# The Zumwalt Destroyer: A Stealth Warship Whose Big Guns Have No Affordable Shells

The Navy built three Zumwalt destroyers for roughly $24.5 billion, then found each guided gun shell cost about $1 million, so it never bought the ammunition.

Author: J.A. Watte
Published: July 16, 2026
Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/ddg-1000-zumwalt-lrlap/

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The USS Zumwalt is one of the most advanced surface warships the U.S. Navy has ever put to sea: a low-observable stealth destroyer with an angular tumblehome hull, integrated electric drive, and enough onboard electrical power to run a small city. It was built around two enormous 155mm main guns. Today those guns are being cut out of the ship with torches, because the Navy could never afford to buy the shells they were designed to fire.

That is the whole story in one sentence, and it is not an exaggeration. The three ships of the Zumwalt class cost the government roughly $24.5 billion including research and development, according to the Government Accountability Office. The guided artillery round designed for their signature guns eventually cost between $800,000 and $1 million apiece, roughly the price of a cruise missile with far greater reach. So in November 2016 the Navy cancelled the ammunition buy. The rounds were never procured in quantity, and the guns have never had anything to shoot.

This post walks through what the program was, how it shrank, what it actually cost from primary sources, and then sets the honest failure critique next to the honest mission defense. Both belong in the record. Neither one erases the other.

## What the Zumwalt was supposed to be

The Zumwalt class (designation DDG-1000) was conceived as a large fleet of stealthy land-attack destroyers. The design broke with decades of naval convention. Instead of a conventional flared bow, it uses a tumblehome hull that slopes inward to reduce radar return. Instead of separate propulsion and ship-service power plants, it uses integrated electric drive, generating electricity centrally and routing it to motors and systems as needed. That architecture leaves an unusually large margin of spare electrical power and internal volume, which mattered enormously later.

Three ships were ultimately built, according to the Congressional Research Service: DDG-1000 Zumwalt, DDG-1001 Michael Monsoor, and DDG-1002 Lyndon B. Johnson. They were procured in fiscal years 2007 through 2009, and the Navy plans no further DDG-1000 procurement. It is worth being precise here, because the number is the entire spine of the story: three ships were built, from thirty-two originally planned. Three were never the plan. Three is what survived the plan.

Each ship was designed around two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems, or AGS. These were not conventional naval guns. They were built to fire a purpose-designed guided shell called the Long Range Land Attack Projectile, or LRLAP, a GPS-guided round with a range of more than 60 nautical miles. On paper this gave a single destroyer the ability to rain precise, long-range fire onto shore targets in support of troops. By multiple accounts the gun and the shell tested well. The failure that followed was not a failure of the technology to work. It was economic.

## The buy that kept shrinking

The Zumwalt's cost problem traces almost entirely to one decision made over and over: the planned buy kept getting cut.

According to figures consolidated by the Congressional Research Service and reflected across GAO and Navy reporting, the program was originally planned at 32 ships. It was reduced to 24, then to 7, and finally to just 3 hulls actually built. In July 2008 the Navy went to Congress and asked to stop DDG-1000 procurement altogether and revert to building more of the proven Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) destroyers instead.

That sequence is the root cause of nearly everything that went wrong financially. A warship program carries an enormous fixed cost of development up front: designing the hull, the electric drive, the combat system, the guns, the ammunition. That non-recurring engineering cost was sized for a fleet of 32 ships. When the fleet collapsed to 3, that entire development bill had to be spread across only three hulls. The per-ship price rose sharply, not because each ship suddenly got more expensive to build, but because each ship now had to absorb a much larger slice of a fixed development cost.

The same logic wrecked the ammunition. Fewer ships meant far fewer guns, which meant far fewer shells would ever be bought, which meant no economies of scale. The per-round cost of the LRLAP climbed until each guided shell cost about as much as a cruise missile, at which point buying them made no sense.

## The money, kept in its separate boxes

Cost figures for the Zumwalt get quoted loosely and inconsistently across the internet, so it is worth stating them carefully and keeping the different frames apart. There are three distinct numbers, and mixing them is the most common error.

- **Total program, all three ships, including R&D:** roughly $22.5 billion as cited by the U.S. Naval Institute in 2016, rising to about $24.5 billion in the GAO's April 2018 weapon systems assessment. This is the largest and most complete figure, because it loads the entire development bill onto the three hulls.
- **Per ship, all in:** this depends on how you compute it. Dividing the $24.5 billion total by three ships gives roughly $8 billion per ship. A separate GAO calculation that loads development cost per hull produced a figure closer to $10.6 billion per ship. These two numbers are not interchangeable. One is a simple average; the other is a specific development-loaded calculation. Either is defensible if you label which one you mean.
- **Procurement only, excluding R&D:** roughly $13.9 billion for the three ships, or about $4.24 billion per hull. This is what it cost to actually build the steel, not counting the years of design work behind it.

The oversight warning came early. In 2008 the GAO published report GAO-08-804, which found that the cost to deliver the Zumwalt class would likely exceed budget, citing immature technologies being developed at the same time the ships were being built. The dollar figures inside that early report predate the final three-ship totals, so it is best read as the warning it was, not as a final cost sheet. The warning proved correct.

## The shell that cost as much as a missile

The sharpest single fact in this program is the price of the ammunition.

Once the buy shrank to three ships, the per-round cost of the LRLAP guided shell rose to somewhere between $800,000 and $1 million each, according to reporting by the U.S. Naval Institute and Defense News, both published on November 7, 2016. Defense News summarized the situation bluntly in a headline describing new warships whose big guns had no bullets.

At that price, a single artillery shell cost roughly what a cruise missile costs, while offering less range and less capability. Faced with that math, the Navy moved in November 2016 to cancel the LRLAP procurement in its draft budget. The rounds were never bought in quantity. By most accounts only about 90 rounds were ever secured, and those were for testing. A full operational buy, sometimes estimated at around 2,000 rounds for the three ships at roughly $1 million each, would have run on the order of $1.8 billion to $2 billion. That figure is an estimate, not an appropriation. No such buy was ever contracted. It is useful only for grasping the scale of the problem.

The practical result: two 155mm guns per ship, six across the class, with no operational ammunition. The magazines were empty by design and stayed empty. This is not a case of guns sitting unused for a season. It is guns that could not be fed.

## Cutting the guns out

The Navy's answer was not to keep looking for cheaper shells. It was to remove the guns entirely and put the ships to different work.

On May 7, 2024, at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the first 155mm AGS was physically removed from USS Zumwalt, according to Naval News and USNI News. In its place the forward gun position is being fitted with four Multiple All-Up Round Canisters, each holding three Conventional Prompt Strike missiles, for a total of 12 CPS hypersonic missiles per ship. Lockheed Martin received the CPS integration contract in February 2023, reported at roughly $1.1 billion and potentially up to about $2 billion across the class. The Michael Monsoor and the Lyndon B. Johnson are slated for the same refit.

This is where the spare power and volume of that unconventional hull design pay off. The same electrical margin and internal space that made the Zumwalt expensive also make it the Navy's chosen first platform for hypersonic weapons.

On or about January 15, 2026, USS Zumwalt departed Pascagoula and returned the next day, its first time underway since 2023, according to USNI News. That made it the first U.S. surface ship configured to carry Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. Two cautions belong on that milestone. The ship went to sea without operational main-gun systems, and the hypersonic weapon itself was not yet operational at that date. The sea time was to enable testing of the Common Hypersonic Glide Body, not to field a working weapon. The capability was being integrated and tested, not declared ready.

## The honest critique and the honest defense

Here is where both verdicts have to sit side by side, because both are true.

**The honest critique.** Roughly $22.5 billion to $24.5 billion, total program including R&D, bought three destroyers whose signature main guns cannot affordably fire. The only ammunition designed for them reached $800,000 to $1 million per round once the fleet collapsed from 32 hulls to 3, so the Navy cancelled the buy in November 2016 and never procured the shells in quantity. The result was a multi-billion-dollar stealth warship carrying large guns with nothing to shoot, and those guns are now being cut out and replaced at further expense. This is a textbook consequence of buying-quantity collapse: fixed development cost sized for 32 ships was amortized across 3, driving both the per-ship price and the per-round ammunition cost to levels no one could defend. The GAO warned in 2008 that the program would exceed budget, and it did.

**The honest defense.** The Zumwalt was not simply money set on fire. It introduced genuinely new naval technology: a low-observable tumblehome stealth hull, integrated electric propulsion, and a large margin of onboard electrical power designed to feed future high-energy weapons. That power-and-space margin is precisely why the class is now the Navy's first platform for Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles, and why it is positioned for directed-energy weapons like lasers in the future. Critically, the runaway cost was driven substantially by the decision to cut the buy from 32 ships to 3, a budget and program-management choice, not by the technology being unworkable. The gun and the shell reportedly performed in testing. Read charitably, the Zumwalt worked as an expensive but real technology demonstrator whose electric-drive and power architecture are now being repurposed for the weapons the fleet actually wants.

Both of those paragraphs describe the same three ships. The waste is real, and it was largely self-inflicted through the collapse of the buy. The technological seed corn is also real, and the Navy is now planting it. An oversight account that reports only the empty guns, or only the hypersonic future, is telling half the story. The full record is that the country paid roughly $24.5 billion, ended up with three ships whose main guns never worked as intended, and is now spending more to convert them into something useful. Whether that counts as a salvage or a rescue depends on how the hypersonic conversion performs, and that verdict is not yet in.

## Fact-check notes and sources

- Three Zumwalt-class ships were built (DDG-1000 Zumwalt, DDG-1001 Michael Monsoor, DDG-1002 Lyndon B. Johnson), procured FY2007 through FY2009 with no further procurement planned. Source: Congressional Research Service, [RL32109, Navy DDG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer Programs](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL32109).
- The planned buy was cut from 32 ships to 24 to 7 to only 3 built, and in July 2008 the Navy asked Congress to stop DDG-1000 procurement and revert to Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) destroyers. Source: Congressional Research Service [RL32109](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL32109), consolidated with Navy and GAO figures at [Wikipedia: Zumwalt-class destroyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer).
- Total program cost is roughly $24.5 billion for all three ships including R&D per the GAO's April 2018 weapon systems assessment (about $8 billion per ship as a simple average, or about $10.6 billion per ship on GAO's development-loaded calculation); procurement-only was about $13.9 billion, roughly $4.24 billion per hull; the ~$22.5 billion figure is the earlier U.S. Naval Institute 2016 total. Keep these scopes distinct. Source: GAO April 2018 assessment as consolidated at [Wikipedia: Zumwalt-class destroyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer).
- The GAO warned in 2008 that the cost to deliver the Zumwalt class would likely exceed budget, citing immature technologies. Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, [GAO-08-804](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-08-804).
- Each ship mounts two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems firing the GPS-guided Long Range Land Attack Projectile with a range greater than 60 nautical miles; the gun and shell tested well technically. Source: [Wikipedia: Long Range Land Attack Projectile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Land_Attack_Projectile), tracing to USNI and Defense News reporting.
- LRLAP reached roughly $800,000 to $1 million per round after the buy shrank to three ships, and the Navy moved to cancel the LRLAP procurement in November 2016, leaving the guns without operational ammunition; only about 90 test rounds were secured. Sources: U.S. Naval Institute News, [Navy Planning Not Buying LRLAP Rounds (Nov 7, 2016)](https://news.usni.org/2016/11/07/navy-planning-not-buying-lrlap-rounds), and Defense News, [New Warships' Big Guns Have No Bullets (Nov 7, 2016)](https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2016/11/07/new-warships-big-guns-have-no-bullets/).
- A full buy of roughly 2,000 rounds at about $1 million each, estimated at $1.8 billion to $2 billion, is an order-of-magnitude estimate and was never contracted or appropriated. Source: [U.S. Naval Institute News (Nov 7, 2016)](https://news.usni.org/2016/11/07/navy-planning-not-buying-lrlap-rounds).
- The first 155mm AGS was physically removed from USS Zumwalt on May 7, 2024, at Ingalls Shipbuilding, and the forward gun position is being replaced by four Multiple All-Up Round Canisters holding three Conventional Prompt Strike missiles each, for 12 hypersonic missiles per ship; Lockheed Martin received the CPS integration contract in February 2023. Source: Naval News, [US Navy Removes First 155mm AGS from USS Zumwalt](https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/05/us-navy-removes-first-155mm-ags-from-uss-zumwalt-at-ingalls-shipbuilding/).
- USS Zumwalt departed Pascagoula on or about January 15, 2026, returning the next day, its first time underway since 2023 and the first U.S. surface ship configured for CPS hypersonic missiles; it went to sea without operational main guns, and the hypersonic weapon was not yet operational, the sea time being to enable Common Hypersonic Glide Body testing. Source: U.S. Naval Institute News, [USS Zumwalt Underway for First Time Since 2023 After Missile Refit (Jan 21, 2026)](https://news.usni.org/2026/01/21/uss-zumwalt-underway-for-first-time-since-2023-after-missile-refit).

## Related reading

- [The Littoral Combat Ship](/blog/littoral-combat-ship-lcs/): another Navy program where an ambitious concept collided with cost and capability problems.
- [The Coast Guard's Deepwater cutters](/blog/coast-guard-deepwater-cutters/): a large recapitalization effort and what it delivered against its budget.
- [The Army's Future Combat Systems](/blog/army-future-combat-systems/): a cancelled system-of-systems whose surviving pieces were repurposed, a close parallel to the Zumwalt's second life.
- [The GAO High-Risk List and improper payments](/blog/gao-high-risk-list-improper-payments/): the oversight lens this series uses, from the same watchdog that flagged the Zumwalt in 2008.
- [The public-money programs index](/blog/public-money-programs-index/): the full set of programs in this where-the-money-goes series.

*This post is informational and journalistic, not legal or financial advice. It describes public programs and documented events; mentions of third parties are nominative fair use and no affiliation is implied.*

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