Editor’s Note: This story was updated on Friday, March 11, to correct a quote from Loren Thompson, and include reaction from the Naval Systems Sea Command.
BATH, Maine — External masts added to the design of three Bath-built “stealth” destroyers increase the radar profile of the warships, but the new vessels still meet the Navy’s “threshold” for stealth.
A little more than two weeks before the lead ship, the future USS Zumwalt, is scheduled to sail down the Kennebec River for a second round of sea trials, USNI News reported design changes that added a mast and sensor to the outside of the vessels.
“The three ships will position sensors originally designed to be embedded in the ships’ composite deckhouses on a mast positioned on the front of the deck house, with several more sensors on either side of the deck house,” the trade journal reported.
The additional mast increases the ship’s radar signature, according to Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the nonprofit Lexington Institute, a defense industry analyst, “but compared with other warships, it’ll be fairly hard to detect using radar from long distances … it’s still the most advanced surface combatant ever built, anywhere.”
Matthew Leonard, spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command, said in addition to reducing costs, an additional mast in the design of three DDG 1000 destroyers being built at Bath Iron Works improved performance and reduced the weight of the ships “while still meeting Key Performance Parameters requirements.”
“When they compressed the Zumwalt class to only three warships, it necessitated a series of other changes,” Thompson said Tuesday. “The costs of each one ballooned and triggered a law that led to them reducing some of the capabilities of the ship. There was going to be a search radar, and 57 millimeter guns were reduced to 30 millimeter.”
Leonard said cost dictated only one change, the replacement of volume search radar with multi-function radar. Navy analysis showed the 30 millimeter guns produced superior results for the DDG 1000, including providing “three times the magazine capacity, two-thirds the reload time, 24,000 pounds less weight [and] 50 percent of the procurement cost.”
The first-in-class Zumwalt is slated to leave Bath Iron Works for new trials on March 21. Earlier this month, U.S. Navy Capt. James Kirk, who will captain the future Zumwalt after the Navy accepts it, wrote in a U.S. Naval Institute article that more than 100 of the eventual 147 crew members have reported for duty in Bath.
Kirk said that additional testing of its systems will take place at sea in 2017.
At more than 610 feet long and 81 feet across, the Zumwalt-class destroyers boast a flight deck nearly twice the size of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, Kirk wrote, and can carry two MH-60R helicopters.
The ship is slated for delivery to the Navy in late spring or early summer 2016 and will be commissioned in Baltimore.
According to Kirk, soon after the new destroyer arrives in its homeport of San Diego, equipment that was not part of the current contract will be installed over a four- to five-month period.