EDITOR’S NOTE:. The “Project On Government Oversight” Article by Mark Thompson
below captured our interest due to the personal involvement we nearly had with BAE when this defense program debacle began Glad I Did Not Take The Job – ‘The Destroyer Without A Round For Its Gun’. As Mark reports, this 3-vessel program is about to go hypersonic in weapons and cost growth.
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“POGO (The Bunker)” By Mark Thompson
Nearly a decade after its commissioning, a $9 billion warship is finally getting its weapons. Designed around a pair of twin 155mm guns, the USS Zumwalt was supposed to launch guided rounds against land targets. But the number of custom-designed shells fell as the size of the fleet plummeted from 32 to three. Fewer ships meant fewer custom rounds, which drove their estimated cost from a finger-crossing $35,000 to nearly $1 million each. Finally, in 2017, the Navy scrapped the rounds — and eventually the guns — leaving the three Zumwalts (total cost: $27.2 billion [PDF]) with little to do.
In 2021, the Navy decided to make the Zumwalt destroyers the first U.S. Navy warships armed with hypersonic missiles, able to travel seven to eight times the speed of sound. On December 6, Ingalls Shipbuilding announced it had returned the first Zumwalt to salt water in the Gulf of Mexico, 15 months after it dry-docked the hull to make the modifications needed to handle up to 12 of the new hypersonic weapons.
“Shortly after its arrival [at Ingalls’ Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard in August 2023], the ship was put back on land in order to receive technology upgrades including the integration of the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) weapon system,” Ingalls said. “The Ingalls team also replaced the original twin 155mm Advanced Gun Systems on the destroyers with new missile tubes.” The Navy plans to begin testing the new weapon aboard the Zumwalt in 2027 or 2028.
All this almost makes that original $1 million bullet look like a bargain. “If any hypersonic weapons end up aboard these destroyers, they’re going to cost far more than $1 million each,” The Bunker said nearly three years ago. Turns out the hypersonic missiles bound for the Zumwalts will cost $60 million — each — to buy and maintain over 20 years. That Congressional Budget Office estimate (PDF) does not include “the cost overruns that are often associated with technically challenging programs” and also “exclude[s] research and development cost for the missiles.”
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