Dave Amaral, of Somerset, a senior software engineer, and Dave Thomas, of North Kingstown, a senior system engineer, monitor air and sea traffic around the destroyer in a simulation drill off the coast of North Carolina.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PORTSMOUTH — It is hard to miss the shipbuilding at Electric Boat’s Quonset yard, where, in clouds of sparks, welders piece together the gargantuan hulls of nuclear submarines.

But the Virginia-class subs being assembled at that North Kingstown facility are not the only Navy vessels born in Rhode Island.

In an office building in Portsmouth, Raytheon Co. has been quietly designing the next generation of destroyer — a $3.3-billion missile ship designed to give the Navy shoreline “dominance.”

The DDG-1000 has been in development since the early 1990s, when Navy planners began studying new designs for a land-attack ship to replace the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class.

Its mission has since broadened to accommodate a range of deployments, from accompanying aircraft-carrier groups to providing coastal patrol. Cruising at 30 knots, the new destroyer will be armed with 80 Tomahawk cruise missiles and two 155-millimeter guns, and will incorporate a new hull design that makes less noise and more effectively eludes radar. The destroyer will have triple the current level of naval surface fire coverage.

It is a wide mandate, and it has threatened to undermine another of the Navy’s main objectives — cutting operating costs.

That’s where Raytheon comes in. Although the new ship is not cheap, engineers in Portsmouth have designed a futuristic control room that the company says will help to halve the crew needed to operate the destroyer.

“We just can’t afford crews that are 300 people anymore,” Daniel L. Smith, a Raytheon vice president, said.

The new destroyer — named the Zumwalt class for former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo R. “Bud” Zumwalt Jr. — will operate with 142 sailors. The Arleigh Burke class, commissioned in 1991, relies on a crew of more than 270.

To cut down on personnel for the Zumwalt, Raytheon engineers attempted to bring together surveillance and weapons systems that are typically operated from separate stations.

The result is demonstrated inside Raytheon’s Portsmouth complex, in a room built to resemble the Zumwalt’s deck. There, Raytheon software engineers write code for programs that one day will allow a destroyer’s air-defense coordinator to target enemy aircraft or intercept a cruise missile from a single station.

Navy personnel have regularly visited the facility to test the programs, which also permit centralized monitoring of the condition of the entire ship, its weapons inventory and the “tactical situation,” displayed on a map that tracks threatening air and sea traffic.

“The core software allows the five sensors to be used as one or, when necessary, five individual sensors with five different missions,” according to company literature.

At the click of a computer mouse, a land-attack warfare coordinator on the Zumwalt will be able to prepare a barrage of naval artillery fire. As a virtual gun fires on screen, land targets explode in advance of a ground invasion by Marines or soldiers. In the future, Raytheon says, the program will incorporate live video of the actual weapons firing.

“The design is moving along quite quickly,” Michael R. Tollefson, a senior principal engineer at Raytheon, said. “This is an area where the ship has made tremendous strides.”

Raytheon is not building the Zumwalt alone. In 2002, the Navy awarded the first major contract for the project to a team led by Northrop Grumman Corp. Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Corp. will build the ship, which is 600 feet long and has a displacement of 14,564 tons. (The Arleigh Burke class is 505 feet long with a displacement of 8,886 tons.)

In 2005, the Pentagon assigned Raytheon a key role, accepting its bid for a $3-billion contract as mission systems integrator. That gave the company responsibility to blend a medley of new technologies built by dozens of companies across the country. It beat out Lockheed Martin, the giant defense contractor that had served as combat system integrator for the Arleigh Burke class.

“That win heralded the arrival of Raytheon as a world-class systems integrator,” said Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia think tank. “I had viewed Raytheon as an also-ran, rather than a leading player. It is now beginning to outshine many of its former competitors.”

Raytheon says the Zumwalt will employ detection and tracking systems that identify targets in day or night and in the type of “low contrast” environments encountered offshore. “It’s really the most challenging type of technology work there is,” Thompson said. “You are talking about an operating environment in which the stresses are greater than anything anyone would ever encounter in the commercial world.”

So far, the Navy has ordered only two Zumwalt-class destroyers, scheduled for delivery around 2013; supporters of the program had expected at least 32 to be built. Cost-cutting measures have also prompted a scaling back of some of the ship’s weapons systems.

But the Navy, which tomorrow is releasing its budget for the 2009 fiscal year, has high hopes for the Zumwalt.

The ship “provides a broad range of capabilities that are vital both to supporting the global war on terror and to fighting and winning major combat operations,” Lt. Clay Doss, a Navy spokesman, said. “The Navy fully supports the DDG-1000 program.”

Destroyers have played a key role since the early 20th century, when navies sought a speedy and maneuverable craft to protect large ships that were being targeted by small but deadly torpedo boats. The U.S. Navy commissioned its first destroyer in 1902, after seeing the new type of ship in action during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

In World War I, Navy destroyers protected convoys of American ships against German U-boat submarines that had been blocking supplies from reaching England. During World War II, destroyers again did battle with German submarines, while also rescuing downed pilots and aiding in landings in Europe, North Africa and Italy by warding off enemy aircraft and blasting enemy positions on land.

“Destroyers have played a leading role in our nation’s defense,” said John C. Meyer, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport and a former Navy captain who commanded a destroyer. “It’s the nimble, agile, fast, hard-hitting multi-mission platform.”

In recent years, Meyer said, destroyers have fired Tomahawk missiles at Iraqi forces during the first Gulf War and later searched ships for illicit Iraqi oil shipments. In the Horn of Africa, destroyers regularly battle pirates. There are 52 destroyers in the Navy’s fleet, and 10 more Arleigh Burke class ships are planned.

Given Raytheon’s involvement, the Zumwalt class has now linked the future of the destroyer to Rhode Island’s economic health. At least 470 Raytheon employees, including 450 engineers, have been assigned to the destroyer program.

Raytheon has long played an important role in the state’s defense sector. Its first building in Portsmouth opened in 1959, creating 500 jobs. By the late 1980s, employment had reached 3,200.

The company, based in Waltham, Mass., began to shed jobs after the Cold War ended. By the mid-1990s, fewer than 1,000 people reported for work at the Portsmouth complex.

But that trend shifted later in the decade, after Raytheon acquired the defense units of Texas Instruments, E-Systems and Hughes Aircraft, according to Nicholas L. Garrison, a company spokesman. Many employees from those companies ended up in Portsmouth, including 450 from a single Hughes facility.

By 2002, Raytheon’s Rhode Island work force had reached 1,475. It is now at 1,626, making it the state’s 21st biggest employer, larger than toymaker Hasbro Inc. and Johnson & Wales University. The company buys products or services from 86 small business in the state.

Uphinder S. Dhinsa, a Raytheon vice president, sits on the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council, made up of the state’s political, business and academic elite. And the company has tested its technology during Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency exercises.

In an otherwise grim State of the State address on Jan. 22, Governor Carcieri included Raytheon in a list of six local companies that have added jobs despite a national economic slump.

Worldwide, Raytheon has 73,000 employees and generated $21.3 billion in sales in 2007. The Portsmouth complex — part of Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems division, headquartered in Tewksbury, Mass. — employs 875 engineers, the type of high-wage job the state has struggled to create in recent years. The 16,000 defense jobs in Rhode Island pay, on average, $66,000 a year.

“The defense industry is one of the brightest stars and Raytheon is a key player within that sector,” Saul Kaplan, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, said. “As Raytheon continues its success, Rhode Island gets its fair share of that success.”

bgedan@projo.com