Aegis Baseline 10 set for IOC in 2023

ARLINGTON, Va. - Lockheed Martin’s Baseline 10 is the latest Aegis combat weapon system upgrade that will be built for the Navy’s upcoming fleet of Flight III Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyers and to provide the Navy with compatibility for older ships. The bulk of the Baseline 10 upgrade integrates the new AN/SPY-6(V) radar, Jim Sheridan, the head of Lockheed Martin’s Naval Combatants Group, told media at the 2019 Surface Navy Association Symposium. Baseline 10 will work with older systems, too. All ships will not have SPY-6 radars installed. In the meantime, Lockheed Martin designed Baseline 10 to be compatible with older variant AN/SPY-1 radars. The future USS Jack H. Lucas (DDG-125), which is the first Flight III Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyer, is being built with Baseline 10 and SPY-6 radar and is anticipated to be operational (OIC) during FY 2023. Lucas is under construction at the Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., and is expected to be delivered in 2021, according to HII. Lockheed is working to pair its HELIOS directed energy weapon with the Aegis system for the future. They plan to put HELIOS through a product design review in 2019. The LM believes HELIOS is promising enough to consider how to integrate the system into ship designs instead of building something bolted onto a ship. “It gives us an infinite magazine,” Sheridan said. (Source: USNI News 01/15/19)