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Stormy Seas for Stealth Destroyer

One of the biggest arguments the Navy makes for its new, $4.7 billion destroyer is that the ship is stealthy. The DDG-1000’s smoothed-out angles make the 600-foot, 14,500-ton behemoth look like a tiny fishing boat to radars. Its unconventional, almost inverse-shaped "tumblehome" hull slices through water, leaving almost no wake. But those same innovations have […]

One of the biggest arguments the Navy makes for its new, $4.7 billion destroyer is that the ship is stealthy. The DDG-1000's smoothed-out angles make the 600-foot, 14,500-ton behemoth look like a tiny fishing boat to radars. Its unconventional, almost inverse-shaped "tumblehome" hull slices through water, leaving almost no wake.

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But those same innovations have made the destroyer unstable, according to eight current and former officers, naval engineers and architects and naval analysts interviewed by Defense News. "Given just the right conditions, some say, it could even roll over."

*One former flag officer, asked about DDG-1000, responded by putting out his hand palm down, then flipping it over.
“You mean this?” he asked.*Ken Brower, a civilian naval architect with decades of naval experience was even more blunt: “It will capsize in a following sea at the wrong speed if a wave at an appropriate wavelength hits it at an appropriate angle.”

In videos obtained by Defense News, a model DDG-1000 in semi-rough seas "pitches, taking water over the bow, and the stern rises clear to the surface." The flight deck on a 30-foot, 1/20th version tips dangerous during turns, almost flooding the flight deck. God help the helicopter pilots on board, if the full-sized ship acts this way. On the record, Navy officials expressed all the confidence in the world about the DDG-1000's tumblehome hull. But one senior surface warfare officer noted "the somewhat dismal history of tumblehome ships."

The shape was popular among French naval designers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and a number of
French and Russian battleships — short and fat, without any wave-piercing characteristics — were put into service. But several
Russian battleships sank after being damaged by gunfire from Japanese ships in 1904 at the Battle of Tsushima, and a French battleship sank in 90 seconds after hitting a mine in World War I. All sank with serious loss of life. Both the French and Russians eventually dropped the hull form.