If it were just a matter of VLS cells, sure, and it would help overall numbers. But the fleet would still lose the command facilities and associated spaces the CGs have, the gigantic Ship's Mission Centers on the 3 Zs will be the only decent command facilities not on a carrier or LCC. Whole lotta people, even many who should know better, try to handwave away the problems of cramming Alpha Whiskey, or a SAG command staff, into a Burke's CIC for the long term. I'd also point out that command hulls should have additional survivability, which an overloaded DDG-51 hull would not.
The first 5 Ticonderoga class were built without VLS because Mk41 wasn't ready in 1980 and the Navy didn't want to wait until it was. The plan to re-arm these 5 hulls with VLS during a major refit ran into a lot of cost issues, and keeping them as-was would mean keeping the MK26 supply chain and the production line for Non-VLS Standards going. The Gordon England-Donald Rumsfeld-era Navy decided they'd rather retire the non-VLS combatants way ahead of time to save money than pay for a comprehensive refit plan. To make matters worse, right around 2003 they suddenly fell in love with SINKEXing modern combatants. There's plenty of good reasons to sink a recent ship once in awhile, but it became something of a fetish for the mid-to-late 2000s navy. Valley Forge and twenty five Spruance class were sunk in half a decade.
Not all that easily, the Burke class is well designed as a multi-mission combatant but doesn't have the designed-in flexibility or reconfigurable spaces that some more modern concepts have. A "Command" version needs additional command space that doesn't really fit anywhere easily, which is why the Japanese and Korean command destroyers descended from the Burke both are larger (longer, wider, taller) and have additional decks.
Is there a reason we can't use the bigger Japanese and Korean designs as the base for the Flight IV Burkes instead of the current hulls? That should go part way into solving the problem.
IIRC they're built to commercial standards, not military.
It comes up somewhat regularly. The short version is, the cost of American-izing them would essentially run the same as taking a Flight III and inflating it to the same size and would produce largely the same end product. While there's appeal to that idea, the resulting destroyers would be so distinct from the existing Burke variants as to have an impact on the budget and logistics similar to that of having an entirely new class of ship, but without the future-proofing baked into an all-new ship.
I was being sarcastic. Most of them have been sunk.
I particularly liked the old CGNs.
