The U.S. Navy has ordered one other $423 million in new ship radar methods from Raytheon Missiles & Protection, headquartered in Tucson, firm officers mentioned. A contract awarded earlier this might embrace as much as $3.16 billion in radars for brand spanking new ships over the following 5 years.
In March, the Navy ordered $651 million in SPY-6 radars, which embrace these to be put in on new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The primary possibility to increase the contract, introduced this week, consists of greater than $400 million extra for these methods.
Your entire “{hardware}, manufacturing and sustainment contract” may see the methods put in on as many as 31 ships over the following half-decade, together with smaller and rotating radars forn plane carriers, amphibious ships, frigates and older destroyers.
In keeping with Raytheon, the SPY-6 radars “can defend towards ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hostile plane and floor ships concurrently. They supply a number of benefits over legacy radars, together with considerably larger detection vary, elevated sensitivity and extra correct discrimination. Their scalable and modular radar arrays scale back value and sustainment wants, whereas assembly the mission necessities of seven courses of ships.”
“SPY-6 is the premiere floor naval radar on the earth, and contracts like this guarantee sailors throughout the fleet can be outfitted with the knowledge, monitoring and detection it supplies,” mentioned Kim Ernzen, president of Naval Energy on the Raytheon division. “SPY-6 radar arrays have already been delivered to a number of ships with set up ongoing.”
The radars will permit sailors to search out threats, together with hypersonic weapons, at larger distances, and to react sooner to them, the corporate mentioned.
“It is a huge enchancment over what the U.S. Navy presently has on it ships,” mentioned Ernzen. “It is like going from a pen mild to an enormous flashlight.”
In 2021, the Navy started putting in the primary SPY-6 radar on its new, high-tech Aegis Flight III, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Jack H. Lucas (DDG 125). Every SPY-6 radar for the DDG class ship consists of 4 arrays, an influence system, a cooling system, and a array computation and monitoring system.
Raytheon — now the world’s second-largest aerospace and protection firm, trailing solely Boeing — has about 13,000 staff in Tucson, with the Missiles & Protection division additionally having operations in different cities.