The United States Navy warship that President Donald Trump suggested was “ugly” last year is one step closer to reentering service. The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) completed its comprehensive series of sea trials following its extensive modernization, Hunting Ingalls Industries’ Ingalls Shipbuilding division announced this week.
DDG-1000, the lead vessel of the Zumwalt-class, is the first of the Navy’s advanced stealth destroyers to near the completion of an upgrade to its primary weapon system.
The destroyer arrived at Ingalls Shipbuilding’s facility in Pascagoula in August 2023, where the ship began to undergo the upgrade that removed the original twin 155mm Advanced Gun System and began the installation of the Conventional Prompt Strike weapon system.
“We have achieved a pivotal milestone with our Navy and industry partners to advance this complex modernization work that will set a precedent for the Zumwalt class,” said Brian Blanchette, Ingalls Shipbuilding president. “I’m very proud of the team effort and their critical role to advance the U.S. Navy’s first warship with hypersonic capabilities.”
The second of the U.S. Navy’s three Zumwalt-class destroyers, the USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002), is now undergoing the installation of the CPS weapon at the shipyard. The third and final vessel of the class, the USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001), will receive the upgrade during a future availability.
Correcting An Expensive Mistake
Designed as a new class of multi-mission stealth warships, the Zumwalt-class was meant to meet the congressional mandate for a warship that offered the naval fire support of a battleship. The new vessels were also developed to be capable of performing a range of deterrence, power projection, sea control, and command and control missions, able to operate in both the open ocean and near-shore environments.
Even with a focus on land attacks, the sleek Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers, which are larger than the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, were also intended to take on secondary roles, including surface and anti-aircraft warfare. The vessels were developed with state-of-the-art electric propulsion systems, wave-piercing tumblehome hulls, stealth designs, and the latest war-fighting technology and weaponry.
Looking like something out of science fiction, the warships were truly state-of-the-art and cutting-edge, but history has shown that new designs can be problematic.
The Zumwalt-class stealth destroyer program is likely to go down in history as one of the U.S. Navy’s significant procurement failures, due to its immense cost overruns, technical issues, and its reduced fleet size from a planned 32 to just three warships. Each of the three costs around $8 billion, significantly exceeding the original estimates, leading to the program being scaled back.
That only led to further issues, as its Advanced Gun System then proved impractical due to the prohibitively expensive shells it fired. When the program was scaled back, the ordnance ballooned from $50,000 to more than $800,000 per round!
In 2022, the Navy Strategic Systems Programs awarded a $22.8 million contract to Lockheed Martin Space Systems to integrate hypersonic weapons aboard the three Zumwalt-class destroyers. The aerospace and defense giant was tasked with providing missile production long-lead materials, program management, and system engineering for the Navy Conventional Prompt Strike Weapon System Platform-Specific Development and Production project.
The CPS will arm the warships with a long-range, high-speed strike capability, using boost-glide missiles that exceed Mach 5.
There are concerns that this solution will affect the roles destroyers can perform and that the CPS missiles are also costly. By employing large hypersonic missiles, the number of other munitions, including standard vertical launch system cells, is also reduced.
As a report from Naval Lookout warned, the 12 extremely costly weapons can be used only very discriminately, meaning that the destroyers’ primary value lies in deterrence.
“CPS rounds would need to be reserved for the highest-value, time-critical targets, where their impact could be decisive. Conversely, the weapons’ value is not measured in how often they are fired. Still, in the deterrence they create and forcing adversaries to invest in costly dispersal, hardening, and defence measures,” the report added.
Trump Called Them Ugly
Even if the Zumwalt-class may have found a new purpose, which has yet to be proven, it is unclear whether Trump’s opinion of the warships has changed.
“I’m not a fan of some of the ships you do. I’m a very aesthetic person, and I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically,” Trump told top military officials gathered at Quantico last year, referencing the destroyers.
“They say, ‘Oh, it’s stealth.’ I say that’s not stealth,” Trump added. “An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.”
In December, Trump announced that the U.S. Navy would build a new class of battleships, but questions remain if it couldn’t get this destroyer right, will the potential battleships end up any better?
Maybe they won’t be so ugly at least!