($5.3 billion dollar) DDG 1000 could get new radar

[unhappycamper]

DDG 1000 could get new radar
By Christopher P. Cavas - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Jun 2, 2010 21:23:33 EDT

The Pentagon’s decisions to eliminate half of a new radar system for the U.S. Navy’s DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyers — and delay the first of the ships by a year — are not, as many surmised, a result of cost growth or poor program performance.

Instead, they are an effort to get a new, even more advanced and capable radar into the new ships.

The new radar is the Air Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), a system currently in the early stages of development. The Navy plans to fit the radar, which will be designed from the start to handle ballistic missile defense, into new Flight III versions of its venerable DDG 51-class destroyer. The first Flight III ship is to be ordered in 2016.

Now, the service seems to be holding a place for the AMDR in its advanced DDG 1000 ships which, ironically, were cut back because the service said the design had too little missile defense capability.

The decision to remove the SPY-4 Volume Search Radar (VSR) from the DDG 1000’s dual-band radar (DBR) was announced June 2 by Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter at a news conference to discuss Nunn-McCurdy cost breaches. Carter also announced the ship’s service introduction would be delayed from 2015 to 2016.