Zumwalt's revolutionary procurement burden

Was Zumwalt the wrong kind of general-purpose ship for the US Navy, and why did the program fail?

Zumwalt was a general-purpose destroyer with manageable handling differences. The critique concerns the accumulation of immature equipment and the decision to blame and cut the overall program.

Zumwalt was a general-purpose destroyer, although the ambitions placed on it pushed toward a railgun cruiser role. Its unfamiliar handling was manageable: crews accustomed to Arleigh Burkes had to unlearn habits, as could be expected with the first vessels of a class planned to exceed thirty. The procurement critique centres on combining numerous revolutionary systems in one program. When that equipment was not ready, the entire class could be cut instead of allowing the hull and individual technologies to evolve separately. In this critique, blaming the ship also protected the earlier procurement decisions from scrutiny.