U.S. NAVY PHOTO ILLUSTRATION
The Zumwalt class destroyer is being designed as a mul-
timission surface combatant ship that will assist Marine
strike forces ashore as well as performing littoral, air and
sub-surface warfare missions. Cost overruns have
plagued the program, and the originally planned procure-
ment has shrunk from 32 ships to three. The lead ship in
the class, Zumwalt, is slated for delivery in fiscal 2014.
review while remaining committed to rigorous over-
sight of cost and technical risk.”
Bath Iron Works declined to be interviewed, defer-
ring questions to the Navy.
The program largely has moved on from the drawing board, but not all the development work is in the
books for the new destroyers.
“While the program is substantially focused on con-
struction and testing at this time, some development
continues in the software area in support of ship acti-
vation and delivery,” according to NAVSEA. “The first
five Total Ship Computing Environment software re-
leases are completed, with Release 6 Coding in pro-
gress and [post-delivery availability/post-shakedown
availability] software under contract review, all timed
to support ship delivery in [fiscal 2014].”
Some key systems also remain under development,
including the ship’s Integrated Propulsion System,
which passed full-power testing in May and is “on
schedule and budget,” according to the NAVSEA state-
ment, which added that DDG 1000 “will be the first
U.S. Navy surface combatant to use electric power for
propulsion and ship services.”
The program also is working on the BAE Systems-built
Advanced Gun System, which has been delivered for the
first ship. The Long-Range Land-Attack Projectile that the
gun will fire has guided flight tests scheduled through
next year in advance of low-rate initial production in
2013. The projectile will have a range of up to 63 nautical
miles, far beyond the range of current ship-launched sur-
face fires. Initial operational capability for the projectile is
planned for fiscal 2016.
NAVSEA is pledging to keep costs of the ship from
going any higher.
“The DDG 1000 program has implemented detailed
cost management controls to monitor performance in
design, development [and] production, as well as test
and integration,” the statement said.
While Bath Iron Works is responsible for building
the ship, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS),
Tewksbury, Mass., is the prime mission systems equipment integrator for the program.
Bill Marcley, Raytheon IDS vice president and DDG
1000 program manager, told Seapower that the company is 80 percent complete with all the mission systems
equipment for ship sets one and two. Programmers
also have completed more than 6 million lines of code
for the software that will go on the ship, he said.
“These were developed in sequential releases where
we added capability,” Marcley said. “This is probably
the most automated surface navy ship that they’ve ever
built, which enables our crew size to be about half
[that] of a regular DDG.”
The company has been running tests on the soft-
ware and hardware at a site in Philadelphia.
“We’re going through actual testing on the real
hardware to ensure that our software can safely control
various functions of the power system,” Marcley said.
There are a lot of “little milestones that take place
all the time,” he said, such as formal testing of the soft-
ware next year, which are not high-profile events like
the Nov. 17 keel-laying, but “that’s what our software
team is focused on.”
To ensure the ship stays on track, Raytheon and
Bath Iron Works have weekly meetings with the Navy
to discuss any changes.
“Part of what made the program successful was that
over five years we established what we call the total ship
systems engineering process, which really kept all of the
primes in lock-step,” Marcley said. “If there are some
interface boundary issues, we look to identify a solution
that’s lowest cost for the total program that isn’t just
optimized for one company over the other.”
Once the ships finally make it to the fleet, NAVSEA
hopes the DDG 1000s will provide the sort of long-
range, precision naval surface fire support the service
had envisioned when it first drew up the blueprints for
the vessel.
“In addition to providing offensive, persistent, high-volume and precision fires in support of Marines, it
will provide valuable lessons in advanced technology
such as signature reduction, active and passive self-defense systems and enhanced survivability features,”
NAVSEA wrote. ;
