The US Navy will soon receive the first destroyer of a new type with missile armament on board, which gave the name to the entire class of ships - "Zamvolt". This week began his trials at sea. The destroyer belongs to a fundamentally new generation of weapons created by the Americans.
Carver's Ship
Zamvolt is the largest destroyer of the American fleet: its length is 183 m, width - 24.6 m, draft - 8, 4 m, and displacement - 14, 5 thousand tons. in the Russian fleet there are non-aircraft carriers and are much larger than it. These are, for example, Project 1144 nuclear missile cruisers with a displacement of 26 thousand tons.
The crew of "Zamvolt" consists of almost one and a half hundred sailors. Such a small team for such a huge ship is explained by the maximum automation.
The destroyer Zamvolt was built at Bath Iron Works. On combat duty, he should take over next year. This ship resembles a futuristic ship of the future that has just stepped off the big screen or the pages of a science fiction novel. In principle, it is: the ship from the 1997 James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies", built by the main villain Carver, who tried to take over the world with the help of the media and marine technology, looked almost exactly the same. The real destroyer is so similar to its cinematic prototype, since it was implied that the latter was built using stealth technology.
At the beginning of this week, according to the AR agency, the destroyer, accompanied by tugs, left Fort Popham and went to the Atlantic Ocean, where it will be tested. The US Navy is looking forward to the Zamwalt and two more ships of this class, which are now at the shipyards. The destroyer Zamvolt is a ship of the XXI century. It has a completely new motor with full electric propulsion. Electricity is generated on board.
The largest destroyer in the history of the United States Navy USS Zumwalt
AP / TASS
Zamvolt is armed with 20 Mk-57 missile launchers, two long-range 155mm cannons and 30mm anti-aircraft guns. To protect against radars, the hull and superstructure of the destroyer are “dressed” in a 3-cm “shirt” made of radio-absorbing materials. It is she who makes him "the hero of the film." To match all weapons and appearance and the price of "Zamvolt". It costs at least $ 4.4 billion.
On the sea and on land
The Pentagon intends to scare Russia and China, of course, not only with Zamvolt. There are no reports of this in the American media during the day with fire, but in Syria and Iraq, the US Department of Defense is testing new exotic weapons systems.
US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Paul Selva, told reporters the other day, the Washington Post writes.
It looks like the Pentagon has decided to take full advantage of America's high-tech advantage. It is on them that the stake is being placed in the correspondence arms race with Russia and China. The new weapons systems are reminiscent of the weapons discussed in Reagan's Star Wars program. only adjusted for the three decades that have passed since then, and numerous scientific advances and discoveries.
The Pentagon announced the system of innovative projects in November 2014, but until the beginning of this year, all the details of the program were kept in the strictest confidence. The Pentagon calls high-tech weapons systems a "third compensation strategy."
The first compensation was the creation of tactical nuclear weapons, the second - high-precision conventional weapons systems. The third compensation involves the development of weapons systems for the 21st century, based on robots and artificial intelligence.
The Pentagon's 2017 budget is heavily invested in a third compensation strategy. $ 3 billion allocated for the development of programs against the actions of a potential adversary; 3 billion - for weapons systems that unite people and machines (robots); 1.7 billion for the development of cyber and electronic systems using artificial intelligence. Half a billion are dedicated to testing new weapons.
At a press conference, Robert Work showed slides of one of the newest weapons systems - the Perdix microdron, the size of which does not exceed 30 cm. In his opinion, these "babies" are the future of military operations in the coming century. That such actions will take place, the general from the presidential administration, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, obviously has no doubts.
To this we can add that as "Expert Online" wrote on February 5, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter named Russia among the "five main challenges to America's security", along with China, North Korea, Iran (by that time already exempted from international sanctions) and IG (banned in Russia). Thus, there is no need to doubt who the new weapon is directed against and to whom the "third compensation" is intended.
By the way, Russia has something to answer to this. "We have developed several types of radio-absorbing materials with high characteristics in the required ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum," Nikolai Fedonyuk, head of the laboratory at the Krylov State Scientific Center, told TASS on the eve of the use of new composite materials in the designs of Russian corvettes of projects 20380 and 20385, frigates of project 22350, which should ensure their stealth. - One of these designs is based on the principle of introducing electrically conductive layers into the corrugated middle layer of the skin panel, which allows providing the necessary parameters of the effective scattering surface of the ship, "- explained the designer.
