The U.S. Navy Is About To Pack A Dozen Hypersonic Missiles Apiece Into Its New Stealth Destroyers

The U.S. Navy plans to install its new hypersonic land-attack missiles on the first warship to get the missiles—the stealthy destroyer USS Zumwalt—in 2025.

And in the years that follow, the Navy could arm as many as 23 ships—all three Zumwalts as well as 20 late-block Virginia-class attack submarines—with the Conventional Prompt Strike missile.

The eight-ton, three-foot-diameter CPS missile can travel farther than 1,700 miles at five times the speed of sound or faster. Exact specifications are classified.

The missile’s speed and range make it a key weapon for the Navy as the service prepares for possible war with Chinese forces in the western Pacific Ocean.

After decades of relentless modernization, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army now is capable of threatening enemy warships as far as 3,000 miles from the Chinese mainland and island outposts. U.S. naval commanders know they need more and better long-range missiles in order to mitigate, if not eliminate, the risk from China’s own long-range missiles.

Of course, superior range is moot without superior targeting.

The U.S. Defense Department has been developing hypersonic missiles—that is, maneuverable missiles capable of at least Mach 5—since the early 2000s. The CPS and its land-based cousin, the U.S. Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, are on track to be the first operational munitions to come from this two-decade effort. “Extremely accurate, ultrafast, maneuverable and survivable, hypersonics can strike anywhere in the world within minutes,” the Army crowed.

For 2023, the Pentagon asked lawmakers for $4.7 billion for hypersonic weapons development—that’s up from $3.8 billion the previous year. In late October, the Navy fired a pair of hypersonic “sounding” rockets at its test range in New Mexico. The sounding rockets, while not as wide as the CPS missile, including some of the same electronics. Testing the sounding rockets is a step toward testing the full CPS system.

The CPS munition includes three stages: two rocket boosters and, on top of them, a so-called Common Hypersonic Glide Body. The wedge-shaped CHGB separates from the boosters in mid-flight and, as its name implies, glides at Mach 5 or faster toward its target. The Pentagon is vague about what kind of guidance and payload the glide body includes.

From the beginning, the Navy planned to arm some of its nearly 60 attack and guided-missile submarines with hypersonic missiles. The Zumwalts are a more recent addition to the project. The Navy originally conceived of the 600-foot destroyers as near-shore land-attack specialists.

But a few years ago, fleet leaders decided they couldn’t afford the million-dollar-per-round cost of shells for the Zumwalts’ custom-designed 155-millimeter cannons. Without ammo for their guns, the $5-billion destroyers were ships without a mission. Then, in 2017, the Navy decided to switch the San Diego-based Zumwalts to deepwater missions.

Armed with SM-6 multi-role missiles, the destroyers would hunt down enemy vessels. Adding tubes for CPS missiles would also give the giant surface combatants a long-range land-attack capability.

It’s taken years to complete the design work necessary for removing the Zumwalts’ twin gun mounts and replacing them with four vertical missile tubes, each 87 inches in diameter.

The plan, at present, is to cut into Zumwalt’s deck starting in 2025. “We’ve got to put these large diameter tubes in there, and then finish the integration work into the combat system,” Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the head of the Navy’s strategic systems programs, told reporters at a symposium in early November.

Sister ships USS Michael Monsoor and the future USS Lyndon B. Johnson would undergo modification after Zumwalt. Around the same time, the first of the 10 new Block V Virginias should commission into service. The Block Vs, and the five each Block VI and Block VII boats that are under contract or planned, will launch CPS missiles from their own 87-inch tubes: four tubes and 12 missiles per boat.

If all goes well, the Navy could deploy a dozen ships with a combined 144 CPS missiles by 2030, and another 11 ships with an additional 132 CPS missiles another five years later.

Sailing from San Diego, Hawaii, Guam and Japan, the hypersonic missile shooters would sail along the outside edge of the PLA Rocket Force’s sea-denial zone, firing Mach-5 missiles at Chinese command posts, air bases, ports, missile launchers and supply dumps.

A dozen missiles per ship isn’t a lot, so the shooters—the Zumwalts and Virginias—would need to return to port to reload. Sail, shoot, return to port, repeat. The need for frequent reloading is a possible weakness in the hypersonic-strike complex the Navy is building.

Range might be another weakness. The Navy won’t say exactly how far a CPS missile can reach, but it appears to be far short of the 3,000-miles estimated maximum range of the PLARF’s best anti-ship ballistic missile, the DF-26B.

That’s not an issue for the Virginias, of course. The submarines will fire their CPSs from underwater. But for the Zumwalts, the mismatch between their hypersonic missiles and the PLARF’s anti-ship rockets poses a dilemma. Even with their new, super-fast, long-range missiles, the Zumwalts will have to close to within range of Chinese missiles before they can attack.

Of course, a missile—whether it’s a Chinese anti-ship rocket or an American hypersonic land-attack glide body—is only as good as its supporting targeting. Just because a DF-26B can range 3,000 miles doesn’t mean it can reliably strike a moving vessel at that extreme distance.

By the same token, a CPS’s high speed and long range mean very little if the crew of a Zumwalt or Virginia can’t aim them. The U.S. Navy and the Chinese rocket force are in a race to develop missiles with ever longer ranges. But the real winner might be the service with better intelligence.