Zumwalt Status Update

The Zumwalt has finally finished its combat system installation and activation and testing is currently taking place at Pearl Harbor.  At last, nine years after physical construction began, Zumwalt is nearly physically complete and functional.  To celebrate, let’s briefly recap the ship’s history and check its current status.  Here’s a timeline of the ship’s major events.

Event	Year	Comment
Laid Down	2011	Beginning of physical construction
Launched	2013
Delivery	2016	Delivered incomplete; Phase II of construction pending
Fake Commissioning	2016
Transit to Homeport San Diego	2016	Lost power due to water leak in lube oil; had to be towed
San Diego Fitting Out	2016	Phase II construction and initial combat system install
PR Cruise	2019	Public relations cruise and transfer to Pearl Harbor for combat systems installation
Combat Systems Installation and Activation	2019	Combat systems installation and testing at Pearl Harbor
Real Commissioning	2020	Commission granted by ComNavOps

So, nine years to complete the ship.  Hmmm …  How are we going to replace lost ships in a war?  We should be seriously examining our ship designs and asking why it takes nine years to build a ship.  But, I digress …

Let’s quickly review the ship’s status.

Weapons.  The major problem with the Zumwalt is that it has very little in the way of weapons which means it has only limited use in combat.  The ship’s main weapon, Advanced Gun System (AGS) - the weapon the entire ship was designed around – is non-functional due to cancellation of the only ammunition the gun could fire, the LRLAP round.  That leaves the ship with a total weapons fit of the following:

• 80x Mk57 VLS cells
• 2x 30mm machine guns

Note the complete absence of any point defense weapons like CIWS or RAM/SeaRAM.  This is not a ship that stands a good chance of survival in combat. 

Worse, we’ve discussed that the Zumwalt’s VLS cells have only limited capability because it doesn’t have the full Aegis combat system software.  Currently, Zumwalt does not have Tomahawk or Standard missile launch capability although the Navy requested funds from Congress to integrate the Tomahawk capability.(2)  What does that leave?  I guess the ship is a giant ESSM barge.

On the ‘plus’ side, the Zumwalt just conducted its first live fire of its 30 mm machine guns, only four years after being commissioned! (3)

You’ll also note that the Zumwalt has no offensive weapon capability since the guns are non-functional and Tomahawk missiles are not supported.  So, that leaves Zumwalt as a purely defensive ship whose self-defense system is also non-functional (see the next section).

Ship Self-Defense System.  Due to the lack of illuminators and the decision to delete half of the Dual Band Radar, the Zumwalt has no functional missile guidance system.  The Navy is currently trying to modify missiles with the Joint Universal Weapons Link to accept radar guidance from the SPY-3 but that, in turn, appears to be negatively impacting radar performance (see, “Zumwalt Self-Defense Problems”).  The upshot is that Zumwalt’s self-defense system is non-functional.

Crew Size.  Zumwalt, like the LCS, was designed for minimal manning with a crew of around 140 on a cruiser size ship with a displacement of 16,000 tons.  By comparison, the Burke has a crew of 320 and a displacement of 9200 tons.  As the LCS has demonstrated, minimal manning has been an abject failure in every respect.  When the lack of point defense is combined with the lack of crew for damage control the situation is even worse.

Ballistic Missile Defense.  Information on the Zumwalt’s BMD capability, or lack thereof, is sketchy and confusing.  The Navy has, at various times, stated that the Zumwalt is capable of firing the Standard missile family and is not capable of operating Standard missiles.  What this appears to mean is that although the VLS cells can launch physically launch a Standard missile, they cannot be guided because the ship lacks the Aegis combat system which provides the missile guidance.  Regardless of the physical ability of the ship to eject a Standard missile from the VLS cells, it appears that the ship has no BMD capability due to a lack of BMD software in its combat system.

Experimental Squadron.  For the moment, the Navy plans to use the Zumwalt as a test bed for an unmanned squadron of ships that will include the first four LCS, DARPA’s Sea Hunter, and the Zumwalts.(1)  Wow!  What a collection of misfits!

Stealth.  Supposedly the ship’s most important attribute, stealth, was going to allow the ship to sit close inshore and rain death on our enemies while remaining undetected.  Setting aside the fantasy level of thinking contained therein, even the stealth has been degraded.  While the first two ships were constructed with a resin-wood composite deckhouse that supposedly had special stealth characteristics, the third and final ship was built with a standard steel deckhouse.  What’s more, the final fitting of the ship reveals that non-stealthy platforms, masts, sensors, and antennae have sprouted on the ship like mushrooms and have, presumably, negatively impacted whatever stealth the ship may have had.

Note all the non-stealthy projections, masts, platforms, antennae, etc.

Summary

Well, there you have it.  That’s what a $25B+ program gets you – a ship with no offensive weapons, no functional self-defense, no point defense, degraded stealth, and a crew too small to fight the ship and execute damage control.

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(1)USNI News website, “Navy Stands Up Surface Development Squadron for DDG-1000, Unmanned Experimentation”, Megan Eckstein, 22-May-2019,

https://news.usni.org/2019/05/22/navy-stands-up-surface-development-squadron-for-ddg-1000-unmanned-experimentation

National Interest website, “Drones Are Giving The Troubled Zumwalt Destroyer A Place In The Navy's Strategy”, David Axe, 2-May-2020,

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/drones-are-giving-troubled-zumwalt-destroyer-place-navys-strategy-149866

(3)MilitaryLeak blog, 21-May-2020,

https://militaryleak.com/2020/05/21/us-navys-uss-zumwalt-completes-first-live-fire-test/

Zumwalt Fiasco Looking Worse!

The Navy is attempting to explain away the Zumwalt fiasco but is only looking more culpable while doing so.

As you know by now, the Zumwalt’s Advanced Gun System (AGS) was designed in such a way that it could only use one, unique munition – the Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP).  The idiocy of that decision has become manifestly clear now that the cost of the LRLAP has risen to nearly a million dollars per projectile and the munition development project has been cancelled.  The Zumwalt is now left without a munition for its main weapon, the AGS.

“Even at the high cost, we still weren’t really getting what we had asked for,” he said. “So what we’ve elected to do is to separate the gun effort from the ship effort because we really got to the point where now we’re holding up the ship.”

“Holding up the ship”????  The ship IS the AGS.  The entire ship was designed around the AGS.  The ship’s reason for existence is to carry the AGS.  The ship IS the AGS.

You’re not holding up the ship – without the AGS, there is no ship.  The ship has no purpose or use.

You never, never, never, never design and build a ship around non-existent technology.  It’s failed every time it’s been tried and the Zumwalt was no exception.

Whoever approved the design concept for the Zumwalt program needs to be court-martialed for dereliction of duty and utter stupidity.  If stupefying stupidity is not a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it should be!

Did you also catch the part about not getting what was asked for?

“…the system was also failing to achieve the range it wanted …”

So, not only was the cost on an exploding, runaway trajectory (unlike the munition itself!) but the performance was inadequate.  The system couldn't achieve the claimed range.  What have I said, repeatedly?  - No system ever achieves its claimed performance.  Despite the 100% certainty of the truth of this statement, people will still wholeheartedly believe the claims for the next great weapon or system.

Take any performance/cost claim and double the cost and halve the performance and you’ll be somewhere in the ballpark of reality.

There’s no explaining this one away, Navy.  You screwed the pooch in a big way.

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(1)Defense News website, “US Navy takes ownership of its second stealth destroyer”, David B. Larter, 24-Apr-2018,

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/04/24/us-navy-just-took-ownership-of-its-second-stealth-destroyer/

A Ship With No Ammunition

Regular readers know that ComNavOps is highly critical of Navy leadership and their decision making.  I’d like to give them credit from time to time but, good grief, it’s very difficult to do so.  Every time I think they’ve hit rock bottom, they surprise me with yet another stunningly incompetent effort.  Honestly, if I was writing a fictional book and included all the things that Navy leadership has done wrong before they did them, no one would believe me and the book would be ridiculed as utterly unrealistic.  In other words, you can’t make this stuff up!

• Would anyone have believed that a professional, competent Navy would build a class of small warship before the vessel’s modular equipment, its main armament, was ready – resulting in a third or more of the ships sailing with no functional capability?

• Would anyone have believed that a Navy would build a bigger aircraft carrier while the air wing it would carry was shrinking to half the design size?

• Would anyone have believed that a Navy would commission an aircraft carrier with damaged main turbines and non-functional arresting gear?

• Would anyone have believed that a Navy would literally sink an entire class of the best ASW destroyer ever made?

• Would anyone have believed that a Navy would early retire the most powerful AAW ship class ever built?

The list is endless and I won’t bother continuing to list examples.  Suffice it to say that if you made this stuff up before it happened, no one would believe it.

Well, here’s the latest.  Would you believe that a professional, competent Navy would build a class (albeit a small, 3-ship class) of ship that was totally conceptualized and designed around the ship’s gun system, commission the ship, and then announce that they had no ammunition for the gun and were canceling acquisition of the ammunition?  That’s exactly what the Navy has just done! 

The Zumwalt’s AGS (Advanced Gun System) exclusively uses the LRLAP (Long Range Land Attack Projectile).  This is the only ammunition that can be fired from the gun.  The Navy has just announced that it is canceling procurement of the LRLAP due to escalating costs (1).

“Barely two weeks after the US Navy commissioned its newest and most futuristic warship, armed with two huge guns that can hit targets 80 miles away, the service is moving to cancel the projectiles for the guns, citing excessive costs that run up to $800,000 per round or more. “

“Even at $800,000 a copy, the LRLAP’s price could go higher. “That’s probably low,” the Navy official said. “That’s what the acquisition community wanted to get it down to.” The official added that there was no sense the contractor was “overcharging or anything.” 

The decision to accept the LRLAP cancellation is part of the Program Objective Memorandum 2018 (POM18) effort, the Pentagon’s annual budget process. “

So, we’re looking at a round that would likely cost around $1M each if the program were continued.

Because the acquisition program is going to be cancelled, we’ve got a commissioned ship, supposedly ready for war, that has no ammunition it can shoot.

The Navy is now scrambling to find some other munition to use.  The problem is that there is no other existing munition that can fit the gun, as is.  Whatever option is chosen, a new developmental effort will have to be initiated to fit the round to a system that was not designed to handle it.

One also has to wonder what this will do to the range of the system.  Recall that the LRLAP is not actually a traditional shell.  It is a rocket propelled warhead.  Where are we going to find another rocket propelled warhead that can fit in the AGS?  We’re not – not without a massive development effort – and what’s that going to do to the cost of whatever we opt for?

We can always take a smaller shell and fire it with a sabot but the range will be nothing more than a standard gun, presumably, in which case, what is the benefit of the Zumwalt?

“…the Navy is evaluating industry projectile solutions (including conventional and hyper-velocity projectiles) that can also meet the DDG 1000 deployment schedule and could potentially be used as an alternative to LRLAP for DDG 1000.” 

“We are looking at multiple different rounds for that gun,” the Navy official said, adding that “three or four different rounds” have been looked at, including the Army’s Excalibur munition from Raytheon, and the Hyper Velocity Projectile (HVP), a project under development by the Office of Naval Research and BAE Systems. 

“There are multiple companies that have looked at alternatives to get the cost down and use that delivery system,” the Navy official said.”

You’ll note that the mentioned alternatives are, themselves, developmental efforts and are not ready for their own use let alone having to undergo further development to be used in the AGS.

There is one more aspect to this story that is interesting.  ComNavOps is on record as stating that the entire Zumwalt gun support concept is flawed and that the gun cannot provide effective gunfire support.  The LRLAP is a guided round and without active guidance is useless.  The likelihood of being able to provide active guidance deep inland is poor.  Unfortunately, the fallback position of blind area bombardment defeats the stated intent of precision fire and is prohibitively costly at $1M per round.  Add to that the small caliber of the round, the limited explosive power, the limitation of only two guns per ship (compared to 9 guns per ship on a WWII cruiser or battleship) and the entire concept is questionable, at best.

With all that in mind, the article offers this tantalizing tidbit.

“While the Navy is stressing that high costs are directly behind the decision to eliminate LRLAP, it is not clear if there are deeper issues at play. The AGS/LRLAP combination was originally developed to provide Marines with a “persistent, precision fire support” capability, able to strike targets far inland with a high degree of accuracy. 

But as the Zumwalt moved from shipyard to sea and to the fleet, the Navy has notably downplayed that attribute, and while the technical achievement of the cutting-edge DDG 1000 has been widely trumpeted this year, its ability to directly support Marines ashore has not.”

What does that mean?  The article offers nothing to substantiate their suspicion but it is exactly in line with ComNavOps thoughts.  Could the Navy be realizing that the entire concept was flawed?

Finally, the article notes the other inherent bit of stupidity about the AGS – it can’t shoot at another ship.  That’s right, the Navy built a ship with a gun that can’t shoot enemy ships!  The LRLAP is a guided round and there is no guidance mechanism for designating enemy ships and linking that guidance to the munition.  The firing software could be modified, as stated, to allow ballistic firing at a ship but that’s a return to WWII salvo accuracy and we can’t afford to be salvo firing $1M projectiles and hoping for a hit.

As I said, if I were to have written this yesterday as fiction, you’d have scoffed at me and, yet, here it is today, as reality.  Navy leadership has added yet another massive screw up to their collective resume.

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(1)Defense News website, “New Warship’s Big Guns Have No Bullets”, Christopher P. Cavas, 6-Nov-2016,

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/new-warships-big-guns-have-no-bullets

The Answer Is 35

ComNavOps will now amaze and astound you by answering a question before it is asked (apologies to Carnac the Magnificent).  The question has been kept in a guarded and hermetically sealed envelope and is completely unknown to ComNavOps.  Only ComNavOps’ all-seeing and all-knowing military knowledge and expertise could possibly allow him to divine the answer prior to knowing the question. 

The answer is,

35

There you have it.  The answer is 35.  But what does it mean?  Let’s open the envelope and see what the question is.

The question is,

How many rounds must be test fired to certify the maturity and performance of the Zumwalt Advanced Gun System (AGS)?

Boo!  Hiss.  That’s wrong.  No way.  Boo!

Alright, calm down.  I admit the answer seems way too small.  A mere 35 rounds isn’t nearly enough to demonstrate the maturity and performance of a brand new, major gun system.  Could ComNavOps have answered incorrectly?  I mean, not knowing the question at the time of the answer would ensure that any mere mortal would only have a 1 in a gazillion chance of answering correctly.  Still, ComNavOps is far superior to normal men.  Let’s see if ComNavOps is wrong.

A search for announcements about AGS test firings reveals the following events over the past several years.

June 2005 – 1 round, 59 miles

Aug 2011 – 2 rounds, 45 miles

Aug 2012 – 4 rounds

June 2013 – 4 rounds, 45 miles

Sep 2013 – 9 rounds, 45 miles, demonstrated multiple round simultaneous impact (MRSI)

Wow!  That’s really not many test rounds fired.  Maybe I missed some announcements or maybe there were a ton of test firings that just weren’t publicized. 

Well, note this comment, reported after the Jun 2013 test (1),

“ 'These tests bring us closer to completing the 35 tests required by the U.S. Navy to demonstrate the maturity and performance of the system,' said Richard Benton, LRLAP program manager at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control."

Well, that seems to pin it down.  There are only 35 test rounds (each round is considered a “test”) required to demonstrate the performance and maturity of the AGS.  So, ComNavOps’ answer was right!  That’s an amazing demonstration of clairvoyant and prescient knowledge.  All right, back to the AGS.

Seriously, does anyone consider 35 rounds, broken up in very small groups over a several year period, to be a demonstration of the performance or maturity of the system?

Note that with one documented exception, all the test firings were at a range of 45 miles.  The AGS, you’ll recall, is claimed to be able to hit targets at 70+ miles with pinpoint accuracy.  Well, how do we know it will really do that since we haven’t tried it yet?  What’s the sustained firing performance like?  How will accuracy be affected as a function of sustained firing?  We have no idea since we haven’t tried it.

System maturity?  With only 35 rounds?  How does 35 rounds fired over the course of a few years tell us anything about the maturity of the system?  That doesn’t tell us anything about the required maintenance, systemic problems, mean time between failures, material fatigue, barrel and system longevity, or anything else that might describe the maturity of the system.

Why is the threshold for acceptance so low?  I don’t know.  I do note, however, that the rounds are reported to cost $35,000 - $50,000 each depending on the source.  I suspect that with that kind of cost, the Navy is simply cutting the testing woefully short to save money. 

If 35 rounds is the limit for testing of the system, you have to wonder how many rounds, if any, an operational ship will be allowed to fire during the course of a year for normal training.  I suspect we’re going to have operators who will come and go from the ship without ever firing a round.

Do we really want to wait for actual combat to tell us what’s wrong with the AGS rather than spend a little bit of money and find out now?  For the cost of one stinking LCS we could fire 14,000 rounds.  Isn’t a thorough evaluation of the Zumwalt’s main armament worth building one less useless LCS?  If you don’t want to sacrifice an LCS, we could fire 5700 rounds for the loss of one F-35C.

We’re pouring money into the black hole, money pits of useless programs but we won’t even thoroughly test the AGS?

On a related note, is it possible that one of the lessons to be learned from this is that when your weapons become too expensive to routinely test and train with you may be hurting yourself more than helping?

Are we really going to send sailors into combat with a gun that’s only been fired 35 times?

(1)http://www.defencetalk.com/lockheed-lrlap-projectile-scores-four-of-four-in-tests-for-us-navy-48363/

AGS - DDG-1000 Gun System

The Advanced Gun System (AGS) developed for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer is a 155 mm gun in a stealth mount.  The gun (and the ship, in a sense, since it was built around the gun) was developed in response to the retirement of the battleships and the resulting gap in naval gunfire support for troops ashore.



LRLAP 155 mm Round



While 155 mm is a NATO and US Army standard size, inexplicably, the Navy’s AGS will not be able to fire any of the existing rounds thus denying the Navy access to a huge inventory of ammunition.  Bear in mind that the AGS ammunition is the Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) which is a rocket assisted projectile with extended glide capability for greater range.  Thus, the AGS is, essentially, a missile launching weapon rather than a standard naval gun.  The LRLAP has a reported range of around 70 miles and uses GPS guidance with canards for flight control.  Efforts are being made to achieve commonality with NATO/Army 155 rounds to the extent possible.  Hmm…  Seems like that should have been the first criteria?  Seeker heads are being investigated for future inclusion.



Other reports state that the AGS cannot be used in an anti-ship role though it is unclear why this is so (the GPS guided nature of the LRLAP, presumably?).  A naval vessel with guns that can’t be used against other ships seems short-sighted.

The AGS is a fully automated system from ammunition strike down and handling to loading and operation of the gun, itself.  While this reduces the crew requirements it also requires an inordinate amount of internal volume especially that devoted to ammunition storage and movement.  The AGS Intra-Ship Rearmament System (AIRS), which is the automated system for moving pallets from the flight deck to the magazine, consumes huge internal volumes.  Both the gun and ammunition handling are all-electric as opposed to previous hydraulic systems.  Power requirements are reported to be 800 kW per mount which precludes fitting the system to other classes of ship.



AGS



The rate of fire is 10 rds/min.  Magazine size has been reported as being 304 rounds per gun.  Rounds are stored on pallets of eight to facilitate the automated handling.

Defense Industry Daily reports that approximately $1.4B has been spent so far on the development of the AGS, AIRS, and LRLAP and work is nowhere near complete yet.  That is a lot of money to develop a gun system. 

In summary, what the Navy has is a dedicated land attack weapon with fair range compared to conventional naval guns.  This may well prove to be a very effective naval gunfire support weapon but the value relative to the cost seems suspect and, when the non-surface firing capability is factored in, the system seems overly restricted.  One can’t help but wonder if the already developed Mk71 8” gun wouldn’t have been a better starting point!