The Navy will not have a final configuration for the next version of the Arleigh Burke-class (DDG-51) destroyers until a new integrated air and ballistic missile defense radar that is currently being competed with industry has been selected, the admiral in charge of the program said recently.

The Navy expects to decide on the Air Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) in fiscal 2013. It will be the most significant upgrade on the Flight III version of the ship. Lockheed Martin [LMT], Raytheon [RTN] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] are among the firms expected to submit final bids and have been working on the program under development contract since 2010. The Navy issued a draft request for proposals in April.

Rear Adm. David Lewis, head of the Navy’s program executive office (PEO) for ships, said he has been working through preliminary design changes on the Flight III destroyers that will be required to accommodate the new and more powerful AMDR, but a final design won’t be possible until he knows what the winning radar will look like.

“The key here is: What information do you have and if you don’t have it when are you going to get it?” Lewis said in an interview with Defense Daily last week. “In order to design the ship for Flight III I have to know what the radar looks like.”

AMDR is to replace the Lockheed Martin-built AN/SPY 1 that currently operates on DDG-51s. AMDR is intended to provide improved capability while also combining air-theatre defense missions with ballistic missile defense (BMD).

The Navy is seeking congressional approval for up to 10 Flight IIA DDG-51s under a multi-year contract, but plans to shift to the Flight III version around the seventh vessel scheduled for construction in 2016–if AMDR is ready. Lewis said if the AMDR program runs smoothly, he expects to issue an engineering change proposal for the DDG-51s in fiscal 2013 and settle on a final design by fiscal 2014 or 2015.

“At that point it will shift from a notional design to an actual design and sometime after that (AMDR) selection we will have a real radar built by a real company with real requirements … so we can then iterate the design one more time,” Lewis said.

If AMDR were to hit a snag, the Navy would simply proceed with building Flight IIA ships under the proposed multi-year and install AN/SPY 1 radars, Lewis said.

The ongoing design refinements his team has been working on for AMDR’s power, cooling and space needs have been based on information provided by the AMDR program under Integrated Warfare Systems (IWS) and through the defense contractors, Lewis said. In the meantime, his office has designed the Flight III version to the maximum impact AMDR could have on the ship “so it won’t ever get any worse than what we’ve designed for–it will always get better,” he said.

“We have made some very significant progress in reducing the impact or mitigating the impact in the ship design,” he added.