The US Navy will place its first at-sea hypersonic missiles aboard one of the service’s three Zumwalt-class destroyers in four years (by 2025).
These will likely be hypersonic warheads on regular vertically launched missiles. Hypersonic warheads can go faster and can move around more than regular warheads. Hypersonic weapons go at 5 times the speed of sound or faster.
The hypersonics weapons will start on the destroyers and then on Block V Virginia-class submarines.
The Navy has studied using a variant of the all Multiple All-up-round Canisters (MAC) system – developed for the Ohio class, which put seven Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM) in the same space of a Trident-II D5 nuclear ballistic missile – to hold the larger C-HGBs.
The Navy is still looking at high energy lasers for defense but they still do not have a firm timetable.
SOURCE – USNI
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
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The Zumwalt was built for laser weapons and railguns. Both require ridiculous amounts of energy, meaning it needs a nuclear reactor.
You don't need a nuclear reactor to fire a hypersonic missile. I don't see why you couldn't fire them from a PT boat or even a large pontoon boat.
This seems like an excuse to keep the Zumwalt relevant.