USS Pinckney has had the kind of year that usually earns a ship some quiet time at the pier. The destroyer left San Diego on November 25 of last year with a helicopter detachment on board, spent the first stretch of the cruise in the western Pacific, then got pulled into the Middle East, where the Navy says the crew carried out strikes in support of Operation Epic Fury and, during the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, forced 11 merchant ships to comply with the rules. She tied up back home on August 9 with more than 48,000 nautical miles on the log, which works out to about 55,000 regular miles.
Less than four weeks later, the Navy signed a $149.6 million contract to put her in a shipyard across the bay. And on October 22 it said what the money is for.
Pinckney is getting a new radar. And it’s the first copy of a version that Raytheon built specifically because the Navy’s older destroyers can’t take the one its newest destroyers carry. So the ship that spent nine months on a combat deployment now spends the next two years with the top of its superstructure taken apart.
So what’s being pulled out?
The SPY-1D(V), the big flat octagonal panels you see on the deckhouse of every Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, has been on Pinckney since the ship was commissioned in 2004. Twenty-two years is a long time for any electronics, and the Navy’s plan for the older ships in the class is to replace it with a radar called the SPY-6(V)4.
If you’ve read our piece on the destroyer the Navy rewired from 450 to 4,160 volts, you already know the family. Every SPY-6 is built out of two-foot cubes that Raytheon calls radar modular assemblies, and each cube is a complete little radar on its own. The ship’s radar is just a bunch of those cubes bolted together into four flat faces, one pointing in each direction, so the ship sees all the way around with nothing spinning.
The version on the Navy’s brand-new Flight III destroyers stacks 37 cubes into each face, 148 in total. Pinckney’s version stacks 24 per face, 96 in total. Same cube, same software, about a third less of it.
Raytheon rates the smaller radar as having “significantly enhanced range and sensitivity” compared to the SPY-1 it replaces, and that’s as specific as anyone gets. I can’t give you a detection range because neither Raytheon nor the Navy publishes one, and I’m not going to borrow the big-radar numbers for the small one.
Why does a 22-year-old ship get the smaller radar?
Because of the wiring. Which sounds like a dumb reason to shrink a radar until you look at what the Navy had to do to fit the full-size one.
The Flight III ships got a 4,160-volt electrical grid in place of the 450-volt grid on every earlier Burke, gas turbine generators that put out 4 megawatts each, and a bigger chilled-water plant to carry the heat away from the radar. The Navy’s own description of that ship calls it a new type of warship rather than an upgrade, and frankly, the electrical numbers back that up.
You don’t rewire a hull that’s already been at sea for two decades to that standard. Not for $149.6 million, anyway.
So the answer for the old ships is a radar built to live with what they’ve got. Raytheon says the (V)4 is “the only variant designed to backfit Flight IIA Destroyers,” and Pinckney is a Flight IIA, the version the Navy built from the turn of the century right up until the Flight III.
Now, one thing I can’t fully nail down. The Navy’s release says the new gear has “significant electrical and thermal needs” and that the yard is installing new air conditioning plants to meet them.
Raytheon, in a separate release, says the radar comes with “its dedicated power system.” Nobody has said whether Pinckney’s grid changes at all, and nobody has published what the (V)4 actually draws. The sensible reading is that the smaller radar was sized so the ship wouldn’t need a new grid, which is presumably the whole reason it’s smaller, but I can’t point you to a document that says so.
New air conditioners, basically
The other first on this ship is a lot less glamorous. The Navy calls this the first installation of both the (V)4 and its new High Efficiency Super-Capacity air conditioning plants, which the service has helpfully shortened to HESC.
If that sounds like a detail, it isn’t. A radar built from 96 active modules dumps a lot of heat into a hull that wasn’t designed for it, and the Flight III ships got bigger chillers for the same reason. On Pinckney, the Navy is tying the new plants directly to the radar’s “electrical and thermal needs,” which is about as clear as a press release gets that the cooling is part of the radar job.
My guess is the chillers turn out to be the harder piece of the two. Bolting radar cubes to a deckhouse is new, but it’s been done once already on the Flight III. Finding room for bigger air conditioning plants inside a 22-year-old hull is the kind of thing that eats shipyard months.
There’s a twin radar on a Virginia beach
This is the piece of the program I like most. Before a single cube went anywhere near Pinckney, Raytheon delivered a full SPY-6(V)4 array to the Navy’s Surface Combat Systems Center at Wallops Island, Virginia, and had it installed by August 3. Wallops is a land-based test site on the Atlantic shore, which means the radar can look out over real ocean and real weather without a ship under it.
The point, according to Barbara Borgonovi, who runs Raytheon’s naval power business, is to “integrate SPY-6(V)4 with its dedicated power system before it reaches the ship.” Testing at Wallops starts late this year and runs through mid-2028, which overlaps almost exactly with the window Raytheon gives for Pinckney being in the yard, late 2026 to 2028.
So what does the ship get out of it? Fewer surprises.
Every power glitch and software bug the Wallops crew finds on the beach is one that doesn’t get found on a destroyer that’s sitting in a San Diego yard costing money by the day. The Navy’s been pushing hard on that logic lately, from robots that map deck corrosion before a ship ever reaches dry dock to a radar getting debugged on shore.
Four test ships, then one-trip upgrades
Pinckney is the guinea pig for a bigger program the Navy calls Destroyer Modernization 2.0, and the way it’s structured explains why this ship has now been to the same San Diego yard twice. The Navy split the job in two on purpose.
It calls the approach “Split Start,” and the idea is that shipyards and contractors learn on the first installations before anyone tries to do everything at once. Pinckney did phase one first, finishing in 2024 with a new electronic warfare suite called SEWIP Block III and the enlarged sponsons that go with it, which is why the ship looks noticeably chunkier up top than its sisters.
Then she deployed with that gear. Now she’s back for phase two: the radar, the cooling plants and the Aegis Baseline 10 combat system that lets a ship run air defense and ballistic missile defense at the same time.
Three more destroyers are on the same two-trip plan: Chung-Hoon, James E. Williams and Halsey. After that, the Navy says USS Sterett will be the first ship to get the whole package in a single shipyard visit. Capt. Tim Moore, who runs the program, put it this way in the Navy’s announcement: “The collective effort by all stakeholders has finally brought us to the point of execution.”
I’d read that as a man who’s been waiting a while. Raytheon was already shipping the first (V)4 array to Virginia in August, Pinckney’s been penciled in as the first backfit ship for years, and the contract to do the work was signed on September 4. The thing that took time was getting all three to line up.
Back by 2028, on paper
The contract runs to General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego, for $149,599,723 to start and up to $149.9 million if the Navy exercises every option. It’s a fixed-price incentive fee deal, awarded without competition because NASSCO was the only yard the Navy considered able to do it, and 91 percent of the money comes out of the Navy’s equipment-buying budget rather than its maintenance budget, so on paper this is more of a purchase than a repair.
One thing to be careful about. The $149.6 million covers the shipyard work, and the radar itself is bought separately on a contract nobody has priced in public. So if you see someone describe this as a $150 million radar, that’s wrong in both directions.
Cmdr. Timothy DeVall, Pinckney’s commanding officer, said in the Navy’s homecoming release on August 11 that the crew “answered every mission with professionalism, resilience, and unwavering commitment.” The Navy’s announcement that phase two has started went out on October 22, 2026, and the contract says NASSCO is to finish by September 2028. Raytheon says the Wallops array keeps testing through the middle of that same year. So the radar on the beach and the radar on the ship should wrap up their homework at about the same time, and Pinckney, by then 24 years old, becomes the first destroyer in the Navy to carry 96 of those two-foot cubes to sea.
