The U.S. Navy accepted delivery of the future USS Ted Stevens, designated DDG 128, on December 29, 2025, adding another Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer to a growing fleet that looks nearly identical to its predecessors on the waterline. What changes is what happens when its sensors come online: the ship’s new AN/SPY-6(V)1 Air and Missile Defense Radar brings a major jump in detection and tracking capacity, and integrating it required redesigned electrical power and cooling infrastructure. The AN/SPY-6(V)1 is the central upgrade that defines Flight III, built to strengthen air and missile defense against evolving threats.
Same Hull, Different Ship Inside
From a distance, a Flight III destroyer is hard to distinguish from the dozens of Arleigh Burke-class warships that have served since the early 1990s. The Navy deliberately kept the proven DDG-51 hullform, avoiding the cost and risk of designing a new ship class from scratch. The first Flight III destroyer, Jack H. Lucas (DDG 125), embodies that philosophy: externally familiar, internally transformed. Its upgrades are centered on the AN/SPY-6(V)1 radar, but fitting that system into an existing hull demanded significant changes to electrical power generation, chilled-water capacity, and internal volume allocations to support the radar’s power-hungry and heat-intensive arrays.
That tradeoff is the central tension of the Flight III program. Rather than build a clean-sheet warship, as the Navy attempted with the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class, the service chose to push a familiar design to its engineering limits. The Zumwalt’s distinctive tumblehome hull was so stealthy that the ship required radar reflectors so other vessels could reliably see it, an illustration of how far that design departed from convention. That leap also came with a price tag and complexity that capped the class at three hulls. Flight III takes the opposite approach: keep the silhouette ordinary and proven, and pour the investment into what the radar can see and track, rather than what the ship looks like to others’ sensors.
What AN/SPY-6(V)1 Actually Does Differently
The AN/SPY-6(V)1, formally known as the Air and Missile Defense Radar, was built to close gaps in integrated air and missile defense, ballistic missile defense, and conventional air defense that the older AN/SPY-1 system could not fully address against modern threats. According to the Navy’s official fact file, the Flight III configuration mounts four fixed arrays, each made up of 37 Radar Modular Assemblies, or RMAs. These RMAs are self-contained radar “bricks” with their own transmit/receive electronics, power, and cooling interfaces, allowing engineers to scale the radar’s aperture and sensitivity by adding or subtracting modules without redesigning the core system architecture.
This modularity matters beyond the Flight III program. The Navy plans variants of the SPY-6 family to backfit onto earlier Flight IIA destroyers, replacing legacy SPY-1 arrays with a common hardware and software baseline. If those upgrades proceed as envisioned, much of the surface combatant fleet will share a single radar architecture, simplifying logistics, technician training, and software development. In operational terms, a standardized sensor suite makes it easier to stitch together track data from multiple ships into a coherent picture, which is crucial when engaging ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and potentially hypersonic weapons that can stress older radars’ detection and tracking limits.
A Half-Billion-Dollar Bet on Production Scale
Scaling the AN/SPY-6(V) program requires sustained industrial investment, and a recent contract award signals the Pentagon’s commitment to that scale. The Department of Defense awarded Raytheon Missiles and Defense more than $536 million under contract N00024-25-C-5501 for AN/SPY-6(V) integration and production support. The base period runs through May 2026, with options that could extend work to May 2030, covering tasks such as hardware production, integration engineering, and lifecycle support. By structuring the deal as a multi-year effort with option years, the Navy signals to industry that SPY-6 is not a boutique system but a long-term production line that will equip multiple ship classes.
Germany’s inclusion in the contract through foreign military sales indicates the radar program is not being treated as purely domestic. Embedding an allied customer’s procurement into the same contract vehicle as U.S. production can create shared incentives to maintain throughput and cost discipline, because delays or overruns could affect both customers. If German surface combatants ultimately field SPY-6 variants, it could improve interoperability during combined air and missile defense operations by aligning sensor architectures. The contract’s option window through 2030 indicates the work could continue as more Flight III hulls are delivered and related upgrades progress.
DDG 128 Delivery Tests the Production Pipeline
The delivery of the future USS Ted Stevens is a concrete marker that the Flight III production line is producing finished warships, not just drawings and long-lead components. According to Naval Sea Systems Command, acceptance followed a sequence of builder’s and acceptance trials that evaluated propulsion, combat systems performance, communications, and navigation, along with basic seaworthiness. Passing those tests with the new radar and upgraded power and cooling systems integrated is an important proof point for the Flight III design, which must demonstrate that the added electrical and thermal loads can be managed in operational conditions, not just in modeling and shore-based testing.
The timeline for DDG 128’s completion will be closely watched as a benchmark for whether the Flight III production line can sustain a steady delivery tempo as more ships integrate SPY-6 and its supporting power and cooling upgrades. Each destroyer that reaches delivery after trials and acceptance provides another data point on how smoothly shipyards are incorporating the new configuration.
From Individual Ships to a Networked Defense
Individually, a Flight III destroyer with AN/SPY-6(V)1 is a more capable air and missile defense platform than its predecessors, but the Navy’s long-term bet is on what happens when dozens of such ships operate as a networked sensor grid. According to the Navy’s fact file, SPY-6 is designed to improve air and missile defense performance through greater sensitivity and discrimination compared with legacy radar, supporting missions including integrated air and missile defense and ballistic missile defense. When multiple radars of this type share data over secure links, each ship can benefit from the others’ vantage points, enabling earlier warning, better-quality tracks, and more efficient use of interceptors and electronic warfare resources across a task force.
The modular radar family also creates a path to extend similar sensing capabilities beyond destroyers, potentially onto amphibious ships, carriers, or even unmanned surface vessels in tailored configurations. Because the underlying RMAs and software are common, improvements to signal processing or threat libraries developed for one platform can, in principle, be rolled out across the fleet with fewer bespoke modifications. For allies such as Germany, participation in the SPY-6 ecosystem offers a way to plug into this broader architecture, sharing and receiving high-fidelity tracks during combined operations rather than relying solely on national sensors. In that sense, the Flight III program and the Ted Stevens’ delivery are less about a single ship and more about constructing a distributed, multinational air and missile defense network at sea.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
