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More than four years after she was first delivered, the futuristic destroyer USS Zumwalt <\/em>has conducted her first live-fire SM-2 missile test. The exercise is a step towards gaining Initial Operational Capability (IOC) certification, which is expected sometime next year. <\/p>\n The SM-2 (Standard Missile-2) is the Navy's workhorse anti-aircraft missile, and it has a secondary anti-ship role. Zumwalt is fitted with 80 VLS cells for SM-series missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles and other munitions – 16 cells fewer than found aboard the Arleigh Burke<\/em>-class destroyer series, which is 100 feet shorter and 6,000 tons lighter. <\/p>\n Zumwalt's <\/em>unique cannons were not part of the test, as the Navy has not yet found a practical and economical means to supply them with ammunition. The Zumwalt <\/em>class was originally envisioned as a 32-vessel series, and the cannon was designed to take a purpose-built ammunition round. However, the class was gradually scaled back to three hulls due to budgetary considerations; the cost per round for a correspondingly smaller quantity of ammunition went up to nearly $1 million per shot. The Navy opted not to move forward with acquiring a supply of the ammunition due to the excessive price per unit, and the cannons have not been used.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Image courtesy USN<\/em><\/p>\n While her deck guns are silent, Zumwalt <\/em>has other features that the Navy believes will be useful in a future conflict. Thanks to her unusual shape and her composite deckhouse, she has a very small radar cross-section, and that allows her to take on the "appearance" of a much smaller vessel for opponents' radar surveillance systems. She was also designed with power and weight margin built in for future, as-yet-undeveloped energy weapons systems like high-power lasers or railguns. <\/p>\n “Today’s successful firing event is a critical milestone in the maturation of this incredible ship class and represents the culmination of a tremendous amount of hard work,” said Capt. Gary Cave, Zumwalt’s commanding officer. “It is a day we’ve been looking forward to and demonstrates the strides we are taking to add combat capability to our surface force.”<\/p>\n Two more Zumwalt-class vessels are currently undergoing construction at Bath Iron Works. When including R&D costs for the scaled-down series, the total cost per vessel is approximately $7.5 billion. <\/p>\n maritime-executive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More than four years after she was first delivered, the futuristic destroyer USS Zumwalt has conducted her first live-fire SM-2 missile test. The exercise is a step towards gaining Initial Operational Capability (IOC) certification, which is expected sometime next year. The SM-2 (Standard Missile-2) is the Navy's workhorse anti-aircraft missile, and it has a secondary …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[1090,12480,3593,6082,1243,12482,12483,2334,12481,2523,5474],"class_list":["post-19716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-budget","tag-cannon","tag-delivery","tag-fires","tag-missile","tag-sm-series","tag-tomahawk","tag-uss","tag-vls","tag-years","tag-zumwalt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/19717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}