THE USS ZUMWALT and her two sister ships are undergoing a dramatic change of mission just three years after the first ship was commissioned. The destroyers, originally meant to provide naval gunfire support for the Marines and to bombard targets far inland, are now being reoriented as ship killers.
The Zumwalt class of destroyers, which also includes the USS Michael Monsoor and the USS Lyndon B. Johnson, was intended to dramatically boost the fleet’s gun firepower. After the retirement of the four Iowa-class battleships in the early 1990s, the Navy studied a number of solutions before deciding on the Zumwalts. Each ship would be equipped with two 155-millimeter Advanced Gun Systems, each firing a precision-guided Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) to ranges of up to 83 nautical miles.
The Navy planned to buy 32 destroyers, but 32 soon became seven, and seven ultimately became three. The cost of the LRLAP, first pegged at $50,000 per projectile, ballooned to $800,000 each, making them unaffordable to even the mighty U.S. Navy. Without enough ships and guns, the Zumwalts were in danger of becoming the white elephants of the fleet.
This story is from the September 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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This story is from the September 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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