Navy Massively Leveling-Up AN/SPY-6 Radars to Detect Incoming Missiles and Fighter Jets

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By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

Incoming anti-ship cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and even enemy fighter jets closing in on a carrier strike groups, will all be detected with much greater image fidelity and much longer ranges due to the US Navy’s fleet-wide integration of a new, highly-sensitive family of radar systems called the AN/SPY-6. 

AN/SPY-6 Radars

Using a cutting edge application of a high density throughput material called Gallium Nitride, Raytheon innovators have engineered a group of scalable, interconnected threat detection ship radar systems able to see objects half-the size and twice as far as existing radar can. 

Navy weapons developers have characterized the SPY6 family of radars as being 35-times more sensitive than the system it is replacing. The SPY-6 family moves beyond existing AN/SPY-1 ship-integrated radar systems and, according to an interesting essay in “Microwave Journal”…”handles 30 times more targets and has 30-times greater sensitivity than the SPY-1D(V).” (“Radar and Phased Array Breakthroughs,” Eli Booker)

The longest range variant, the AN/SPY-6 (V)1, is built to detect incoming ballistic missiles arriving from beyond the horizon. The (V)1s are now being built into new Flight III DDG 51 destroyers. Building upon this, the Navy is now networking its entire fleet with the systems with various kinds of SPY-6 radars…. Amphibs, Carriers, the new Frigates and more.

“There is a lot of focus on the next generation SPY 6 radar that is going on every single platform you can name in the Navy,” Capt. Jason Hall, Sensors Program Manager, Naval Sea Systems Command, said to an audience at the 2022 Surface Navy Association Symposium.