Any idea what is behind the latest delay? It sure seems that we've forgotten how to design ships.
Mix of several things, mostly Congress and lack of resources.
Going back to the late 2000s, the Navy was marketing both Zumwalt and CG(X) as a similar product, sharing common machinery, electronics, hull, powerplant, etc. So when Congress learned how much the Zumwalt program had ballooned in price (mostly due to Congressional mismanagement and reduced hull orders), they took this to mean CG(X) would suffer from the same issues the Zumwalt did, so they killed that around 2009 or so.
That left an obvious hole in the fleet though, the Ticos still needed to be replaced by the end of the 2010s. Designing a new hull would take too long (and Congress wouldn't allow it either), and the clock was ticking to get something to the yards quickly. The 2009 Radar/Hull Study examined 2 options for Tico replacement, a heavily modified Burke, or an AAW Zumwalt. Both options had several glaring issues, the Burke would need virtually a complete powerplant redesign to fit AMDR, and the Zumwalt would need years worth of programming work to either combine AEGIS with TSCE or remove TSCE entirely.
The Navy ultimately chose the heavily modernized Burke option, thinking it would be less risky and cheaper, but they seem to have underestimated just how extensive those changes would be. An AAW Zumwalt would also cause oddities in construction schedules, that would require retooling the yards. Flight III design took years, granted it was relatively on budget, but the design is... less than ideal in several metrics (namely the lack of SWAPC margin).
With the Flight III design underway, the Navy started looking at a clean-sheet design around 2014. This came in the form of the Future Surface Combatant (FSC) and Large Surface Combatant (LSC) programs. The issue though was that with the sudden change in policy towards fighting China, the Navy didn't really know what it wanted for a future design. That began dozens of different studies to first determine how to fight China, then the fleet architecture, then the future threats, then the future technologies, then the best ways to implement said technologies, etc. It seems only around 2019 or so did this work finish, and preliminary DDG(X) work could begin. I believe they said that the preliminary sketch work was just finished a few months ago.
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