BALTIMORE — If Batman had a warship, it would be the USS Zumwalt.
That’s how Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, described the Navy’s largest and most sophisticated new destroyer, which comes with a price tag of at least $4.4 billion.
“As long as our president and you the American people have an insatiable appetite for security, then I have an insatiable appetite for the stuff to underwrite that security,” Harris said at the ship’s commissioning ceremony Saturday.
The 610-foot-long warship has an angular shape to minimize its radar signature. It looks like a much smaller vessel on radar.
With 147 officers and sailors, the Zumwalt’s crew is the smallest of any destroyer built since the 1930s, thanks to extensive automation. All sailors are cross-trained, and there’s more sharing of tasks on the Zumwalt. Sailors have staterooms, instead of bunk rooms with dozens of people in them.
“So when they wake up, they wake up to only one or two alarm clocks, not four, not 50,” said Capt. James Kirk, commanding officer of the Zumwalt.