USS Zumwalt sails with an Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship
WASHINGTON: The Navy plans to install hypersonic missiles on its troublesome Zumwalt destroyers, after Congress gave them the green light to start studying the move in the 2021 budget.
Multiple Navy officials said this week they’re diving into the effort, even though the USS Zumwalt, the first of the three-ship class, has yet to deploy despite being christened in 2016.
The timeline for the Conventional Prompt Strike Weapon to be fitted onto the ship isn’t clear, but first the service needs to finish testing it’s own version of the missile, then deliver a report to the Hill.
The Navy has started “looking at what does it take to go do that,” Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the Navy’s director for Strategic Systems Programs, said during a Mitchell Institute event this morning. Wolfe’s office works on nuclear modernization and hypersonic weapons development. “We’ll figure out that integration. We’ll publish the right report, and then we’ll start to talk to Congress about what the cost is going to be for DDG 1000,” to field hypersonic missiles.
The plan the Navy has discussed is to put the conventional prompt strike missile on Virginia-class submarines by the late 2020s initially, followed by the Zumwalt and other surface ships.
For existing ships, fitting the missile will take some time and engineering work. The conventional prompt strike round is too large to fit in the current Mk 41 vertical launching system, Rear Adm. Paul Schlise, the Navy’s surface warfare chief, told reporters. But the Zumwalt could be fitted with larger missile launchers during maintenance periods, he said, and the Navy designing its future Large Surface Combatant program would be able to accept the larger missiles.
“We are working on the Large Surface Combatant top-level requirements right now,” he said, “and we think a version of a larger diameter launcher that can handle a round like CPS will absolutely be part of that platform.”
In October, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien suggestion that all of the destroyers in the Navy would be fitted with hypersonic missiles raised eyebrows in a fleet already in the midst of massive changes.
O’Brien proclaimed that “all three flights of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers will field this capability,” despite the fact that those “plans” are absent from any and all Navy plans and budget documents.
“This is a terrible idea for several reasons,” Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute said at the time, since the oldest ships would need to undergo a service life extension in order to make the upgrades worthwhile, and would only only squeeze another decade or so out of them.
But the Zumwalt ships, which haven’t found a place in the fleet yet, would likely be a good place to start.
The first in class, USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) will participate in an upcoming Fleet Battle Problem event, where it will be teamed with unmanned surface vessels to see if the two can be integrated into operations.
“Right now, we’re looking at how do we get this ship involved in the integrated battle problem in the spring, working with some of the medium USVs we have as well,” Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener, commander of Naval Surface Forces, said.
