Navy Finishing Design for New Guided Missile Destroyers

By Kris Osborn

Intended to accommodate emerging weapons such as lasers, rail guns and advanced radar able to detect attacking anti-ship cruise missiles from more than twice the distance, service officials said.

Navy officials with Naval Sea Systems Command tell Scout Warrior that design work is almost completed for the services’ Flight III DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyers – warships slated to enter service in the 2020s.

The new destroyers are engineered with advanced sensors, weapons, ship-defenses and radar technologies to keep pace with emerging threats and help the Navy maintain technological superiority over potential adversaries, Navy developers said.

“The DDG 51 Flight III design is currently 91% complete and on track to be 100% complete by the start of fabrication,” Colleen O’Rourke, NAVSEA spokeswoman, told Scout Warrior in a written statement.

A new, super-sensitive radar emerges as a distinguishing characteristic of Flight III destroyers, representing a technological advance beyond an existing fleet of DDG 51 Flight IIA destroyers.

The Navy has now placed it first three unit orders for a Raytheon-built AN/SPY-6(V) radar, a system reported by developers to be 35-times more powerful than existing ship-based radar systems; the technology is widely regarded as being able to detect objects twice as far away at one-half the size of current tracking radar.

“Preliminary design efforts are in progress and the development is on schedule for initial multi-element testing in summer of 2018,” O’Rourke added.