© Portland Press Herald - Getty ImagesThe Navy's Zumwalt stealth destroyers will be the first to rock Mach 17 missiles. The ships will skip the line and get hypersonic weapons in 2025.
- The Navy's three Zumwalt-class destroyers will be modified to carry new hypersonic weapons.
- Each destroyer could hold up to 16 C-HGB missiles.
- The speed and range of hypersonic weapons would allow the U.S. Navy to strike any target within 5,000 miles in a matter of minutes.
The U.S. Navy says it will add hypersonic weapons to its latest class of destroyers by 2025.
The Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers, characterized by their knife-like bows and angular shaping, will add the Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB) missile system while removing their controversial long-range guns. The result will be a unique trio of warships capable of striking targets that are thousands of miles away within minutes of launch.
The Zumwalts, which the Pentagon first proposed in the early 2000s, were supposed to be among the most capable warships ever built. As the first U.S.-made warships armed with two advanced 155-millimeter guns and designed from the outset to minimize their radar signature, the 32 destroyers of the Zumwalt class could sneak up to a coastline and unleash a barrage of long-range, precision-guided shells.
Unfortunately, development costs ballooned, the Navy trimmed the number of ships from 32 to just 3, and the gun ammunition swiftly became unaffordable-even by Pentagon standards.
© U.S. Navy - Getty ImagesThe Zumwalt-class destroyers will likely use a missile launch system originally developed for ballistic missile submarines converted to carry cruise missiles. The guided-missile submarine USS Michigan pictured.
In 2017, the Navy changed the Zumwalts' mission from shelling land targets from the littorals to anti-ship and long-range strike. Last year, Congress mandated the Navy add the C-HGB hypersonic weapon system to the Zumwalts.
C-HGB, which the Navy developed in conjunction with the Army and Air Force, is a boost glide hypersonic weapon that will be launched from aircraft, trucks, ships, and submarines. The two-stage weapon launches like a ballistic missile in that it flies skyward toward space, but unlike a ballistic missile, it falls short of entering space.
Instead, C-HGB and other boost glide weapons remain in the atmosphere, gliding down to their targets at hypersonic speed. Current U.S. hypersonic weapons are all conventionally armed with high explosive warheads.
Experts believe C-HGB is the "Super Duper Missile" that former U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly referenced during his presidency, claiming it could strike targets within 6 inches of the bullseye. C-HGB has a maximum speed of Mach 17, or 13,043 miles per hour, though the missile's speed varies considerably throughout its flight profile. While a March 2020 test shot from the Hawaiian island of Kauai flew for 2,500 miles, the original range specification was for 5,000 miles.
Here's a video of the test launch:
The Navy has studied how to integrate the new missile into the Zumwalt-class ships. Adding the weapons to the deck of the Zumwalts would create major issues with the ship's stealth, which reportedly reduces the radar signature of the 600-foot-long destroyer to that of a small fishing boat. Instead, the service is looking at ripping out one or both of each ship's two 155-millimeter Advanced Gun Systems and replacing them with C-HGB launchers, according to U.S. Naval Institute News.
In the current design, the Navy would modify the Multiple All-up-round Canisters (MACs) fitted to the Ohio-class guided missile submarines to carry the hypersonic weapons, USNI News explains. Each MAC on the Ohio-class subs is armed with seven Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving each submarine a total loadout of 154 cruise missiles.
C-HGB missiles are about one-third larger in diameter than Tomahawk missiles, so MACs will be armed with fewer hypersonic missiles. One gun mount might be replaced with as many as two MACs.
It's hard to see the Navy keeping any of the Zumwalts' 155-millimeter guns. While the guns are useful, sticking with even one of them would reduce the number of the more useful hypersonic missiles by half-while making ammunition for the guns that much more expensive. But removing both guns, as well as the ammunition magazine designed to store 920 howitzer rounds below deck, could make room for as many as four MAC canisters with a total of 16 hypersonic missiles.
The Navy wants to have at least one of the three Zumwalt destroyers-the USS Zumwalt, USS Michael Monsoor, and USS Lyndon Johnson-armed with C-HGB missiles by 2025.
© Portland Press Herald - Getty ImagesThe second Zumwalt-class destroyer, USS Monsoor, during sea trials, 2018.
A Zumwalt-class destroyer in a major conflict with China or Russia would allow the Navy to strike targets from thousands of miles away. If the 5,000-mile range requirement sticks, a Zumwalt could strike a target on China's coastline, such as a naval headquarters, communications facility, or surface to air missile battery, from a location halfway to Hawaii. This would allow U.S. planners to launch strikes against critical targets without endangering the launch platform. If some risks are accepted, a Zumwalt could sail closer to the Asian mainland and strike targets deeper in the Chinese interior.
The possibility of such strikes could deter an adversary from aggressive action-or prompt them to build hypersonic weapons of their own.
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