Just a couple weeks ago, the Navy fired off the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer’s Integrated Power System (IPS), bringing the ship’s highly advanced system online ahead of sea trials in mid-2015. But as the ship prepares to enter the fleet, just what role will this futuristic vessel have in the Navy’s Asia-Pacific pivot, especially in light of the fact the service abandoned the program to go back to building DDG-51s? As it turns out, the service may see the Korean peninsula as Zumwalt’s new home.
In all, the Navy will build only three Zumwalts. When the program began, the plan was to buy 32. As costs grew for the ship’s cutting edge technology, that figure dropped to 24, then to seven, and finally to three as the service went back to the DDG-51 to supply its destroyer needs, labeling the Zumwalt more of a “technology demonstrator” platform.
But the DDG-1000 is still going to be an operational warship once it makes its way to the fleet soon, so will it be relegated to the sidelines, or will it pay a critical role in the Navy’s strategy?
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, noted that the Zumwalt is “going to be a very different kind of ship for the Navy.” He sees it as a “throwback” to the era when the service had real battleships, because it is a large ship — at 17,000 tons, twice the size of a DDG-51.
“When you go and visit the ship and walk around it, it’s clear it’s huge compared to the rest of the surface combatants,” Clark said. “It’s got this integrated power plant. It’s all electric, so it’s got big electrical generators, as opposed to modern destroyers and frigates, which have got gas turbines.”
It also has two large guns, bigger than that of the DDG-51 and CG-47 cruisers. It will have a lot more range, too, at 60 miles versus 12 miles for the DDG-51’s gun. Those attributes communicate just what this ship is likely to be used for in the modern age, Clark said.
“It’s going to be able to shoot farther with greater accuracy and a bigger round, so it’s kind of got a land attack, littoral sort of mission set,” he said.
While you could insert a vertical launch system to shoot Tomahawks and Standard Missiles, the ship has the ability to support even bigger missiles that don’t exist yet. The idea was you would have a large group of Zumwalts that could bombard the land to support ground forces.
Now that the Navy is building only three, the service will take a more careful, strategic approach to deploying them. Most likely, the first DDG-1000 will head to Japan or South Korea. The Navy will want to maximize operational availability, and the best way to do that is have one permanently stationed where the service needs it, Clark said. The Navy will be able to swap the ship for another when it’s time for periodic overhauls, so there is a minimal gap between when DDG-1000s are available.
The Navy likely will forward-deploy two of them while keeping one on U.S. shores, Clark said.
There are recent parallels to the DDG-1000 program — for example, the short-lived Seawolf submarine program from the 1990s. Like DDG-1000, only three Seawolf vessels were ever built, but originally in the 1980s the Navy had planned to buy more to counter the Soviet Union threat. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, they didn’t need the costly submarines as much.
Similarly, the DDG-1000 started as part of a family of ships in the early 2000s to provide a new architecture for surface warfare, along with the Littoral Combat Ship and the CG(X) next-generation cruiser effort, which was eventually axed.
“We would have the DDG-1000 — or DD(X) at that time — and it would be focused on that land attack mission, and then that vision sort of made sense at the turn of the century time frame when terrorism and small wars and things like that were the main concern,” Clark said. “Even after the 9/11 attacks, that kind of confirmed the idea that this is the direction the military is going — based in littoral operations, small wars, no big wars against peer, big-water navies.”
However, that has changed drastically in the last 10 years with the rise of China and the reemergence of Russia, not to mention various rogue countries like Iran and North Korea that aren’t traditional maritime powers, but because of their geography play a major role in their respective regions.
The Navy realized that land attack is much less important and there was a need to increasingly rely on the joint force, minimizing the need for DDG-1000.
But like Seawolf, the Navy believes the technology developed for the platform can be evolved into future ships — in fact, some of the innovations are already showing up in the Flight III DDG-51s, Clark said.
And in the right operational context, DDG-1000 is very valuable — it’s just that with three of them, they better be in the right place to begin with.
In particular, its powerful radar can help handle a cluttered air environment. It has a good anti-submarine warfare suite to deal with the submarine threat in the Korean region. And, of course, it can use its land attack capabilities to provide support for Marines, as there is always the possibility of a need for amphibious landings — a very beneficial capability on the Korean peninsula.
“That’s one contingency where Marines see they need to do amphibious landings to deal with some of the Korean scenarios,” Clark said. “So that’s a great place for it.”