The Navy’s newest shipboard radar has spotted targets older radars cannot during two recent tests, according to the Program Executive Officer for Integrated Warfare Systems. Rear Adm. Seiko Okano told Defense News in a December interview the Navy learned a lot from these major test events — the first-ever at-sea live fire test in September and an air raid test event in December. The Raytheon-made AN/SPY-6 radar performed as expected. Mike Mills, Raytheon’s senior director of naval radar programs, said Jack Lucas will in the coming weeks sail to Hawaii, where it will continue testing its new radar ahead of a planned August declaration of initial operational capability. Okano noted the radar had only seen about 30 days of at-sea testing at the time of the interview.
Informing a family of systems, SPY-6 is a family of radars. The Flight III destroyers were designed around having the SPY-6(V)1 air and missile defense radar, which is the largest and most capable radar of the family. Eventually, the Flight IIA ships will receive both the radar and the electronic warfare package in the same two-year yard period, DDG Mod 2.0 program manager Capt. Tim Moore said in a presentation at the Surface Navy Association’s annual conference in January. Mills said the lessons learned on Jack Lucas — including the Navy and Raytheon’s efforts to fine-tune the radar and tweak its software — will apply to the other variants. Navy SPY-6 program manager Capt. Jesse Mink said in a separate presentation at the conference that “the idea is, we continue to learn every time a ship goes to sea, every test that occurs — maybe it’s not on the same ship class, maybe it’s not the same version, but that code will be reused so that we don’t have to test it again.”
On the production side, Okano said Raytheon’s heavily automated production facility is churning out radars, such that “we have them now stacked up in warehouses.”
Mills said the company has nearly finished the work awarded in the first low-rate initial production contract signed in 2017. In 2022 and 2023, the Navy awarded Raytheon hardware production and sustainment contract options — essentially a full-rate production contract, but not formally called that until the radar reaches initial operational capability, Mills said. He said he expects the next in the coming months and then a final option in March 2025, ahead of an early 2026 full-rate production contract to allow for continuous production.
