Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure

The ''Zumwalt''-class destroyer is a class of three United States Navy guided-missile destroyers designed as multi-mission stealth ships with a focus on land attack. It is a multi-role class that was designed with a primary role of naval gunfire support and secondary roles of surface warfare and anti-aircraft warfare. The class design emerged from the DD-21 "land attack destroyer" program as "DD(X)" and was intended to take the role of battleships in meeting a congressional mandate for naval fire support. The ship is designed around its two Advanced Gun Systems (AGS), turrets with 920 round magazines, and unique Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) ammunition. LRLAP procurement was canceled, rendering the guns unusable, so the Navy re-purposed the ships for surface warfare. Starting in 2023, the Navy will remove the AGS from the ships and replace them with hypersonic missiles.

These ships are classed as destroyers, but they are much larger than any other active destroyers or cruisers in the U.S. Navy. The vessels' distinctive appearance results from the design requirement for a low radar cross-section (RCS). The ''Zumwalt'' class has a wave-piercing tumblehome hull form whose sides slope inward above the waterline, dramatically reducing RCS by returning much less energy than a conventional flare hull form. The appearance has been compared to that of the historic USS ''Monitor'' and her famous antagonist CSS ''Virginia''.

The class has an integrated electric propulsion (IEP) system that can send electricity from its turbo-generators to the electric drive motors or weapons, the Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure (TSCEI), automated fire-fighting systems, and automated piping rupture isolation. The class is designed to require a smaller crew and to be less expensive to operate than comparable warships.

The lead ship is named for Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and carries the hull number DDG-1000. Originally, 32 ships were planned, with $9.6 billion research and development costs spread across the class. As costs overran estimates, the quantity was reduced to 24, then to 7, and finally to 3. This significantly increased the cost per ship to $4.24 billion ($7.5 billion including R&D costs), well exceeding the per-unit cost of a nuclear-powered ($2.688 billion). In July 2008, the Navy requested that Congress stop procuring ''Zumwalt''s and revert to building more ''Arleigh Burke'' destroyers. This final cut in procurement led to a dramatic per-unit cost increase that eventually triggered a Nunn–McCurdy Amendment breach. In April 2016, the total program cost was $22.5 billion.

History

Background and funding

Many of the features were developed under the DD-21 program ("21st Century Destroyer"), which was originally designed around the Vertical Gun for Advanced Ships (VGAS). In 2001, Congress cut the DD-21 program by half as part of the SC21 program; to save it, the acquisition program was renamed DD(X) and heavily reworked.

Originally, the Navy had hoped to build 32 destroyers. That number was reduced to 24, then to 7, due to the high cost of new and experimental technologies. On 23 November 2005, the Defense Acquisition Board approved a plan for simultaneous construction of the first two ships at Northrop Grumman's Ingalls yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. However, at that date, funding had yet to be authorized by Congress.

In late December 2005, the House and Senate agreed to continue funding the program. The U.S. House of Representatives allotted the Navy only enough money to begin construction on one destroyer as a "technology demonstrator". The initial funding allocation was included in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2007. However, this was increased to two ships by the 2007 appropriations bill approved in September 2006, which allotted US$2.568 billion to the DDG-1000 program.

On 31 July 2008, U.S. Navy acquisition officials told Congress that the service needed to purchase more s and no longer needed the next-generation DDG-1000 class; only the two approved destroyers would be built. The Navy said the world threat picture had changed in such a way that it made more sense to build at least eight more ''Burke''s rather than DDG-1000s. The Navy concluded from fifteen classified intelligence reports that the DDG-1000s would be vulnerable to forms of missile attacks. Many Congressional subcommittee members questioned that the Navy completed such a sweeping re-evaluation of the world threat picture in just a few weeks, after spending some 13 years and $10 billion on the development of the surface ship program known as DD-21, then DD(X), and finally DDG-1000. Subsequently, Chief of Naval Operations Gary Roughead cited the need to provide area air defense and specific new threats such as ballistic missiles and the possession of anti-ship missiles by groups such as Hezbollah. The mooted structural problems have not been discussed in public. Navy Secretary Donald Winter said on 4 September, "Making certain that we have—I'll just say, a destroyer—in the '09 budget is more important than whether that's a DDG 1000 or a DDG 51".

On 19 August 2008, Secretary Winter said that a third ''Zumwalt'' would be built at Bath Iron Works, citing concerns about maintaining shipbuilding capacity. House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha said on 23 September 2008 that he had agreed to partial funding of the third DDG-1000 in the 2009 Defense authorization bill.

A 26 January 2009 memo from John Young, the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) top acquisition official, stated that the per ship price for the ''Zumwalt''-class destroyers had reached $5.964 billion, 81 percent over the Navy's original estimate used in proposing the program, resulting in a breach of the Nunn–McCurdy Amendment, requiring the Navy to re-certify and re-justify the program to Congress or to cancel its production.

On 6 April 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that DoD's proposed 2010 budget would end the DDG-1000 program at a maximum of three ships. Also in April, the Pentagon awarded a fixed-price contract with General Dynamics to build the three destroyers, replacing a cost-plus-fee contract that had been awarded to Northrop Grumman. At that time, the first DDG-1000 destroyer was expected to cost $3.5 billion, the second approximately $2.5 billion, and the third even less.

What had once been seen as the backbone of the Navy's future surface fleet with a planned production run of 32 has since been replaced by destroyer production reverting to the ''Arleigh Burke'' class after ordering three ''Zumwalt''s. In April 2016, the U.S. Naval Institute stated that the total cost of the three ''Zumwalt'' ships is about $22.5 billion with research and development costs, which is an average of $7.5 billion per ship.

Construction

In late 2005, the program entered the detailed design and integration phase, for which Raytheon was the Mission Systems Integrator. Both Northrop Grumman Ship Systems and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shared dual-lead for the hull, mechanical, and electrical detailed design. BAE Systems Inc. had the advanced gun system and the MK57 Vertical Launching System (VLS). Almost every major defense contractor (including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman Sperry Marine, and L-3 Communications) and subcontractors from nearly every state in the U.S. were involved to some extent in this project, which was the largest single line item in the Navy's budget. During the previous contract, the development and testing of 11 Engineering Development Models (EDMs) took place: Advanced Gun System, Autonomic Fire Suppression System, Dual Band Radar -band and L-band Infrared, Integrated Deckhouse & Apertures, Integrated Power System, Integrated Undersea Warfare, Peripheral Vertical Launch System, Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure (TSCEI), Tumblehome Hull Form. The decision in September 2006 to fund two ships meant that one could be built by the Bath Iron Works in Maine and one by Northrop Grumman's Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi.

Northrop Grumman was awarded a $90M contract modification for materials and production planning on 13 November 2007. On 14 February 2008, Bath Iron Works was awarded a contract for the construction of , and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding was awarded a contract for the construction of at a cost of $1.4 billion each.

On 11 February 2009, full-rate production officially began on the first ''Zumwalt''-class destroyer. Construction on the second ship of the class, ''Michael Monsoor'', began in March 2010. The