(Washington, D.C.) While the world takes notice of China’s visible and massive Naval expansion, the U.S. Navy has quietly been powering up its own fleet of new warships by surging along with construction of a new generation of high-tech, heavily armed DDG 51 Flight III Destroyers.
The Navy has now formally “launched” the first of its ultra-modernized, more capable “Flight III” DDG 51 variants, the soon to be USS Jack H. Lucas. The ship is a small, yet crucial element of a broader service warship upgrade and expansion which seeks to help the Navy pursue and sustain maritime warfare superiority.
20 U.S. Navy Destroyers in Construction
The U.S. Navy has as many as 20 new destroyers now in various stages of construction, an extremely significant, yet lesser known fact of great relevance to the future of maritime war. The number of destroyers now being built by the Navy is itself quite significant, yet of even greater significance, many of the emerging Navy Arleigh Burke class DDG-51 destroyers are new, far more capable Flight III DDG 51 configurations.
Flight III Destroyers: AN/SPY-6 Radar
The Flight IIIs destroyers integrate a new Aegis Radar Baseline 10 air-and-missile defense technology intended to integrate air and missile defense with ballistic missile defense into a single operational system.
The most defining element of the Flight IIIs is its new AN/SPY-6 radar, a new application which enables ship commanders to locate and discriminate multiple approaching threats at one time.
