Zumwalt Let Down: Why Did the Stealth Destroyer Not Live up to the Hype?
USS Lyndon B. Johnson was launched this December 2018 and will be commissioned in 2022. This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest. Traditionally, warships are tailored to perform specific missions. But the cutting-edge Zumwalt has been a ship in search of a mission, especially since procurement of hyper-expensive ammunition for its primary weapon system was canceled. Years and billions of dollars later, the Navy may finally have found one. In the post-Cold War 1990s, the U.S Navy lacked peer competitors on the high seas, so it conceived its next-generat...