So the the U.S. Navy's new Zumwalt-class destroyer has been launched--at the cost of more than $7 billion per ship (more than half the cost of an aircraft carrier), and its only non-missile weapons are a pair of guns that have no ammunition!
I posit that the Zumwalt destroyer is everything that's wrong with the U.S. government.
First of all, the very reason for this ship's existence is to provide naval gun-based shore bombardment--a dubious aim in today's era of long-range guided missiles and carrier-launched aircraft, both of which are perfectly capable of doing the same job, and striking targets much farther inland, too. The only real advantages of naval gun-based shore bombardment are psychological shock value and cost-effectiveness (cruise missiles and aircraft-delivered munitions are expensive).
So how does the Zumwalt destroyer do when it comes to cost-effective demoralizing naval shore bombardment?
Let's start with cost-effectiveness: the new gun's fancy shells cost $800,000 each to deliver 24 pounds of explosive 68 miles. By contrast, existing Tomahawk cruise missiles cost $2m apiece (2.5 times as much) but deliver 1,000 pounds of explosives (41 times more) at a distance of more than 800 miles (11 times farther). Due to its low cost-efficiency, the program to develop this ammunition was canceled right after Trump's inauguration, presumably by one of the many sane generals in his administration.
As for psychological impact, even if there was any ammo available, the shells are only 1.1" larger in diameter than existing U.S. naval guns' ammunition. Not much of a bigger bang--certainly nothing like the 16" guns used for naval bombardment until the 1980s, which is what the Marine Corps really wanted.
So the guns have no ammo, even if they did, it wouldn't be much scarier than what they replace. But wait! These are 155mm guns, theoretically allowing them to fire standard and inexpensive 155mm artillery shells to salvage the program. But for some bizarre reason compatibility with existing ammunition stocks was not a goal. It will cost an estimated $250m per ship to retrofit the guns to fire the artillery shells with a much lower rate of fire and range, or an Italian-developed long-range guided 5" shell that it could have fired from day 1 if they had just chosen a standard 5" gun of the type that already arms every other Navy warship.
The total cost of this boondoggle was more than $22 billion. Coulda paid for a lotta high-speed trains with that money...
One of them has anti-air missiles at least. And they do have some machine guns and cannons, for protection against fast-moving boats. Of course, all the other U.S. Navy ships are armed with small rapid-firing 5" guns that can do the same job--from a longer distance, too. And internationally, there are versions that are even faster-firing and longer-range, doing that job even better.
