The fear is, that the current CG-21 proposal will be so expensive, that ouyr congress critters will do to it what they are doing to the DD-21 program...limiting it to eight or so vessels. We cannot afford that at all.
I’d bet money that no more than two DDG-1000s are built.
They’re simply too expensive and too gold-plated - stuff just kept getting added (and the Stealth characteristics are ENORMOUSLY expensive) to the design without any control.
I see DDG-1000 as the second coming of the CG Long Beach - which ended up a one-off design that had an initial cost of 80 million (this is in 1960 dollars) and ended up coming in at 320 million, I think.
We’ll learn a lot of the design and it will be a useful test-bed. Cannot be built in any quantity without completely destroying the shipbuilding budget (And of course it now looks that a complete redesign of LCS will be necessary.)