America’s Newest Destroyer Is Already Outdated

Hie thee hence, sea fighters, to peruse Information Dissemination‘s take on the U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer. Pseudo-pseudonymous pundit “Lazarus” gives a nifty profile of the newfangled vessel. That’s worth your time in itself. Though not in so many words, moreover, he depicts the attention-grabbing DDG-1000 stories of recent weeks and months as a red herring. Sure, Zumwalt features a “tumblehome” hull that makes the ship look like the second coming of USS Monitor. (This is not a compliment.) The hull tapers where it should flare and flares where it should taper. Zounds!

Yet more than cosmetics occasions commentary. Some navy-watchers voice concern about tumblehome hulls’ seakeeping ability in rough waters. Others question their ability to remain buoyant and stable after suffering mishaps or battle damage. That’s a worry in a “minimum manned” ship that relies on automated damage control. (The very idea of automated firefighting and flooding control, and sparsely populated fire parties, sits poorly with this former fire marshal.) In any event, time will tell whether the naval architects got it right.

Even if problems do come to light, Zumwalt would be far from the first fighting ship to undergo modifications to remedy problems baked into her design. The flattop USS Midway, for example, underwent repeated change over her long life — including to correct such maladies. Plus ça change.

Zumwalt‘s secondary armament has made headlines as well. The navy recently opted to substitute lesser-caliber 30-mm guns for the 57-mm guns originally envisioned to empower the ship to duel small boats and light surface combatants. The smaller mount evidently meets performance parameters for close-in engagements that its bigger counterpart misses. This too is a controversy that, in all likelihood, will be settled once sea trials put the ship through her paces. Tempest, meet teapot.

Such controversies obscure matters that are more elemental and consequential than hullforms or selecting a secondary gun. The truly important DDG-1000 question is a question of purpose. Navies exist first and foremost to win command of the sea, overcoming foes’ efforts to deny it this goal or exercise command themselves. Zumwalt, by contrast, is almost exclusively a shore-bombardment platform, designed to rain projectiles on targets far inland. That means she will either rely on other ships to hold enemy defenses at bay, or perform her mission under near-constant enemy fire. The hard fact confronting mariners is that shore-based defenses — tactical aircraft, anti-ship and anti-air missiles — now outrange the U.S. Navy fleet, while even lesser navies boast an array of submarines and patrol craft able to make trouble for outsiders. Projecting power ashore must await victory in the fight for command. Delay can cost you.

The new combatant, then, is in effect a “flotilla” vessel, to borrow Sir Julian Corbett’s taxonomy of naval fleets. Such ships neither fight for command of the sea — that mission falls to the battle fleet — nor join the “cruiser” contingent to police seas largely scoured of enemies. They do their rather humdrum jobs once others have borne the brunt of combat. In a sense, consequently, the U.S. Navy’s priciest, sexiest warships are now auxiliaries rather than capital ships — the ships that, in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s parlance, dish out and take heavy punishment in action against enemy main forces.

That could be a tough sell for taxpayers, who presumably expect their hard-earned cash to fund platforms that accomplish the navy’s chief purpose. So the navy leadership has a salesmanship challenge ahead of it.

Tactical challenges lie ahead as well. How will commanders employ DDG-1000s? The possibilities are few and unattractive. Zumwalt may become a “high-value unit” like a carrier or amphibious assault ship, escorted into combat zones by a retinue of picket ships. The escorts can attempt to fend off attack while DDG-1000 pummels land targets, much as carrier strike groups close within reach of the air wing while striving to defend themselves. Or, Zumwalt can await the results of battle before taking station within reach of her land-attack cruise missiles or advanced precision gunnery. Or, she can venture inshore alone, trusting to stealth to mask her presence. Her builders boast that the cruiser-sized vessel looks like a small craft on adversaries’ radar sets. Passive measures such as reducing her radar cross-section will doubtless help.

But none of these methods appeal. A concentric formation centered on a high-value unit is bound to attract unwanted attention. Waiting for safe seas and skies means postponing the main event, namely projecting force ashore. And relying entirely on stealth — on a big ship’s capacity to elude detection — is a hazardous business. Once Zumwalt starts firing guns and missiles, someone’s eventually going to detect her using what seafarers ruefully call the “Mark I, Mod 0 Eyeball.” Once the ship is sighted visually, her minimal ability to ward off surface, subsurface, air, or missile attack could prove fatal.

In short, DDG-1000 appears to be a man-of-war built for the halycon 1990s, when no one contested American command of the commons. The good news is that, with only three ships of the class forthcoming, the navy can treat Zumwalt as a fleet experiment, learning what works in her design and what doesn’t, trying out various tactics, and feeding that insight into future ship classes. In the meantime, upgrading the main guns for action against enemy surface ships is a must, as is hastening the development and deployment of new anti-ship cruise missiles. These are defects we already know about and must act on. If DDG-1000 is a surface-combat platform, let’s equip her to do more than fire into a continent.

And it is unarmored. These things won’t survive combat. They are suited for anti piracy ops and nothing more, a task which seems to be less important now as more traditional ships and multinational participation seems to have got that problem down to its old desultory level.

Concure. My only concern is the low manning making it hard to do damage control. If you look at the Stark and the Roberts, neither of them should have survived the hits they took. The difference was damage control.

The Germans had a terrible problem with military technology in WWII. Their scientists were continually developing new models, upgrades, add-ons, this, that and the other to their weapons, and then fielding them. It caused chaos.

Everything from small arms to heavy tanks, all incompatible with each other, were sent to the fronts, guaranteeing there would never be enough ammo, and that the loss of a single major weapons system would be a disaster.

The pinnacle of this over-design was likely the “Elefant” heavy tank destroyer, that was so overloaded with gizmos that by the end of the war it was almost immobile. Since then it is still remembered for its over-design, and total reliance on theoretical quality instead of quantity.

But the extreme of this was when German scientists were asked to develop the perfect artillery cannon, which on paper would have likely been the best artillery piece ever created. Unfortunately, it needed to be made with a tungsten alloy, needing more tungsten for a single tube than the known world reserves of tungsten at the time.

He sort of lost my credibility when he disparagingly compared the hull shape to the Union’s Monitor. It more resembles the Confederate CSS Virginia. The writer apparently has trouble with naval history and the modern concept of radar signature reduction. His points regarding whether the ship is suitable for use against its probable opponents may be valid, but with multiple cruise missile launchers, a VTOL platform, and a pair of 155 mm (6”) guns the ship looks pretty capable of defending herself and inflicting damage. Its cost may be the biggest issue.

Your point reminded me of some business I used to do in the Middle East. My company was selling portable steam and pressure washers that were being used out in the desert on the oil rigs. The design was simple, robust, more or less idiot proof, and had been around largely unchanged for at least twenty years. Our chief competition was a German manufacturer who made machines beautifully designed so that the operator could fine tune everything specific to his purpose.

When I asked our dealer why he was succeeding so well against the cheaper and more advanced and aesthetically modern German machines (this was back in the Reagan days when the Dollar was hugely strong against the D-Mark and we were at a major cost disadvantage) he said our machines would last and do the job but when the Pakistanis and other uneducated oilfield laborers got hold of the German machines they would start playing with all the buttons and dials and ruin it in hours. And the design was so complicated that the service engineers (also Pakis and worse) were hopeless in making repairs. Rugged, reliably, and simple enough for an illiterate peasant to fix served the Russians well in WWII and as my story may illustrate Germans can find it hard to change habits.

How many of those buildings were hit by enemy shells and missiles? Shipboard battle damage control involves a great deal more than just extinguishing the fires. Holes need to be patched. Power needs to be restored. Flooded compartments need to be dewatered.

My understanding of the ‘stealth’ aircraft is that they’re all but invisible to radar.

Is it possible to make ships like that, or will you always get more radar ‘ping’ with ships?

For ships, it’s all about angles. Look at some close up pics of an Arleigh Burke DDG. They’ve replaced round and flat structures with diamond and angled structures, even down to side rails, cleats, capstans, masts and gun turrets. this does not make ships invisible to radar. It reduces their RCS (radar cross section)so they might not be detected at longer distances and they might be mistaken for smaller vessels. The Burkes also have a system to reduce heat/infrared signature from exhaust stacks. Noise reductions under water...that’s touchy.

Everything, including stealth aircraft, can be found if you use the right technology. You may remember that one of our F-117’s was shot down during Clinton’s Balkan war. The intent of any low-observable technology is to allow your aircraft/ship/personnel to get inside the line that the enemy thinks he controls. When your assets are in that position, the enemy has less time and opportunity to defeat them. Putting things in a more conventional framework, when we stealthily put specops teams behind enemy lines, we are essentially doing the same thing. The first inkling that the enemy knows they are there is when things start blowing up.

They still have he same tendencies today given what I think I know about German cars. I still like German cars, but you have to have the right mindset about it, and be willing to put up with reliability quirks for the handling at speed. I see them as reliable Italian cars.

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