The first two Zumwalts have been “delivered” from the shipbuilder, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in Maine, to the Pacific Fleet in San Diego, the Navy announced.Īccording to Bryan Clark, an expert on Navy issues at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, each of the Zumwalts has cost about twice as much to build as an Arleigh Burke, the Navy’s other type of destroyer, even when non-recurring design and engineering costs are subtracted. The Navy and the program’s supporters in Congress have still depicted the program as a success story. The guns the Navy and its contractor built the ships around do not work well enough and the rounds they would fire cost too much.Īs a result, late last year - more than a decade after the first contracts were signed to build the ships - the Navy said the vessels would have a new primary mission: “surface strike,” which mainly means attacking enemy ships at sea with as yet undeveloped cruise missiles. But the extent of the program’s problems to date - and the remaining cost to make things right - has not been fully appreciated even among many defense experts.įor starters, no Zumwalt-class ship is ever expected to perform the primary mission it was built for: striking land targets with artillery. The ships, known as DDG 1000s, may yet become capable and, with enough additional money, they may even become warships of unprecedented lethality. And hundreds of millions more dollars will be required to get there. But nearly a dozen years later, none of the Zumwalt ships is ready to fight.

In 2006, Congress started funding construction of the first of three Navy destroyers named after the late famed Navy chief Adm.

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