Delays impede hypersonic missile integration on US Navy destroyers
A GAO audit finds the surface fleet's first hypersonic strike platform on schedule to leave the yard without its weapon—and warns that a fractured Army-Navy investment approach threatens the wider $50 billion enterprise.
Bottom Line Up Front
The Navy's effort to arm its three Zumwalt-class destroyers with the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) hypersonic missile is roughly 24 months behind schedule, according to a Government Accountability Office report released on 17 July 2026 (GAO-26-107974). Lead ship USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) is expected to leave Ingalls Shipbuilding and return to service in the second half of 2026 as the first U.S. surface combatant fitted with hypersonic launch tubes—but she will sail without any missiles to load into them, because the weapon is still in test. The first at-sea CPS flight test from Zumwalt has slipped from 2025 to the third quarter of fiscal year 2027. Missile production is running at roughly half the required rate, sustainment of the class's one-of-a-kind combat and radar systems remains costly, and the modernization bill for all three hulls has climbed past $2 billion. GAO's central institutional finding is broader than any single hull: the Department of Defense lacks a comprehensive strategy to coordinate the Army's and Navy's separate CPS-related investments, and without one the services are poorly positioned to fix shared production shortfalls or sustain the DDG-1000 economically across its intended 35-year life. DoD concurred with the single recommendation.
A Mission in Search of a Magazine
The Zumwalt class has spent most of its short life looking for a reason to exist. Conceived as a land-attack destroyer built around the 155-mm Advanced Gun System, the program collapsed to three hulls after the guided projectile that justified the gun became unaffordable, leaving the ships with mounts and no economical ammunition. In 2021 the Navy settled on a new purpose: convert the class into the surface fleet's first hypersonic strike platform by ripping out both Advanced Gun Systems and installing four large-diameter missile tubes in their place. Each tube holds three all-up rounds, giving each destroyer a magazine of up to twelve CPS weapons—conventional, non-nuclear boost-glide missiles intended to reach valuable, heavily defended, time-critical targets from stand-off range.
That structural surgery is now essentially finished. Zumwalt entered Huntington Ingalls Industries' Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, for what the Navy calls its Build Yard Modernization Period; the guns are out and the tubes are in. GAO assessed the lead-ship modernization at 94 percent complete as of January 2026. The problem is not the platform. It is that the ship has outrun the weapon it was rebuilt to carry.
The Slip: Twenty-Four Months and Counting
GAO catalogs a chain of linked delays. On the ship side, the yard encountered substantial unplanned work: in August 2025 the Navy added some 230,000 labor hours to the HII contract at a cost of about $20 million, driven in part by first-of-kind difficulties in shutting down and restarting the destroyer's complex integrated electrical plant—systems that had never been fully cycled in this configuration before. Faults in that electrical system contributed to the schedule erosion. Across all three hulls, the modernization estimate has risen from roughly $1.8 billion to at least $2 billion.
On the weapon side, the picture is more consequential. The first CPS flight test from Zumwalt was originally planned for 2025; it is now scheduled for the third quarter of FY2027. Program officials told GAO they deliberately restructured the test campaign to reduce risk to the ship and crew, inserting incremental land-based and shore events ahead of the first shipboard launch. That is defensible test discipline, but it pushes fielding to the right.
Production is the harder constraint. Lockheed Martin, responsible for building the missile body, is currently turning out only six to seven rounds per year against a stabilization goal of twelve. GAO attributes the shortfall to a build process more labor-intensive than anticipated, complicated work instructions on the shop floor, and quality-assurance problems. At a planned unit cost approaching $50 million per missile, a magazine of twelve represents a substantial capital asset per hull—one the production line cannot yet reliably fill.
Where the Class Stands, Hull by Hull
The three ships are on divergent tracks. Zumwalt leads and is expected out of the yard in the back half of 2026, returning to the fleet with launch tubes but no rounds. USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001), which completed fleet operations and a first deployment in 2025, has not yet begun her own Build Yard Modernization Period; GAO places that start around February 2027. USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) remains in the activation phase before delivery: as of January 2026 her combat-systems activation was 96 percent complete and her mission-systems activation—including CPS installation and testing—was 54 percent complete, with delivery having slipped from April 2027 to 2028.
Underlying all three is a sustainment concern GAO flags pointedly. The class's radar, combat, and network systems are effectively unique in the fleet, which makes them expensive and difficult to maintain and support. If the Navy intends to operate these hulls across a nominal 35-year service life, the cost of keeping bespoke systems running is not a one-time modernization line item but a recurring structural burden.
The Real Finding: A Portfolio Without a Pilot
The most durable contribution of GAO-26-107974 is not the Zumwalt schedule—that has been slipping publicly for two years—but its assessment of how the Pentagon manages hypersonics as an enterprise. CPS is not one program. It is a portfolio: the Navy's ship-launched CPS effort, planned integration aboard Block V Virginia-class submarines with the Virginia Payload Module, and the Army's Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), or "Dark Eagle." The three share a Common Hypersonic Glide Body and a common all-up round; the Army is responsible for producing the glide body for both services, and the Navy leads production of the missile body. DoD plans to invest at least $50 billion across these efforts.
Yet GAO found that while Army and Navy officials coordinate on day-to-day execution, they largely make investment decisions separately. The report offers a telling example: with the Navy responsible for missile-body production, the Army nonetheless commissioned its own consultant to study how to raise output—duplicative effort on a shared bottleneck. There is no comprehensive DoD strategy ensuring that each program's investments serve the portfolio's common objectives. The consequence is not abstract. Without formal coordination, the services are poorly positioned to make timely, efficient decisions on exactly the things that matter most—closing shortfalls on the shared production line and sustaining the DDG-1000 economically.
GAO's recommendation is singular and unusually direct: the Secretary of Defense, through the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and in coordination with the service secretaries, should develop a comprehensive strategy governing how all CPS-portfolio programs coordinate and regularly review investment decisions. DoD concurred.
Not Starting From Zero
It would misread the report to treat CPS as a failure. The technical core is maturing. On 2 May 2025 the Navy's Strategic Systems Programs conducted a successful end-to-end flight test of a conventional hypersonic missile from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station—the first CPS launch using the cold-gas ejection approach that will be used at sea, in which the round is expelled clear of the platform before first-stage ignition. In August 2025 the program conducted a warhead arena test, results of which were still under analysis at the time of GAO's review. The joint Army-Navy campaign has logged repeated end-to-end all-up-round flights since 2024.
The Army, meanwhile, has moved fastest. Having weathered a string of earlier test scrubs and booster failures, the LRHW program began fielding its first operational battery to a unit in late 2025, with the process expected to complete in early 2026—positioning Dark Eagle to become the first U.S. operational hypersonic weapon. The Army plans to field its rounds ahead of the Navy. That asymmetry is precisely what makes GAO's coordination finding urgent: two services drawing on one production base, fielding on different timelines, without a shared investment plan.
Analysis: The Cost of an Unfilled Tube
For the surface fleet, the operational significance of GAO-26-107974 is straightforward and uncomfortable. The Navy will soon have a destroyer configured for hypersonic strike and no rounds to give it that capability—capability that exists on paper, in steel, and in the fleet's force-structure briefings, but not yet in a magazine. In an era in which China has fielded a substantial hypersonic arsenal and Russia has employed hypersonic ballistic weapons in combat, the gap between an installed launcher and a loaded one is the gap between deterrent signal and deterrent reality.
Two lessons stand out for the naval professional. First, platform readiness and weapon readiness are separable, and program schedules that celebrate the former while the latter lags produce hollow milestones. A Zumwalt leaving the yard "on the water" is a headline; a Zumwalt with twelve rounds ready is a capability. Second, the enterprise problem GAO identifies—two services, one glide body, one strained production line, and no unifying investment strategy—is the kind of seam that acquisition systems consistently fail to police, because no single program manager owns it. The remedy GAO prescribes is not a new missile or a bigger budget; it is coordination. Whether DoD's concurrence translates into an enforceable portfolio strategy, rather than another layer of liaison, will determine whether the surface fleet's hypersonic ambition arrives in this decade or drifts into the next.
The tubes are installed. Filling them is now a question of production discipline and institutional coordination—two things that do not respond to a christening date.
Verified Sources
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. Navy Ship Modernization: DOD Needs Comprehensive Strategy to Field Hypersonic Missile Capability. GAO-26-107974. Published and publicly released 17 July 2026. Full report (33 pp.) and highlights. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107974
- Government Accountability Office. Full report (HTML). GAO-26-107974. https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-26-107974/index.html
- Breaking Defense. "Navy, Army risk wasting money, time without unified hypersonic missile strategy: GAO." 17 July 2026. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/07/navy-army-risk-wasting-money-time-without-unified-hypersonic-missile-strategy-gao/
- Defense News (TechWatch). "US Navy 2 years behind on hypersonic missile installation on Zumwalt destroyers." 17 July 2026. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2026/07/17/us-navy-2-years-behind-on-hypersonic-missile-installation-on-zumwalt-destroyers/
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- Baird Maritime. "Report: delays impede hypersonic missile integration on US Navy's Zumwalt-class destroyers." 20 July 2026. https://www.bairdmaritime.com/security/weaponry/report-delays-impede-hypersonic-missile-integration-on-us-navys-zumwalt-class-destroyers
- Interesting Engineering. "US' first hypersonic destroyer to return with empty missile tubes." 20 July 2026. https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-navys-first-hypersonic-destroyer-to-return
- Defence Industry Europe. "US Navy Zumwalt destroyer hypersonic missile upgrade slips two years as costs, testing delays and sustainment risks mount." 18 July 2026. https://defence-industry.eu/us-navy-zumwalt-destroyer-hypersonic-missile-upgrade-slips-two-years-as-costs-testing-delays-and-sustainment-risks-mount/
- U.S. Navy / Department of Defense. "U.S. Navy Proves Sea-Based Hypersonic Launch Approach" (2 May 2025 CPS cold-gas flight test release, via GlobalSecurity.org). https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2025/05/mil-250502-dod02.htm
- USNI News. "Navy Wants to Start Conventional Prompt Strike Tests Aboard USS Zumwalt in 2027." 14 November 2024. https://news.usni.org/2024/11/14/navy-wants-to-start-conventional-prompt-strike-tests-aboard-uss-zumwalt-in-2027
- Office of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E). "Navy — Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS)," FY2025 Annual Report. https://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2025/navy/2025cps.pdf
- DefenseScoop. "Army expects to complete fielding of Dark Eagle hypersonic missile in 'early 2026.'" 21 January 2026. https://defensescoop.com/2026/01/21/dark-eagle-hypersonic-weapon-army-fielding-plans/
- Congressional Research Service. "The U.S. Army's Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW): Dark Eagle." IF11991. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11991
- U.S. Army / Department of Defense. "Army Announces Official Name for its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon" (Dark Eagle), 24 April 2025, via GlobalSecurity.org. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2025/04/mil-250424-dod01.htm
- U.S. Navy, Naval Facilities Engineering / NEPA. "Navy CPS Weapon System Flight Tests Final EA/OEA." https://www.nepa.navy.mil/Portals/20/Documents/Navy%20CPS%20Weapon%20System%20Flight%20Tests%20Final%20EAOEA-Vol%201%20(Ch%201-7).pdf
GAO contact of record: Shelby S. Oakley, Director, Contracting and National Security Acquisitions. Report page: GAO-26-107974.
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