Two weeks ago, the Navy’s most technologically advanced ship, a 15,000-ton guided-missile destroyer, was commissioned in Baltimore. The USS Zumwalt looks more like a spaceship than a traditional Navy ship, and is both twice the size and cost of the Navy’s mainstay destroyers, the Arleigh Burke class. In a strange twist, the Zumwalt’s first commanding officer is Captain James “T.” Kirk. It’s a fitting ship for the twenty-first century.
The Zumwalt is as radical in design as the man she is named after. Designed to be stealthy, the 610-foot ship features an all-electric propulsion system, tumblehome (backward-slanting) bow, uncluttered deck, and superstructure presenting a radar image that mimics a 50-foot fishing boat. Her futuristic weapons systems include lasers, missiles, and—eventually—an electromagnetic railgun that can fire 23-pound projectiles at speeds of Mach 7 without using gunpowder.
The Zumwalt—like the admiral—is controversial. The cost of this lead-in-class vessel soared to $4.3 billion from an initial estimate of $1.4 billion. The cost overruns led Congress and the Navy to scrap plans for 32 ships in the class to just three. “There is just too much new technology in one package,” says retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “The newly designed electrical propulsion system has delayed construction and the electromagnetic railgun is not ready for the first two ships. None of these improvements are bad by themselves, but all together they posed a bridge too far.”