Navy Surges Ahead Building New High-Tech DDG 51 Flight III Destroyers

Video Above: Modernized DDG(X) Destroyer Warship Designed to Fight into 2060s and Beyond

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

Several years ago the Navy put as many as 10 DDG 51 Flight III Destroyers on contract to help catapult the service into a new dimension of maritime attack capability, as the greatly upgraded ships have improved weapons, better computing and a much longer-range, far more sensitive radar system.

Flight III Destroyers

The Flight III destroyers, in development now for many years, are engineered to ensure the US Navy fleet stays in front of the competition as the world threat equation evolves and China continues to quickly build a new fleet of high-tech Type 055 semi-stealthy destroyers.

The Navy recently laid the keel for the future USS Jeremiah Denton (DDG 129), the latest Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyer to surge into a new phase of production. While the Navy is currently experimenting with concepts for its next-generation DDG X destroyer, the Flight III destroyers are intended to sail for decades into the future, given the sophistication of the weapons and technology now being built into the ships. In fact, early conceptual thinking regarding the new DDG X is that its technological systems, weapons and radar will likely be based upon those now integrating into the Flight iii, a plan which offers a window into Navy thinking regarding how sophisticated Flight III technologies are.

The cornerstone or foundation of the Flight III upgrade is the addition of a paradigm-changing AN/SPY-6 (V)1 Air and Missile Defense Radar system. This radar is reported by Navy and Raytheon developers to be 30-times more sensitive than its predecessor and help ship commanders detect enemy objects and threats half the size and twice the distance as previous radars can. This is quite a leap forward, given that the ranges of enemy weapons and sensors, coupled with multi-domain connectivity and networking, have dramatically increased the threat equation for surface warships.

SPY-6

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)