USS Zumwalt

If you want to see how long it takes the U.S. Navy to build a questionable surface ship, just follow the hull number: DDG-1000. That’s the USS Zumwalt, a stealth destroyer that was supposed to change naval warfare—and mostly ended up changing plans.

The Navy began dreaming it up in 2001. Back then, they called it revolutionary. It would be electric-powered, radar-elusive, and loaded with next-gen firepower. Two giant 155mm Advanced Gun Systems were supposed to give it land attack capabilities no other ship had. It was even built with the juice to someday power lasers or a railgun—because if you’re going to burn through taxpayer money, you might as well melt steel while you’re at it.

The Zumwalt was laid down in 2011, launched in 2013, and finally commissioned in 2016. By the time it hit the water, one thing was already clear: its main guns were worthless. The precision-guided ammo they were designed to fire—the Long Range Land Attack Projectile—was so expensive it would’ve been cheaper to launch Tomahawk missiles. At nearly a million dollars per round, Congress pulled the plug. That left the Navy with two oversized cannons and no shells to fire. The ship had 155mm paperweights mounted on deck.

Next up in the parade of Pentagon optimism was the railgun. It looked good in demos, firing slugs at Mach 7 and tearing up test ranges. The Zumwalt had the power to run it, but not the systems to load or sustain it. The Navy spent over a decade chasing the dream before pulling the plug in 2021. Too expensive, too unreliable, and too late.

So by 2022, the most advanced destroyer in the fleet had no working weapons and no clear mission. The Navy scrambled to come up with Plan C.

That plan arrived in 2024, when the Zumwalt entered drydock for a retrofit. The Navy ripped out the useless 155s and installed vertical launch tubes built to carry hypersonic missiles. It was hailed as a leap forward—the ship would now fire the Conventional Prompt Strike weapon, capable of reaching Mach 5 and hitting targets thousands of miles away. One small problem: the missiles aren’t there yet.

The ship came out of drydock in December 2024 with empty launchers and a press release. Live testing on the ship isn’t expected to begin until 2027. That means the most expensive destroyer in Navy history—clocking in north of $7.5 billion—is sailing without a single operational weapon system. Again.

This is what happens when the Navy builds ships for PowerPoint wars. The Zumwalt was supposed to be a Swiss Army knife. What it turned out to be was a stealthy butter knife with no edge and no dinner to cut.

Originally, the Navy planned to build 32 Zumwalt-class destroyers. But after watching the price tag soar and seeing how the first ship performed, they got cold feet. The Navy went back to Congress, hat in hand, and quietly asked to stick with the reliable Arleigh Burke instead. In the end, only three Zumwalts were built before the whole program was shelved—a $25-billion-dollar experiment scrapped mid-sentence.

The final scorecard is a masterclass in Pentagon drift: weapon one (AGS) canceled for cost, weapon two (railgun) canceled for failure, and weapon three (hypersonics) not yet ready for launch. Meanwhile, China launches ships like it’s printing money, and the U.S. Navy is still trying to retrofit its way out of a design from the Bush administration.

In the end, the Zumwalt wasn’t too advanced—it was just too early, too expensive, and too alone. And if you want to see how long it takes the Navy to field a surface ship it can actually use, just ask the guys standing watch on DDG-1000.

They’ll tell you: we’re still waiting.