The toughest thing about refitting a warship is admitting what it is no longer good for. For the Zumwalt class, that day came when the Navy removed the two deck guns that originally made the ships and began to carve the former interior space into something more like a dedicated strike bay.
The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) has now finished the builder’s sea trials to prove the new major systems incorporated to support the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) weapon, making it the leader of a very small class of three ships as the first surface ship ready to host a hypersonic strike system. The original plan of stealthy destroyers with automated systems sneaking towards the shore to provide long-range naval gunfire support had faltered under the complexity, changing requirements, and harsh math of a program that was to be 32 ships but ended up as three.
This collapse was more than just cost growth. It was also about an idea that lost its weapon. The 155mm Advanced Gun System required a special round that never reached economical scale, making the “land attack destroyer” a mere hull with an unusable centerpiece. With the shift in U.S. naval interests from long-range precision strike to operating in an ever more contested maritime domain, the odd-shaped hull, special systems, and integration challenges of this ship class went from being a vision of the future to a warning sign on the dangers of revolutionary procurement thinking.
The modernization plan slices right through this history. The Navy’s plan to swap out the original gunhouses with four large missile tubes re-focuses the ship on a new payload: CPS all-up rounds that integrate a booster stack and the Common Hypersonic Glide Body. In effect, the new design is scaled to support a small but significant magazine of 12 CPS missiles per ship and is based on handling, safety, and shipboard integration issues that are not relevant to traditional vertical launch missiles. CPS is designed to attack the time gap between decision and impact, targeting the area between slower conventional missiles and the political escalatory risks of nuclear missiles.
Commonality is part of the logic. The glide body design that CPS employs is the same as that of the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon. The idea relies on speed, range, and maneuvering flight patterns to make modern defenses more complicated, but it also carries non-technical overheads. A hypersonic launch could be misconstrued by another nuclear-weaponized state. This situation forces a closer relationship between the engineering of the weapon, command authority, and the way the system is represented and used.
We have reached a crucial point with our Navy and industry partners to move forward with this complex modernization effort, which will set a precedent for the Zumwalt class, Ingalls Shipbuilding President Brian Blanchette said. I am very proud of the team effort and their important role in moving forward the U.S. Navy’s first warship with hypersonic capabilities.
The rest of the class is following the same trajectory. The third ship, Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002), is under construction for combat system activation and the same tube installation, while Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) is in place for CPS modifications. The larger point is less about “saving” Zumwalt than about narrowing it: from an overreaching multi-mission experiment to a specialized, selectively employed strike platform whose long-term value also includes being a high-end integration testbed for power, sensors, and future payloads.
