The Zumwalt-Class Destroyer: What It Is, Why It's Controversial, and What It Becomes Next

The Zumwalt-class destroyer looks like something a film studio would build if the Navy gave them an unlimited budget and told them to make it look scary. A 600-foot ship with a hull that slopes inward, no visible gun turrets (anymore), and a radar signature reportedly similar to a small fishing boat. It's one of the most visually striking warships ever built. It's also one of the most controversial procurement decisions in modern US naval history. Understanding why tells you a lot about how expensive it is to be on the bleeding edge of military technology.

What Is the Zumwalt-Class Destroyer?

The Zumwalt class, formally designated DDG-1000, is a class of three US Navy guided-missile destroyers built around stealth, automation, and advanced firepower. The lead ship, USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000), was commissioned in October 2016. It was followed by USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) and USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002). Despite being called destroyers, these ships are actually the largest surface combatants in the US fleet, displacing around 15,900 tons, which puts them well above any other active destroyer or cruiser.

The class is named after Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., the youngest four-star admiral in US Navy history and the youngest person to serve as Chief of Naval Operations. He was appointed CNO in 1970 by President Nixon. The program itself grew out of the DD-21 "land attack destroyer" concept from the early 1990s, which was eventually redesignated DD(X) and then DDG-1000 through a series of program overhauls. The original ambition was to build 32 ships. That number fell to 24, then to 7, and finally to just 3, which is where the real cost story starts.

The Stealth Hull That Makes a 15,000-Ton Ship Look Like a Fishing Boat

The most immediately striking thing about a Zumwalt is the hull. It uses what naval engineers call a "tumblehome" design, meaning the hull slopes inward above the waterline rather than flaring outward the way conventional warships do. That inward slope scatters radar returns rather than bouncing them directly back toward the detecting radar. According to publicly available analysis, the design makes the Zumwalt approximately 50 times harder to spot on radar than a conventional destroyer of similar size. The ship's radar cross-section is reportedly comparable to a small fishing vessel, despite the ship being 600 feet long.

The composite deckhouse adds to this effect. Rather than a steel superstructure bristling with visible antennae and radar arrays, the Zumwalt's sensors are enclosed within a smooth, angled deckhouse made largely of carbon fiber composite material. Low-signature electronically steered arrays and an integrated multifunction mast sit behind that composite shell, reducing the overall radar and infrared profile further. The third ship in the class, USS Lyndon B. Johnson, uses a steel deckhouse instead, which is one of several differences between the vessels.

It's worth being precise about what "stealth" means here. The Zumwalt is not invisible, and it's not trying to be. Sea conditions, radar frequencies, heat emissions, and electronic signatures could still give it away in the right circumstances. What the tumblehome hull buys is a reduced detection window, which in modern naval warfare can absolutely be the difference between surviving a strike and not. "Harder to detect" is not the same as "invisible," but it's not nothing either.

The Integrated Power System: Why This Ship Is Effectively a Floating Power Plant

The Zumwalt's propulsion and power arrangement is genuinely different from what you find on other warships. Instead of separate systems for propulsion and shipboard electricity, the Zumwalt runs on an Integrated Power System (IPS). Gas turbines drive generators, and those generators feed everything on the ship, including the electric motors that turn the propeller shafts. The system produces approximately 78 megawatts of electrical power, which is far beyond what any current destroyer needs for conventional operations.

The Zumwalt was designed to power weapons that didn't exist yet. That's either visionary engineering or expensive optimism, depending on your perspective.

That surplus capacity is the point. The Navy designed the IPS specifically to support future energy-intensive weapons: railguns, high-energy lasers, and advanced directed-energy systems that draw far more power than existing weapons. None of those systems materialized in the timeframe the program anticipated. Railgun development funding was cut in 2021. But the power infrastructure remains, and it's one of the genuinely forward-looking elements of the design. The IPS concept has influenced thinking about future surface combatant design well beyond the Zumwalt program itself.

The Gun System That Never Got Its Ammunition

Here's where the story gets complicated. The Zumwalt class was originally designed around two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems (AGS), each capable of firing Long Range Land Attack Projectiles (LRLAP) at targets more than 100 nautical miles away. The idea was that these ships would replace battleships in the naval gunfire support role, providing precision fires for troops operating near coastlines. On paper, it was a credible solution to a real problem.

Then the program was cut from 32 ships to 3. That reduction had a catastrophic effect on ammunition economics. With 32 ships each cycling through rounds regularly, the production volume would have kept the per-unit cost of LRLAP manageable. With only 3 ships, the cost of each guided projectile climbed above $800,000 per round. The Navy canceled the LRLAP program in 2016, the same year the lead ship was commissioned. The guns remained physically installed on all three ships for years but had no usable ammunition. They were, effectively, very expensive decorations.

The Three Ships: Where Each One Stands Right Now

All three Zumwalt-class ships are in various stages of an extensive weapons conversion. Here's a snapshot of where things stood as of late 2025 and into 2026.

The conversion work is being carried out at Huntington Ingalls Industries' Ingalls Shipbuilding facility in Pascagoula, Mississippi. USS Zumwalt's two AGS turrets were fully removed during a refit that began in August 2023, and the ship was refloated in December 2024 after an extensive overhaul. The total cost of modifying all three ships to carry the new hypersonic missile systems is estimated at around $2 billion.

The Conventional Prompt Strike Conversion: What Replaces the Guns

The space freed up by removing the AGS turrets is being used to install four Multiple All-Up Round Canisters (MACs), each holding three Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) missiles. That gives each ship a magazine of 12 hypersonic missiles. The CPS system uses a Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB), a wedge-shaped glide vehicle that is released from a rocket booster, climbs to high altitude, and then glides to its target at hypersonic speeds. The US Navy and Army completed an end-to-end flight test of the system from the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii in June 2024.

Each CPS All-Up Round is over 10 meters long, weighs around 7 tonnes, and is estimated to cost between $30 million and $40 million per missile. Accuracy is reported to be within a few meters. The Navy's current timeline puts the first at-sea live-fire test around 2027, with full operational capability anticipated by 2029. These are not mass-strike weapons. With 12 missiles per ship and each one costing tens of millions of dollars, CPS rounds would logically be reserved for the highest-value, time-critical targets where hypersonic speed and precision are the only options that work. Think high-value fixed installations, command nodes, or adversary naval assets where interception of a slower weapon would be likely.

Twelve hypersonic missiles that cost $30-40 million each aren't for everyday use. Their value is as much about deterrence as it is about actual firepower.

Beyond the CPS installation, the ships are also being upgraded under the Zumwalt Enterprise Upgrade Solution (ZEUS) program. This includes combat system modernization, integration of the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) datalink, upgraded electronic warfare suites, and additional anti-air and anti-surface improvements. The Zumwalt is being rebuilt, in effect, as a precision long-range strike platform rather than the shore bombardment vessel it was originally designed to be.

Was the Zumwalt Program Worth It?

This is the question that naval analysts have been arguing about for years, and the honest answer is: it depends on what you think it was for. If you evaluate the program against its original stated purpose of providing naval gunfire support, it failed. The primary weapon system was canceled before the ships could even perform their intended mission. The program cost roughly $7.5 billion per ship when total development expenses are included, well above the per-unit cost of a nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarine at around $2.7 billion.

But there's another reading. The Zumwalt program forced the Navy to develop and prove out integrated electric propulsion at scale. The IPS concept has influenced future warship design broadly. The automation systems that allow the ships to operate with a crew of around 147 to 158 (compared to 330 on the older Spruance-class destroyers they nominally replaced) demonstrated what reduced manning could look like. And now, as the only surface ships in the US fleet being equipped with hypersonic strike capability, they occupy a strategic role no other platform currently fills.

In my reading of the available analysis, the fairest description of the Zumwalt class is an expensive technology demonstrator that is now finding a second life as a genuine strategic asset. That's cold comfort for the budget overruns and the canceled ammunition program. But it's a more accurate picture than either "total failure" or "visionary success."

What the Zumwalt Tells Us About the Future of Naval Warfare

The Zumwalt program's trajectory from ambitious 32-ship class to 3-ship experiment points to a broader tension in naval procurement: the faster technology moves, the harder it is to write requirements for a warship that will serve for 30 years. The AGS and LRLAP made sense in the threat environment of the late 1990s. By the time the ships were commissioned, the assumptions had shifted. The Navy had pivoted toward distributed maritime operations, long-range missile warfare, and great-power competition with China, none of which a shore bombardment destroyer was built to address.

What the Zumwalt does offer now is a platform with the power headroom to support future weapons, a reduced radar signature that remains meaningful in contested environments, and a hypersonic strike capacity that no adversary surface combatant currently matches. Whether that justifies the cost is a legitimate debate. But the ships are here, they're being modernized, and they will carry weapons that can reach targets over 1,000 miles away in a matter of minutes. That's not nothing.

What to Read and Watch Next

If the Zumwalt class caught your interest, the most useful next steps are to look at how it compares to the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that the Navy continued building in parallel. The Burkes are cheaper, simpler, and far more numerous. Understanding why the Navy chose to keep producing them even as it was developing the Zumwalt tells you a lot about how procurement decisions get made. You might also want to follow the Conventional Prompt Strike program more broadly, since the technology being installed on these three ships is the same hypersonic glide body the Army is developing for land-based launchers. If you want to track the Zumwalt conversion in near-real time, the USNI News and NavyLookout are the two most reliable open-source outlets covering it. Subscribe to either one if this kind of thing is your interest.