U.S. Navy Delays Zumwalt Destroyer Hypersonic Missile Test to 2027 as Costs Reach $2 Billion.

The U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyers are now 24 months behind schedule in gaining the Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missile, delaying the fleet’s first surface-launched hypersonic strike capability. A Government Accountability Office report published on July 17, 2026, says the first ship-based flight test has slipped to the third quarter of fiscal year 2027, pushing back certification, crew qualification, and operational deployment.

USS Zumwalt was 94 percent through modernization in January 2026, but the three-ship conversion effort has risen from $1.8 billion to at least $2 billion. With only three destroyers in the class, any delay removes a third of the planned force and makes it harder to sustain a cycle of deployment, training, and maintenance.

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A Zumwalt-class destroyer is shown at sea. The U.S. Navy is modernizing all three ships of the class to carry up to 12 Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles, although the program is currently running about two years behind schedule (Picture source: U.S. DoW).

CPS is a boost-glide missile rather than an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile. Its All-Up Round consists of a two-stage solid-propellant booster and a Common Hypersonic Glide Body manufactured by Dynetics, a Leidos subsidiary, containing what the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation describes as a kinetic-energy projectile warhead. The booster accelerates the glide body toward the upper atmosphere; after separation, the glide body follows a lower and less predictable trajectory than a conventional ballistic missile and uses aerodynamic lift to maneuver toward the target. The Navy has disclosed a speed above Mach 5 and classifies the specific range and accuracy requirements, although recent testing and simulation demonstrated compliance with minimum range and accuracy thresholds.

The naval launch sequence is technically important. Compressed gas ejects the nearly four-story-tall missile from its canister before the first-stage motor ignites at a safe distance above the ship, limiting the heat, pressure, and exhaust imposed on the launch tube and surrounding structure. The Army’s Dark Eagle Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon uses the same All-Up Round but ignites it inside its ground launcher. The Navy demonstrated the cold-launch method at Cape Canaveral in April 2025 after an extensive in-air-launch test campaign; the weapon-control, launch, and missile systems operated as intended, but the event was conducted from a land-based naval launcher and did not demonstrate the complete combat system aboard a moving destroyer.

The Zumwalt modernization program removes the ship’s two 155 mm Advanced Gun Systems and installs four 87-inch Large Missile Vertical Launch System tubes, with three CPS rounds in each tube for a maximum ship load of 12. The new tubes are necessary because CPS cannot fit inside the destroyer’s 80 existing Mk 57 peripheral vertical-launch cells. Those cells remain available for weapons such as Tomahawk cruise missiles, SM-2 surface-to-air missiles, Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles, and Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rockets. This produces a mixed magazine in which CPS is reserved for a small number of high-priority targets, while the Mk 57 cells provide air defense, anti-submarine firepower, and less expensive land-attack capacity.

A destroyer carrying hypersonic missiles changes operational planning primarily by making the launch point mobile. A land-based battery requires access agreements, prepared operating areas, logistics support, and protection within a host country; a destroyer can alter its location and firing azimuth without depending on permanent basing ashore. This permits strikes to originate from different maritime approaches and forces an opponent to account for a larger defended area. It does not eliminate dependence on external intelligence, surveillance, target identification, and communications. CPS is intended for high-value, time-sensitive, and heavily defended targets, including command facilities, missile units, and air-defense nodes, but engagements against moving ships would require sufficiently accurate and recent target updates throughout the joint targeting process.

The capability is therefore different from simply adding another long-range missile. A subsonic Tomahawk offers greater magazine depth and is appropriate for many fixed targets, but its longer flight time gives mobile units more opportunity to relocate and air defenses more time to detect and engage it. CPS is intended for the opening phase of a conflict, when commanders may need to disable a small number of radars, long-range missile launchers, or command nodes before aircraft and lower-cost missiles can operate with less risk. Twelve rounds do not provide a sustained bombardment capability. They provide a limited first-salvo option whose military value depends on target quality, precise mission planning, and the ability to confirm effects after impact.

Program development reflects an attempt to share expensive missile components between the services. Joint Army-Navy work began in 2019; the Navy selected the Zumwalt class in 2021 because the missile was too large for existing surface-ship launchers, and in 2022 expanded the plan from one test ship to all three destroyers. Successful end-to-end tests followed in December 2024 and April 2025, allowing rapid prototyping to conclude in October 2025. The current rapid-fielding phase is intended to culminate in the 2027 USS Zumwalt launch, after which CPS is expected to enter low-rate production for the other destroyers and selected Virginia-class submarines with the Virginia Payload Module in the early 2030s.

The principal near-term constraint is production rather than launcher capacity. Each CPS missile is estimated to cost between $63 million and $71 million, averaging approximately $67 million as of April 2026. The Navy’s lifecycle estimate increased from $31 billion for 262 missiles in 2020 to $41 billion for 224 missiles in 2024, while the Army plans to spend more than $10 billion on 48 missiles and associated ground equipment. Lockheed Martin’s production facility can currently complete no more than six or seven rounds annually, compared with the 12-round rate considered necessary to stabilize production. At the present rate, manufacturing one full Zumwalt load would consume roughly two years of output before accounting for Army requirements, flight-test weapons, training rounds, or submarine inventories.

Manufacturing problems behind that shortfall include contamination of thermal-protection coating, incomplete parts kits, missiles partially disassembled to recover missing components, work instructions written as engineering specifications that inexperienced employees could not readily follow, and workforce turnover. Lockheed Martin increased manufacturing personnel from approximately 60 to 80, but officials estimated that a new employee requires about one year to work independently. A 2023 Navy audit also found expired materials, inadequate parts inspection, and quality-assurance steps that were not consistently followed. These are not peripheral industrial issues; defects in coatings, assembly, or guidance-related components directly affect whether a missile can survive hypersonic heating and maintain the accuracy required for a conventional kinetic strike.

Ship integration has created a separate set of delays. In August 2025, the Navy added 230,000 labor hours and $20 million to Huntington Ingalls Industries’ contract after more electrical cabling was removed from USS Zumwalt’s forward section than expected during launcher installation. Restarting major systems after the first complete shutdown of the ship’s Integrated Power System also exposed equipment failures. The destroyer can generate 78 megawatts and distribute 1,000-volt direct current to propulsion and combat loads, but the Navy found repeated Category 3 and 4 casualty reports, three-month lead times for some power-system components, and reliance on parts taken from Lyndon B. Johnson. The Navy has also deferred a decision on replacing the class-specific SPY-3 radar, Total Ship Computing Environment, and network architecture with standard Navy equipment, an additional change estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion for the three ships.

For Congress, the relevant measure is not whether a Zumwalt destroyer can physically carry 12 hypersonic missiles, but whether the Navy can generate a deployable ship, a reliable missile inventory, and a functioning joint targeting chain at the same time. At an average estimated price of $67 million, a full 12-round load represents about $804 million in missiles, excluding the destroyer, launch system, and supporting sensors. The 2027 flight test will establish whether the weapon can be safely launched and controlled from USS Zumwalt, but it will not by itself prove sustained operational availability, adequate production or effectiveness against representative defended targets. The April 2025 demonstration was not intended to support a full assessment of operational effectiveness, suitability or survivability.

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Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.