The Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer program manager this week said the first ship to get the new hypersonic missile system should finish installing missile tubes and be ready for testing by the end of the year, with the next ship due to start modification work in 2026.
“The USS
Zumwalt will be the first maritime platform to deploy [Conventional Prompt Strike] and is due for testing to start by the end of the year,” Capt. Clint Lawler, program manager for the Zumwalt-class Destroyer program office at Program Executive Office Ships, said Wednesday during the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium in Arlington, Va.
DDG-1000 arrived at HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard in 2023 to start the maintenance and modernization work that included replacing its unused Advanced Gun System with four 87-inch large missile vertical launch system tubes to field the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) hypersonic missile system (Defense Daily, Aug. 30, 2023).
The new missile tubes can field up to 12 total CPS missile rounds.
DDG-1000 was back in the water and undocked at the shipyard last month, as the shipyard finishes the maintenance and modernization work (Defense Daily, Dec. 9, 2024).
Lawler confirmed the large missile vertical launch system that will host CPS is “designed to be compatible with the submarine version of the CPS weapon system that will go on the Virginia-class submarines in the early 2030s.”
The Navy plans to add CPS to Block V Virginia-class submarines fitted with the mid-body Virginia Payload Module.
He confirmed that the missile tubes on the Zumwalt-class are not exactly the same as those going on submarines in the 2030s.
“They’re similar. So from a physical dimensioning perspective and their interfaces, they’re by and large the same, but they’re built to different structural requirements, so we don’t have sub state requirements. So there’s a number of differences in the design and fabrication that are not required for surface ships. So there are some differences.”
The third Zumwalt-class destroyer, the future USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002), is also at Ingalls for an extended combat system activation period that is rolling in the CPS modifications.
“We’ve extended the combat system activation period by two years to accomplish this installation. The CPS work was contracted in August and we dry docked the ship this past Sunday in preparation for land-level production. Ship delivery and commissioning is planned for 2027,” Lawler said on Jan. 15.
The second Zumwalt-class destroyer, the USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001), will be the last to receive the CPS missile tubes. DDG-1001 is set to start its modernization period at Ingalls Shipbuilding in 2026, following its upcoming deployment to the Western Pacific later this year.
Lawler underscored the importance of how the Navy established a new kind of modernization period to accommodate adding the new hypersonic missile tubes: the Build Yard Modernization Period (BYMP).
BYMP is used “to leverage the capability and capacity of the Ingalls shipyard and to avoid the delays typical of repair availabilities that incorporate major first time modernization.”
He argued this was necessary because previously the ships planned a normal Drydocking Selected Restricted Availability (DSRA), in which most of the work would be normal maintenance packages and only a small portion was modernization to add CPS systems.
Lawler said this was not ideal because most of the structural work repair facilities do is built piece by piece, known as stick built. In contrast, a build yard like HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding can build a 40 by 60 foot piece of deck structure with all the foundations ready to connect to the ship.
“So we recognized that with the amount of production work we required–new bulkheads, new decks, large foundations–a repair shipyard would have a tough time accomplishing that type of work to the schedule.”
Separately, Lawler confirmed this class still has more space and weight to accommodate more combat systems, they have no plans for SPY-6-type radar retrofits, and he does not foresee any significant changes to the CPS that would in turn require further modifications to the Zumwalt-class ships.
In November, Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, Director of Strategic Systems Programs (SSP), said the Navy pushed back test launching the first CPS on DDG-1000 from late 2025 to 2027 due to the testing schedule of the hypersonic weapon running behind schedule, separate from the HII work product (Defense Daily, Nov. 14, 2024).