An Alternative Comparison of DDG 2 to DDG 51 Costs

The fact that there has been a 123% real cost growth between cost comparison of a DDG 2 guided missile destroyer ship to a DDG 51 Flight IIA class ship has received a great deal of publicity in presentations by senior officers and in an independent RAND analysis of shipbuilding costs. The basis of this comparison is a unit‐to‐unit analysis which compares unfavorably to a real cost growth of automobiles over the same time. However, a DDG 51 displaces twice as much as a DDG 2. If one normalizes the destroyers to a cost per ton basis, the majority of the real cost growth goes away and it is closer to the commercial items real cost growth. In an appendix, a series of tables compares the features of a DDG 2 with those of DDG 51.