U.S. Touts ‘Batman’ Ship as Obama Courts Southeast Asian Leaders
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USS Zumwalt.
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U.S. officials are looking to superheroes in their quest to preserve Asia’s postwar security order in the face of an increasingly assertive China.
“If Batman had a ship, this’d be it,” Admiral Harry Harris, head of U.S. Pacific Command, told a crowd of Asia specialists in Washington last month as he pointed to a slide of a DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer, the U.S. Navy’s largest and stealthiest. “Everything that is new and cool that the United States is developing is going to the Asia Pacific.”