[CaptainCrunch]

The US Military has had real problems with its procurement and new platform designs for a while. As ships have gotten more complex, the designs have failed or become far more expensive then they were first budgeted for.

The Zumwalt was supposed to be a stealth platform that would replace the Iowa class battleship in terms of close in support for the Marines. It was also supposed to have saved costs by being a heavily automated ship that would need a small crew of under 100 men.

However problems showed up almost immediately.

1) Stealth - In terms of a navy ship as part of the US Navy's tactical doctrine it doesn't work very well. The US Navy is really dependent on the concept of battlegroups. so if you put a stealth ship as part of a battlegroup, its almost useless as every other ship in the group will show up on enemy radar. Also the biggest threat to the US Navy is still in terms of Submarines, and a ship like the Zumwalt isn't a especially good anti-submarine platform, and stealth isn't anti sonar and there's only so much that you can do in terms of quieting to protect a ship from sonar.

Even if you can use Stealth to sneak a ship close in to shore to add fire support to a marine assault, the problem is now that the ship will be visible, and also the shells that the rail guns fire will show up on counter battery radars.

Crew size - The Zumwalt was designed to operate with a 90 man crew and be computer and automation intensive. However after original testing they found that a 90 man crew wouldn't be able to keep a constant high operational temp, so the crew size was expanded to 150 men so the cost and manpower savings vanished.

The Advanced Gun System - The heart of this ships offensive capability. It was designed to deliver a 155 mm projectile over the horizon (83 miles). When the ship was first designed they costed the rounds out as being similar to the older 155 mm round used by standardized artillary, instead that plan fell through and a new 155 mm round was designed, originally the cost was expected to be fairly reasonable, though not the $700.00 per round of a standard round. But with the fleet shrinking from 30 to 3 the costs skyrocketed to about $1 million dollars a round. there was also concern about the size of the magazine that would hold the 300 rounds the ship carried.

If you look at the list of commissioned ships, most of their hulls were designed and dropped anywhere from the early 80's to the 90's. Even their submarine fleet is getting up their in age. At the same time the Chinese and Russians are in a full modernization of their navy.