In September 1912, the General Board of the United States Navy asked the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) to develop plans for the next class of destroyers. The General Board asked for a design with four guns, six twin torpedo tubes, and twenty floating mines, that could travel at up to with steaming radius of . C&R came back with a design for a long, displacement, triple-screw "super-destroyer" requiring to make the design speed of . The C&R design was similar to, but larger than the unique British destroyer of 1907, and more than twice the displacement of the largest U.S. destroyers.