Hypersonic dreams for a billion-dollar Zumwalt blunder

At the Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard, where the San Diego-based USS Zumwalt—lumbering titan of bureaucratic ambition—lay in drydock, welders and engineers moved with an almost ecclesiastical focus, reworking the innards of a ship that was born both too early and too late.

The twin turrets, relics of a system so prohibitively expensive it was abandoned in a silent bureaucratic shrug, were gone now, replaced by missile tubes, the gateways for a new kind of fury. The Navy’s idea: to alchemize failure into something sleek, terrible, and fast—hypersonic.

Imagine, if you will, a weapon that does not so much fly as it does leap out of the conceivable. Mach 5? A number, yes, but one that whispers of untouchable distances and the kind of power that makes air itself irrelevant. And yet the Zumwalt, San Diego-based, stealth-coated, and forever carrying the stink of “overbudget,” might actually find itself redeemed. By 2025, if all holds steady, the ship will be a platform for precision strikes that can thread through enemy defenses like a needle through silk.

USS Zumwalt getting upgrades of the lethal kind/US Navy

This was not the original idea, of course. The Zumwalt-class destroyers were supposed to be the Navy’s shimmering promises to itself—stealthy gunships with unparalleled firepower, the future incarnate. That is until someone did the math, and the ammunition for those grandiose guns priced itself into the kind of absurdity one associates with a defense contractor’s fever dream. A costly blunder, as Bryan Clark from the Hudson Institute—defense analyst, prophet of second chances—would put it, but one with a salvageable narrative.

The Navy had been forced into a state of reaction, its hypersonic ambitions sharpened not by imagination but by the ghostly figures of DF-27 missiles streaking across leaked Pentagon slides. Russia and China had already walked the hypersonic path, and their tests echoed louder than any press conference from Washington. A race? Call it that if you must, but it was less a sprint and more the slow boil of Cold War II—technology as theology, velocity as dogma.

Here was the strange poetry of it all: a ship designed for the improbable reworked into a vessel for the unimaginable. The Zumwalt’s new hypersonic teeth would bring it to the edge of modern warfare, where maneuverable missiles blurred the line between physics and magic, and Mach 5 wasn’t just a speed but a declaration. As for the workers in Pascagoula, they labored not with the clean confidence of inventors but the grim precision of repairmen in a country that had no time for mistakes anymore.

There is a kind of theater to the Navy’s “Conventional Prompt Strike” program, a performance in which ballistic missile launch systems and hypersonic glide vehicles become the stars. Picture it: a missile clawing its way skyward, shedding the clumsiness of Earth’s atmosphere before releasing its sleek, gliding avatar—a hypersonic miracle accelerating to seven or eight times the speed of sound. This, too, is an American dream: speed married to precision, a punchline delivered before anyone knew a joke had been told.

The Zumwalt, ever the wayward child of the Pentagon’s vast family of projects, has been chosen as the venue for this latest act. Four missile tubes per ship, each holding three of these swift emissaries of destruction, twelve in total—an arsenal as much about quantity as it is about the existential terror of possibility. Developed by both the Navy and the Army, the program is an awkward joint custody arrangement, though perhaps fitting for a weapon system that seems caught halfway between science fiction and military necessity.

And why the Zumwalt? Why this 7.5 billion-dollar parable of mismanaged ambition? Critics still point to its troubled birth—its failure as a land-attack platform, the ghost of its canceled Advanced Gun System haunting the deck like a broken promise. Those guns, once heralded for their rocket-assisted projectiles, now seem like relics of a bygone era, their price tags ($800,000 to $1 million per shell!) a punchline delivered at the taxpayer’s expense. But even critics must begrudgingly admit that this ungainly experiment remains the Navy’s most advanced surface warship, a bundle of high-tech oddities wrapped in stealthy angular panels and crowned with a composite deckhouse that hides its secrets as well as its ambitions.

Here is the poetry of failure

Electric propulsion that whispers instead of roars, a wave-piercing hull that seems to skim rather than cut through water, automated systems that promise to keep their crew alive even when things go wrong, which they inevitably do. All of this, housed in a ship so costly and so singular that its very existence feels like a contradiction.

The USS Zumwalt now resides at the Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, its destiny reworked once more. Stripped down to its essentials, it stands removed from the water, a colossus undergoing surgery. The integration of the new weapon system—delicate, complex, and teetering on the edge of engineering audacity—has begun. This week, if all goes according to plan (and how often does it?), the Zumwalt will be reintroduced to the sea, a ghost of its former self, remade to fight wars of the future. The fleet waits for its return, and somewhere in the halls of the Pentagon, someone is holding their breath, hoping that this time, the math will work out.

Conventional missiles, Spicer said, are a false economy if they can’t close the deal. A missile that misses, after all, is just a very expensive firework. The grim calculus of modern war leaves little room for sentiment: the U.S. military has no choice but to chase hypersonics. “The adversary has them,” Spicer added, his voice the dry crackle of inevitability. “We never want to be outdone.”

The race is afoot, and it’s more than just about speed. Hypersonics have ascended to the rarefied air of “vital to national security,” whispered as both prophecy and threat in the labyrinthine halls of the Pentagon. James Weber, principal director for hypersonics in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies (a title that itself seems to glide at Mach 5), laid it out plainly: these weapons aren’t just about survival; they’re about lethality. Survivable and lethal—the twin pillars of a doctrine that sees no daylight between defense and offense.

“Fielding new capabilities based on hypersonic technologies is a priority,” Weber intoned, his words polished and deliberate, like something read off an etched plaque in a high-security briefing room. The goal? Integrated deterrence, that nebulous phrase beloved by defense contractors and think tanks, and the promise of “enduring advantages,” as if the future of warfare could be boiled down to a perpetual motion machine of supremacy.

But what is really being built here? More than missiles, more than programs or platforms, what’s under construction is a state of mind: the inability to imagine being left behind. The technology becomes secondary, almost irrelevant—what matters is that it exists, and that it exists here first. The adversary has it. We never want to be outdone. That’s the mantra, recited not with pride but with the uneasy certainty of people who know exactly how expensive winning can be.