USS Lyndon B. Johnson was launched this December 2018 and will be commissioned in 2022.
Traditionally, warships are tailored to perform specific missions. But the cutting-edge
Zumwalt has been a ship in search of a mission, especially since procurement of hyper-expensive ammunition for its primary weapon system was canceled. Years and billions of dollars later, the Navy may finally have found one.
In the post-Cold War 1990s, the U.S Navy lacked peer competitors on the high seas, so it conceived its next-generation surface combatants for engaging coastal targets. As the Navy phased out its last battleship, it decided its next destroyer should mount long-range guns that could to provide more cost-efficient naval gunfire support than launching million-dollar Tomahawk cruise missiles.