DD(Rex)

A conceptual drawing of the Navy's new DD(X) class destroyer. Image courtesy of Raytheon.

"The situation was an answer to the prayers of a War College strategist or a gunnery tactician. The enemy column, now reduced to one battleship, one heavy cruiser, and one destroyer, was steaming into a trap. It was a very short vertical to a very broad T, but Oldendorf was about to cap it, as Togo had done to Rozhdestvensky in 1905 at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, and as thousands of naval officers had since hoped to accomplish."

--Samuel Eliot Morison

THE BATTLE AT Surigao Strait, described above, was only one engagement within the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf, which took place in the Philippine Sea during October of 1944. The clash in Leyte Gulf is regarded as the largest naval battle in history, but it is the battle at Surigao Strait which has for years captured the imagination of naval historians. It was, and, it was assumed, always would be, the last great battleship engagement in history. The dominance of the carrier in naval combat had become apparent more than two years prior at the Battle of Midway, and the obsolescence of the battleship, in turn, heralded the rapid decline of the gun as the primary weapon of the U.S. surface fleet. Over the next 50 years, advances in technology led the Navy to rely ever more on missiles and jet aircraft to project power at sea and on shore. But the naval gun may yet make a comeback. The Navy's next-generation destroyer, the DD(X), will be armed with a battery of two 155mm Advance Gun Systems that will offer a spectacular improvement over its predecessors in range, accuracy, and rate of fire. The DD(X) may, in fact, portend the reemergence of the gun as the primary weapon of the fleet.

THE MOST ADVANCED DESTROYERS in the fleet today are those of the Arleigh Burke class, or DDG 51's. This class includes the USS Cole, the USS Winston S. Churchill, the USS John S. McCain, and 42 other ships. These destroyers are armed with the Standard surface-to-air missile, the Harpoon antiship missile, the VLA antisubmarine warfare missile, and an array of torpedoes. Despite this formidable arsenal, the DDG 51's possess only one 5-inch lightweight gun--that is half the firepower of the Burke class' predecessor, the Spruance class, which is armed with two 5-inch lightweight guns. The Fletcher class destroyers, some 175 of which were built during the Second World War, possessed five 5-inch guns. This decline in the strength of naval artillery on U.S. destroyers took place over a period that saw the great Iowa class battleships, each with 9 16-inch guns (capable of propelling 1,900 pounds of high explosives up to 30 miles) and twenty 5-inch guns, disappear from the fleet altogether. At the dawn of the 21st century, the Navy's primary antisurface gun battery consists of one 5-inch gun with a range of 13 nautical miles. But if the Navy sticks to its schedule, by 2012 two DD(X) ships will be operational, each armed with a battery of two 155mm (6.1-inch) Advanced Gun Systems with a range of no less than 68 miles.

THE PRIMARY REQUIREMENT for the DD(X) program is to "carry the war to the enemy through offensive operations and destroy enemy targets ashore with precision strike and volume fires." Despite the impressive range of the Advanced Gun System, to achieve this requirement DD(X) will operate far closer to shore than its predecessors. In order to "dominate the littoral," the ship has been constructed with a number of features which will offer a tremendous improvement in survivability, the first among which is stealth.