• The US Navy is converting Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers into hypersonic missile shooters.
• The expensive Zumwalt class has struggled to find a suitable mission and weapons.
• The upgrade is part of the US' effort to keep pace with adversaries in fielding hypersonic weapons.

The US Navy's Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers are hailed as a revolution in naval warfare due to their next-generation design and advanced technology.

But nearly two decades after the first-in-class USS Zumwalt began construction, the world's most advanced surface combatants are still not ready for combat, victims of development problems, cost overruns, and ineffective systems.

Now, the sea service is retrofitting the Zumwalt-class destroyers to launch future hypersonic missiles in a bid to make the costly warships more useful by allowing them to strike targets from afar with greater precision.

The Zumwalt has been docked at a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, since August 2023 to integrate the new and untested weapon system.

The ship is expected to be undocked this week as it prepares for tests and a return to the fleet, according to a shipyard spokeswoman, though the Navy said it wants to begin testing the ship's new hypersonic weapon system in 2027 or 2028.

The world's largest, most advanced destroyer

The Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers are considered the most advanced surface warships in the world, equipped with innovative naval technology.

Named after Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., the youngest chief of naval operations in US history, the lead ship USS Zumwalt is the largest destroyer in the world at 610 feet long. It can house a crew of nearly 200 sailors and accommodate one MH-60R Seahawk helicopter in its hangar.

General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Huntington Ingalls Industries were behind the design and construction of the three stealth destroyers.

The warships feature an all-electric propulsion system and a composite deckhouse covered with radar-absorbing material to hide their sensors and communication systems. But the US Navy has struggled to arm them.

Due to the ship's manufacturing issues and soaring costs, the Navy reduced the Zumwalt class's overall size from 32 ships to just three: the Zumwalt, USS Michael Monsoor, and the future USS Lyndon B. Johnson, which is expected to commission after its combat systems are fully installed and activated.

The first shipborne hypersonic weapon

The stealth destroyers were armed with two 155 mm deck guns for shore bombardment, but ballooning manufacturing costs made the ammunition for the guns ridiculously expensive.

The Navy halted the ammo procurement in 2016, the same year the Zumwalt was commissioned, and publicly announced in 2018 that it was scrapping the now-useless main deck guns for a new weapon system.

In 2021, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said the stealth destroyers would be the first Navy warships to be armed with hypersonic missiles instead of its Block V Virginia-class submarines, saying that it would be an "important move" toward turning the surface ships into strike platforms.

The Navy said the first-in-class stealth destroyer's "upgrades will ensure Zumwalt remains one of the most technologically advanced and lethal ships in the US Navy."

Photos showed the Zumwalt's main deck gun mounts were removed. The cannons will be replaced with four all-up round canisters containing three hypersonic missiles each. These come in addition to its conventional missile arsenal of 80 vertical launch cells.

US efforts in hypersonic innovation

The US military is working on hypersonic weapons across all branches. The Zumwalts will be armed with the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) system, the Navy's joint hypersonic weapons program with the Army and US Strategic Command.

Described by STRATCOM as "a strong deterrence message to our adversaries," the "highly lethal platform" would launch like a ballistic missile but instead uses a two-stage solid-fueled rocket booster to get the projectile to travel at speeds faster than Mach 5 speed — nearly 4,000 mph. The booster allows the missile to change trajectory at these speeds, unlike a ballistic missile, and combined with its lower altitude flight complicates efforts to intercept it.

The weapon system features an all-up round (AUR) missile and a separate payload modular adapter, which the Navy is testing along with the missile and eject system.

"It's not like any other type of missile," Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the Navy's director of strategic programs, told reporters at the Naval Submarine League's annual symposium last month. "You don't light this thing off inside."

The CPS system failed its first test in June 2022, as well as subsequent flight tests in March and September 2023. The first successful test was completed this summer.

"The testing that we need to do to get to the final integration of Zumwalt, that's irrespective of where the Zumwalt's at, whether it's in the water," Wolfe added.

In addition to the CPS system, the Navy is also developing a hypersonic air-launched anti-ship missile expected to be compatible with the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet. However, few details about the $178.6 million program have been released to the public.

Scrapping the Zumwalts' twin turrets

Developed to provide off-shore precision fire support from a distance, the Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers were armed with a pair of Advanced Gun System (AGS) mounts to fire naval artillery from up to 100 nautical miles away — in what would've been the US Navy's longest-range shell in use.

However, after the Navy reduced the size of its Zumwalt fleet, manufacturing costs for the Long-Range Land-Attack Projectile-guided shells skyrocketed to about $800,000 to $1 million per round — about the same price as a cruise missile.

The rocket-assisted projectiles also fell short of the intended range, prompting the sea service to cancel production of the munitions, rendering the pair of high-velocity cannons useless.

Before announcing the new hypersonic weapon, the Navy floated other weapon systems to replace the failed gun mounts, including an electromagnetic railgun or futuristic laser weapons.

The hypersonic edge

In recent years, US adversaries like Russia and China have been developing hypersonic weapons, adding pressure on the Pentagon to prioritize its own hypersonic development efforts.

China has "the world's leading hypersonic arsenal," and Russia has already deployed two of its three hypersonic weapon systems in Ukraine, according to congressional testimony from Jeffrey McCormick, senior intelligence analyst at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.

The US, however, has yet to field a single hypersonic weapon amid ongoing development and integration challenges across the military, including the Zumwalt-class artillery upgrade.

'Is it really worth the money?'

Research and development for the destroyer cost about $22.4 billion, and General Dynamics spent another $40 million just to construct a shipyard facility large enough to accommodate the giant hull segments.

Each ship cost an average of $7.5 billion — more expensive than the Navy's Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.

Even with all of their costly innovations, the Zumwalt-class vessels continued to be plagued by equipment problems and constantly needed repairs.

Last year, the Navy awarded Huntington Ingalls Industries with a $154.8 million contract to integrate the hypersonic weapon system aboard USS Zumwalt. The Congressional Budget Office also estimated that it would cost nearly $18 billion to buy and maintain 300 of the hypersonic boost-glide missiles for the next 20 years.

As the expenses of fielding US-developed hypersonic weapons pile up, some military analysts say the costs outweigh the benefits.

"This particular missile costs more than a dozen tanks," Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the DC-based think tank Lexington Institute, told the Associated Press. "All it gets you is a precise non-nuclear explosion, someplace far, far away."

"Is it really worth the money?" Thompson continued. "The answer is, most of the time, the missile costs much more than any target you can destroy with it."

A steep price to pay to keep pace

While conventional missiles may cost less, long-range hypersonic weapons increase the chances of striking the targets of adversaries protected by advanced air defense systems like those of China and Russia.

"The adversary has them," retired Navy Rear Adm. Ray Spicer, CEO of the US Naval Institute, told the AP. "We never want to be outdone."

Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute, told the AP that while the US stealth destroyers were "a costly blunder," the Navy could "take victory from the jaws of defeat here and get some utility out of them by making them into a hypersonic platform."

The jury is still out on whether the Zumwalt hypersonic upgrades are worth the hefty price tag, but it would at the very least give the stealth destroyers a purpose.

"Zumwalt gave us an opportunity to get [hypersonics] out faster," Gilday told USNI News in 2022," and to be honest with you, I need a solid mission for Zumwalt."

• The US Navy has developed a new way of reloading warships with missiles while at sea.
• It will be "critical" to any future conflict in the Pacific, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said.
• The solution could be useful, but it's untested in real war conditions, one analyst said.

The US Navy has developed a new way of reloading its destroyers, cruisers, and other sizable warships with missiles at sea, as it contends with the growing naval threat from China.

The Wall Street Journal gained exclusive access to a recent test off the coast of California, where US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro described the new capability as "critical to any future conflict in the Pacific."

The technology is based on repurposed 1990s prototype equipment and uses a hydraulically propelled system that transports missile canisters from a supply ship via a zipline to place them into a launch cell, it reported.

TRAM was tested on land in July and then at sea for the first time in October, off the coast of San Diego, where Del Toro touted it as a "powerful deterrent" to US rivals.

"Without the ability to rearm at sea, our service combatants must return to port, sometimes thousands of miles away," Del Toro said at the time.

This could put them out of action for weeks at a time.

Del Toro said the US Navy expected to start deploying TRAM within the next two to three years.

In a speech at Columbia University in December 2022, Del Toro said delivering the "game-changing" capability to rearm US warships at sea was one of his top priorities.

China has grown increasingly assertive in the Pacific in recent months, crossing into the airspace and waters around Taiwan, a key US partner, and carrying out maritime gray-zone operations in the South China Sea against the Philippines, an ally the US is treaty-bound to defend.

To date, the US has only been able to reload its warships' cruise missile launchers from solid ground, or in sheltered harbors.

In September, the USS Dewey reloaded at an allied naval base in Darwin, Australia.

But "if conflict were to erupt, or if something were to happen, being able to go to various different locations around the Indo-Pacific, it makes it much faster for us to reload," Nicholas Maruca, the commanding officer of the USS Dewey, told the Journal.

However, the technology alone might not be enough.

Nick Childs, a senior naval analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, noted in a recent military blog that the system has only been trialed in "fairly benign" sea conditions and that the Navy needs to distribute enough equipment, replenishment ships, and missiles around the fleet, and also modify warships to receive them.

"However they are accomplished," he said of reloading solutions, they "will be no silver bullet for navies."

• Israel's potent air defenses are increasingly threatened by low-flying drones.
• Two retired Israeli generals say it needs new defenses against this "low sky" layer.
• Israel pioneered targeting air defenses with drones in a stunning victory four decades ago.

Israel's air and missile defense system is arguably the best in the world, having proven this year it can down Iranian ballistic missiles and Hamas-fired rockets. Its Iron Dome is the epitome of this success and is only one of many systems. But while these can protect Israeli cities, they have an increasingly glaring problem — they can't protect themselves from low-flying drones, two retired Israeli brigadier generals warn.

"We have to defend our air defense," wrote Eran Ortal and Ran Kochav in a blog for the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Defense at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, Israel.

Ortal and Kochav fear that enemy drones could knock out air defense systems such as the vaunted Iron Dome, enabling ballistic missiles, manned aircraft and artillery rockets to strike Israel without being intercepted. "The Israeli Air Force does continue to rule the skies, but under the noses of the advanced fighter jets, a new air layer has been created."

The authors call this the "low sky" layer. "The enemy has found a loophole here. The Air Force (and, within it, the air defense corps) is required to defend against the combined and coordinated threats of missiles, unmanned aircraft systems and rockets."

Over the past year, Israel's air and missile system has achieved remarkable success against a range of projectiles launched by Iran, Hamas and other Iranian proxies, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, artillery rockets and mortar shells. For example, Israel — with the assistance of the US, Britain and other nations — reportedly intercepted 99% of some 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and large attack drones launched by Iran in April 2024.

However, Israel has struggled against small exploding drones launched by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. More than a hundred Israeli soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded by these UAVs, including 67 who were wounded when a drone hit a building in northern Israel in October. Still, the situation is a far cry from the Ukraine war, where hordes of small drones have rendered battlefield maneuver almost impossible.

Nonetheless, Ortal and Kochav worry that Israeli air defenses were designed in the pre-drone era, when the threat to Israel came from aircraft and ballistic missiles, a critique that also applies to Western- and Russian-made systems. "This array was built over the years under the premise of Israeli air superiority. The air defense itself was not supposed to be hunted."

"The enemy is able to penetrate deep into Israel and engage the air defense system in one lane while other aircraft take advantage of the diversion and penetrate in another, more covert lane. It can identify targets and strike immediately using armed or suicide UAS. Above all, it strives to locate, endanger, and destroy key elements of the air defense system itself."

Israel relies on a multilayer defense system, with long-range Arrow interceptors targeting ballistic missiles above the Earth's atmosphere, the medium-range David's Sling handling ballistic and cruise missiles about 10 miles high, and the short-range Iron Dome stopping cruise missiles, short-range rockets and artillery and mortar shells at low altitude. All depend on the production and reloading of missiles adequate to the threat.

The problem is that these three systems can't protect each other. "The degree of mutual assistance and protection between the layers is relatively limited," Ortal and Kochav wrote. To optimize the allocation of a limited supply of interceptor missiles, "each tier was designed to deal with a specific type of missile or rocket. Iron Dome can't really assist Arrow batteries or support their missions. This limitation is equally true among the other layers."

Nor are Israel's air defenses built for survivability, such as creating decoy missile batteries and radars to protect the real ones or frequently relocating systems. "The degree of mobility, protection and hiding ability of the Israeli air defense system is inadequate. Unlike similar systems in the world, our air defense system was not built with synchronization as a critical goal."

Their solution? The creation of a fourth layer focused on point protection of the radar, missile launchers and troops that operate them against rockets and drones that have penetrated the first three layers. Air defenses must be camouflaged and should be mobile enough to change location before the enemy can target them.

Ironically, Israel itself was one of the pioneers of using drones to suppress air defenses. Stung by heavy losses from Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel used drones in during the 1982 Lebanon War. By using unmanned aerial vehicles that mimicked manned aircraft, Israel lured Syrian air defense radars into coming online so they could be destroyed by anti-radiation missiles. The Israeli Air Force destroyed 29 out of 30 anti-aircraft missile batteries in the Bekaa Valley without loss and downed more than 60 Syrian aircraft.

Israel's Air Force became so dominant that the ground forces discarded their tactical anti-aircraft weapons (though the IDF recently reactivated the M61 Vulcan gatling cannon for counter-UAV defense on the northern border). Meanwhile, the IDF's air defense corps switched its focus from anti-aircraft to missile defense.

"The working assumption was, and remains to this day, that Israel's Air Force rules the skies," wrote Ortal and Kochav. "The job of air defense, therefore, is to focus on missiles and rockets. This assumption is no longer valid."

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Two days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a change in the country's policy for employing nuclear weapons in conflict. Then, on Thursday, Russia attacked the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a new type of ballistic missile capable of one day delivering multiple nuclear warheads to distant targets with little warning.

Putin says his ballistic missile attack on Ukraine is a warning to the West.

These events are just part of what has been a week of escalation in the war between Russia and Ukraine. In recent days, Ukraine fired US-made ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles and UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at targets in Russian territory for the first time. This followed approval by President Joe Biden for Ukraine to use US-provided longer-range missiles against Russian targets. Previously, Ukraine was only permitted to use them on its own territory.

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• Russia fired what it said was a new type of ballistic missile at Ukraine this week.
• Putin called the missile the "Oreshnik" and said it had a "non-nuclear hypersonic warhead."
• Ukraine described the attack as a "severe escalation."

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said his military had fired a new type of missile at Ukraine, describing it as a test and also a warning to the West.

Putin called the missile the "Oreshnik" and said it had a "non-nuclear hypersonic warhead" and had hit a military-industrial site in Ukraine's eastern city of Dnipro.

He also said it was capable of traveling at Mach 10 — ten times the speed of sound.

The missile, described by the US as experimental, appears to have the range to hit targets elsewhere in Europe.

Here's what we know about the missile and what it could mean for the war and the West.

An experimental missile

Putin said the "Oreshnik" missile can't be stopped, though he and Russian officials have made similar claims in the past about other weaponry that proved anything but infallible.

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh called the missile "experimental" as it was the first time it had been seen deployed on the battlefield in Ukraine.

She said it was an intermediate-range ballistic missile based on Russia's RS-26 Rubezh model, and that it had a non-nuclear payload but could be refitted to carry different types of "conventional or nuclear warheads."

Some military analysts contest the RS-26's classification as an intercontinental ballistic missile, arguing it falls between an ICBM and an intermediate-range missile. As BI previously reported, an ICBM has never been used in combat.

Missile experts said the "Oreshnik" appeared to have a MIRV, or multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, payload, which can carry multiple warheads.

A larger range

The missile's possible range is important. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, medium-range missiles can travel up to 1,860 miles, while intermediate-range missiles can travel up to 3,410 miles.

The RS-26 has a range of up to 3,728 miles, The Financial Times reported.

Matthew Savill of the UK's Royal United Services Institute told the Associated Press the range was "way beyond any of that seen in the conflict so far and possibly the first ever use in combat."

Meanwhile, former Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan described the attack as "a political strike not a military one" but wrote on X that an intermediate-range missile could "be used against almost any target in Europe and the United Kingdom."

The first missile attack, however, was minimal. The local mayor said it had damaged a rehabilitation center, knocking out the windows and destroying a boiler room.

A threat to the West

It's not clear how much of an escalation this latest strike represents in practical terms.

An unnamed US official told the BBC that Russia likely only has a handful of these missiles. And they said Ukraine had already faced significant missile attacks, including ones with much bigger warheads than this.

Jakub Janda, director of the European Values Center for Security Policy, told BI that the move was Russia's attempt to intimidate the West into not giving Ukraine more support at a "critical" time.

"From the Russian side, this is just a cognitive warfare move," he said.

Meanwhile, Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, wrote on X that "using these kinds of missiles, whether RS-26 or a true ICBM, in a conventional role does not make a lot of sense because of their relatively low-accuracy and high cost."

"But this kind of a strike might have a value as a signal."

A nuclear hint

Putin described the strike as a response to Ukraine using US and UK-provided missiles on Russian soil this week.

He said Russia "had the right" to strike countries that gave Ukraine weapons that hit Russia.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it "a clear and severe escalation" and called for worldwide condemnation.

"Russia must be forced into real peace, which can only be achieved through strength," he added.

At the same time, the strike may have been intended to hint at a nuclear threat.

Fabian Hoffmann from the Oslo Nuclear Project told Reuters that Russia chose a missile with a MIRV payload "for signaling purposes" because "this payload is exclusively associated with nuclear-capable missiles."

Ryan, the former Australian officer, said Putin wanted to send a message to Europe about Russia's capacity, and to signal to the US ahead of the presidential transition that it should not give Ukraine advanced capabilities.

But in a statement to BI, NATO spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah said Russia's strike "will neither change the course of the conflict nor deter NATO allies from supporting Ukraine."