaturized RF proximity detector that occupies a fraction of the volume at a fraction of the cost. The fire control computer programs each round individually in the milliseconds before firing, feeding target geometry that Van Allen could not have dreamed of. The projectile costs $27. The threat it is designed to kill costs $35,000 — a 1,300-to-one favorable cost ratio that is the economic inverse of the Patriot-versus-Shahed exchange.

The Navy that invented the proximity fuze, mass-produced twenty-two million of them, and used them to transform the cost-effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire in the Pacific War has allowed the institutional knowledge of why it worked to fade from its armament philosophy. The drone swarm is the kamikaze's grandchild: cheap, numerous, one-way, arriving in the specific engagement band where gun systems dominate. The gun has evolved into solid-state form. The ship classes that need it are being built — too few and too slowly. The ships doing the fighting do not have it.

That is the gap. Closing it is not a future capability aspiration. It is an urgent operational requirement that the Red Sea has demonstrated in billion-dollar terms.

References and Sources

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  24. Inside Unmanned Systems. (2026, January 12). "2025 Proved the Case for Drone Defense." [Shahed at $20,000–$40,000; Patriot asymmetry; production rate disparity; affordable-volume C-UAS shortage.] https://insideunmannedsystems.com/2025-proved-the-case-for-drone-defense/
  25. Defense.info. (2026, March 13). "From Red Sea Defense to Epic Fury: How the U.S. Flipped the Drone Cost Equation." [USN ~$1B Houthi intercept cost through April 2024; SM-2/SM-6 economics; Del Toro quote on sustainability.] https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/03/from-red-sea-defense-to-epic-fury-how-the-u-s-flipped-the-drone-cost-equation/
  26. CSIS / Cancian, M. et al. (2025, December 10). "Calculating the Cost-Effectiveness of Russia's Drone Strikes." [Shahed-136 $35,000 median; 14,700+ one-way attack drones Sept. 2022–Dec. 2024; cost asymmetry analysis.] https://www.csis.org/analysis/calculating-cost-effectiveness-russias-drone-strikes
  27. Norsk Luftvern. (2025, June 26). "The Drone Defense Economics Crisis: When $3M Missiles Target $38K Drones." [PAC-3 $4.2M; SM-2 ~$2M; IRIS-T ~$450K; 650–740 Patriot rounds produced annually; Shahed production rate.] https://norskluftvern.com/2025/06/26/the-drone-defense-economics-crisis-when-3m-missiles-target-38k-drones/
  28. U.S. Naval Institute / Collier, C.D. (1999, August). "Tiny Miracle — The Proximity Fuze." Naval History Magazine, Vol. 13, No. 4. [Forrestal quote; Helena first kill Jan. 5, 1943; VT fuze ranked with radar and atomic bomb by APL.] https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1999/august/tiny-miracle-proximity-fuze
  29. NavWeaps / Staff. (n.d.). "VT Fuze in World War II." [3–4× effectiveness vs. time fuze; 370% night kill ratio increase; 51% of kills from 25% of rounds in 1943.] http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-129.php
  30. USNI News / Proceedings. (2025, September). Flynn, K. "Let Drones Play Defense." Proceedings, Vol. 151/9/1,471. [Aegis SAM economics vs. Houthi weapons; Replicator program; OWA drone threat.] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/september/let-drones-play-defense
  31. Wikipedia contributors. (2026, accessed May 13). "Constellation-class frigate." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. [Full program history; November 2025 cancellation; FF(X) announcement December 2025.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation-class_frigate
  32. Joint Forces News. (2021, October 30). "Bofors 57mm Mk 110 for New US Navy Frigates." [$26M NAVSEA Mk110 contract for Constellation-class; 220 rpm; 9+ nm effective range with 3P.] https://www.joint-forces.com/defence-equipment-news/47849-bofors-57mm-mk-110-for-new-us-navy-frigates
  33. The Forensic Archive / Medium. (2025, November 12). "Sweden's Tridon Mk2 Shoots 40mm Programmable Rounds at $27 Each — Patriot Costs $4 Million." [3P at $27/round; Tridon Mk2 cost-per-kill 1:185 vs. Shahed; Ukraine deployment data.] https://medium.com/@Forensic-Archive/swedens-tridon-mk2-shoots-40mm-programmable-rounds-at-27-each-patriot-costs-4-million-874b3b45e031

Prepared in the analytical style of U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings  ·  Research current through May 2026  ·  Surface Warfare · Weapons · Force Structure

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