Navy Stealthy Zumwalt Destroyer to Fire First Missiles, Expand Mission

Navy developers of the new USS Zumwalt high-tech, stealthy destroyer are widening the mission envelope for the ship, exploring new ammunition for its guns and preparing to fire its first missile next year, service program managers said.

The new ship, engineered with a sleek, radar-evading design, was initially conceived of in terms of primarily engineering a shallow-water land attack platform. While the ship was envisioned as a multi-mission platform at its inception, current emerging threats and new technology have led Navy strategists to scope a wider strategic view for the ship.

In particular, given the rapid evolution of targeting technology and advanced long-range precision weaponry, particularly those being developed by near-peer adversaries, the strategic calculus informing maritime warfare is changing quickly.

“The aim of the ship will focus on surface strike. Long range surface ship platform in contrast to a previous look at a littoral platform able to launch suppressive fire in close to land,” Capt. Kevin Smith, DDG 1000 Program Manager, told reporters at the Surface Navy Association symposium.

Long-range strike technology, coupled with advanced seekers, electromagnetic weapons and higher-resolution sensors, quite naturally, create the need for greater stand-off ranges; such a technical phenomenon is a key element of the Navy’s current “distributed lethality” strategy designed to better prepare the Navy for modern, open blue-water combat operations against a technologically advanced adversary.

Part of the initial vision for this ship, which is still very much part of its equation, is to engineer a ship able to detect mines. For this reason, the ship has been architected with a shallow draft, enabling it to operate closer to shore than most deep water surface ships.

At the same time, threat assessment experts, strategists and Navy weapons developers also heavily emphasize the growing need for the ship to succeed in the event of major nation-state force-on-force maritime warfare.

In preparation for all of this, the ship is now going through combat activation in San Diego, Calif., to pave the way toward preparing the weapons systems for the ship’s planned move to operational status in 2020, Smith said.