The Next Destroyer
By 
And on the lighter side of the news, the Navy is still trying to build a new class of destroyers…
The DDG(X) is expected to be a class of twenty-eight large warships that will eventually replace the first two flights of the DDG-51 “Arleigh Burke” class destroyers.
The oldest Arleigh Burkes are approaching thirty-five years old and have experienced considerable wear and tear.
The new destroyer is expected to displace some 13,500 tons, about a third larger than the Arleigh Burkes and the Ticonderoga class cruisers.
The design remains in flux, but the ships are expected to carry three thirty-two cell vertical launch system (VLS) modules along with an assortment of defensive and anti-submarine weaponry.
Designers expect that the VLS modules can be replaced with newer, larger VLS cells that can carry hyper-sonic missiles and other large weapons.
The engineering plant of the DDG(X), largely adopted from the model of the Zumwalt class destroyers, will be able to provide multiples of the power available to the DDG-51s.
In addition to greater range, this will give the ships the capacity to use higher powered direct energy weapons (lasers) that may become important to the vessel’s air defense missions. The ship is currently expected to carry a standard 5” gun, although recent mock-ups have omitted the gun (undoubtedly to the frustration of the Navy’s old hands…).
The extra power and extra size are intended to provide room for improvement and modification, both to individual ships across the course of their careers and to new construction.
Click through for some discussion of the genuine catastrophe of US Navy procurement and shipbuilding over the past three decades. Basically, the Navy is terrified of having hulls with a projected 40 year lifespan that are rendered obsolete less then a decade after construction (there was some trauma in the 20th century) and this panic is leading to some poor decisions.
Some other links:
- AUKUS on life support.
- F-35 vs. the Gripen E…
- Russia’s Oreshnik isn’t a big deal for Ukraine but it is a big deal for NATO…
- Some lawyers, some guns, some money, and US aircraft development failures in World War I…