Attack Lasers, EW, New Missiles & Advanced Radar Delivered to US Navy on Flight III DDG 51 Destroyers

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

Incinerating enemy drones and fighter jets with laser weapons, tracking and destroying incoming anti-ship and ballistic missiles with ship-launched interceptors, jamming enemy radar, targeting and communications with next-generation EW and launching paradigm-changing long-range, over-the-horizon precision weapons … are just a few of the missions intended for the now arriving US Navy Arleigh Burke-class DDG 51 Flight III Destroyers. 

The Navy’s first Flight III DDG 51 Destroyer, the USS Jack Lucas (DDG 125), has been commissioned. Long in development, the new ship is the first in a class of cutting edge new destroyers armed with laser weapons, paradigm-changing, long-range high-fidelity sensors and radar, over-the-horizon ship-fired weapons and new-generations of on-board electricity, cooling and power storage. 

The vision for these warships, which has included the integration of an entire sphere of new weapons, computing, command and control and sensing, aligns with strategic thinking outlined by Navy leaders planning for a more distributed, networked and highly-lethal kind of maritime warfare.  The intent is to not only add new generations of warfighting technologies but accelerate their development because, as former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday explained it .. “speed matters.” 

“Ubiquitous and persistent sensors, advanced battle networks, and weapons of increasing range and speed have driven us to a more dispersed type of fight …. keeping ahead of our competitors requires us to rapidly field state-of-the art systems. Speed matters,” former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday writes in the service’s 2022 CNO NAVPLAN.

There is little question that the “speed” element of this is, in large measure, intended to keep pace with or stay in front of the People’s Liberation Army – Navy’s explosive naval expansion. 

To accomplish this, Navy weapons developers have for years been focusing on identifying an optimal balance between integrating upgradeable new weapons quickly and ensuring the best available technologies are built into the ship.  This optimal blend is in large measure pursued through a “modular” or “open architecture” strategy through which weapons developers use common IP Protocol standards, interfaces and computing systems to enable a persistently “upgradeable” technical infrastructure. With this approach, software upgrades, for example, can massively improve ship radar, weapons guidance, computing and key technologies such as lasers, EW and AI-enabled command and control. Software upgrades to both the SM-3 with Block IIA and the SM-6, for example, have massive expanded combat capabilities and performance; the larger SM-3 Block IIA has a longer range and improved guidance and discrimination to track and destroy a wider range of targets and the SM-6 has had software upgrades to accommodate a dual-mode seeker enabling the weapon to better adjust course in flight to hit moving targets. 

The largest and arguably most significant element of the Navy’s Block III DDG 51 upgrade includes the addition of a breakthrough family of radar systems called AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar.  Multiple variants of the SPY-6 radars, with (V)1 being the strongest and most sensitive, are arming Navy warships with the ability to “see” and “detect” or destroy targets nearly half the size and twice the range of previous radar systems.