NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Navy is nearing a multi-year procurement deal for Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers that would take production out to fiscal 2022 and ramp production back up to three deliveries per year.

Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works [GD] are competing for the multi-year contract to build DDG-51s through fiscal 2023. A request for proposals was issued in February and the Navy expects those proposals in the next few weeks, according to DDG-51 Program Manager Capt. Casey Moton.

An Mk 41 VLS launches an SM-6 off the USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53). Photo: U.S. Navy.
An Mk 41 VLS launches an SM-6 off the USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53). Photo: U.S. Navy.

A contract award is due sometime this summer, he said at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference here. With that contract, the Navy will ramp up serial production of the ships and eventually build three per year for at least five years.

“If you look at the history of the program, we built three ships a year for quite a long time,” he said. “Before that, we were actually … building in some years four ships, five ships a year. … I’m confident in three. We’re confident in the material base. I’m confident that if the Navy wanted to go higher, there might be a list of things we need to go work, but we could go do that.”

In its fiscal 2018 budget request the Navy planned to build two DDG-51 per year. Beginning with the fiscal 2019 budget, that rate should climb to three per year through 2023, not including fiscal 2020, Moton said.

Building just two ships in fiscal 2020 was made to balance the Navy’s overall shipbuilding budget, Moton said.

“It gives us the potential to sort of have a year where we do a ramp-up of the build rate,” he said. “That being said, if we were to decide to add a ship, I’m confident we could execute that. But I think it was driven by overall Navy balance at the budget level.”

The Navy has 12 DDG-51 ships on contract, of which eight are under construction at both competing yards. Another four are under contract but have not begun construction, Moton said. Three ships have been delivered since the production restart in 2008. Two of those were built by Huntington Ingalls in Pascagoula, Miss. The other was built by Bath Iron Works in Maine.

Contracts also have been signed with both yards to build the new Flight III DDG-51s. The company plans to begin fabrication for that ship in May, Moton said.

DDG-125 will be the first Flight III ship built at HII and DDG-126 will be Bath’s first of that class. Both shipyards in December completed the 3D modeling that is “key to us for having a good, stable design baseline, cost-efficient construction,” Moton said.

Flight III upgrades include some structural changes to the ship’s hull and interior, more-powerful air-conditioning units to cool the new radar and Aegis systems, a switch from halon to water-mist firefighting systems and installation of a 21-inch-diameter variant of the SM-3 missile called the SM-3 Block IIA.

The most significant upgrade is integration of Raytheon’s [RTN] SPY-6 actively electronically scanned array (AESA) air and missile defense radar.

“The radar will bring significant improvements in integrated air and missile defense for the ship,” Moton said. “Along with that, we’ll have a major Aegis upgrade to the baseline 10 TI-16 hardware. … That’s really the principal warfighting capability that the ship brings.”