Characteristics
The Arleigh Burke class is among the largest destroyers built in the United States. Only the Spruance and Kidd classes were longer (563 ft), the lead ship of the class, USS Arleigh Burke "was the most powerful surface combatant ever put to sea." The Burke class are multi-mission ships with a "combination of... an advanced anti-submarine warfare system, land attack cruise missiles, ship-to-ship missiles, and advanced anti-aircraft missiles," The larger Ticonderoga class ships were constructed on Spruance class hullforms, but are designated as cruisers due to their radically different mission and weapons systems. The Burke class on the other hand were designed with a new, large, water-plane area-hull form characterized by a wide flaring which significantly improves sea-keeping ability. The hull form is designed to permit high speed in high sea states.
The Arleigh Burke's designers incorporated lessons learned from the Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruisers, with the Arleigh Burke class, the US Navy also returned to all-steel construction. An earlier generation had combined a steel hull with an innovative superstructure made of lighter aluminum to reduce topweight, but the lighter metal proved vulnerable to cracking. Aluminum is also less fire-resistant than steel. A 1975 fire aboard USS Belknap gutted her aluminum superstructure. Battle damage to Royal Navy ships exacerbated by their aluminum superstructures during the 1982 Falklands War supported the decision to use steel. Another lesson from the Falkland war led the navy to protect the ship's vital spaces with double-spaced steel armor (creating a buffer for modern rockets), and kevlar spall liners.
The Ticonderoga class cruisers were deemed too expensive to continue building and too difficult to further upgrade. The angled rather than traditional vertical surfaces and the tripod mainmast of the Arleigh Burke design are stealth techniques, which make the ship more difficult to detect, in particular by anti-ship missiles.
A Collective Protection System makes the Arleigh Burke class the first U.S. warships designed with an air-filtration system against nuclear, biological and chemical warfare.
The class' Aegis radar differs from a traditional rotating radar that mechanically rotates 360 degrees for each "sweep" scan of the airspace which allows continual tracking of targets. The system's computer control also allows centralization of the previously separate tracking and targeting functions. The system is also resistant to electronic counter-measures. Their standalone Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers give them an anti-ship capability with a range in excess of 64 nm. " The 5"/54 caliber Mark 45 gun, in conjunction with the Mark 34 Gun Weapon System, is an anti-ship weapon which can also be used for close-in air contacts or to support forces ashore with Naval Gun-Fire Support (NGF), with a range of up to 20 miles and capable of firing 20 rounds per minute." The class' Sparrow missile provide point defense against missiles and aircraft while the Standard Missile provides area anti-aircraft defense, additionally the ship has an electronics warfare suite that provides passive detection and decoy countermeasures.
The class' Light airborne multipurpose system, or LAMPS helicopter system improves the ship's capabilities against submarines and surface ships, a helicopter able to serve as a platform to monitor submarines and surface ships, and launch torpedoes and missiles against them, as well as being able to support ground assaults with machine guns and Hellfire anti-armor guided missiles. The helicopters also serve in a utility role, able to perform ship replenishment, search and rescue, medical evacuation, communications relay, and naval gunfire spotting and controlling.
Arleigh Burke destroyers have many combat systems. Burkes have the Navy's latest anti-submarine combat system with active sonar, a towed sonar array, and anti-submarine rockets. They support strategic land strikes with their VLS launched Tomahawks.
So vital has the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMD) role of the class become that all ships of the class are being updated with BMD capability. Burke production is being restarted in place of additional Zumwalt class destroyers.
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