U.S. Navy stocks up on spare parts for Aegis radars

The U.S. Navy is building up its stocks of spare parts for the radars and fire-control gear on its Aegis warships, ordering $15.1 million worth of components from Raytheon in a deal it tied directly to the surface fleet’s goal of keeping 75 mission-capable ships ready on any given day.

The Department of War contract announcement published on Oct. 13 describes a firm-fixed-price delivery order covering 419 requirements across 46 separate parts used on the MK 99 fire control system, the AN/SPY-1 radar’s transmitter group and the AN/SPY-3 multifunction radar. Each of the 46 parts carries its own National Item Identification Number, the code the U.S. military uses to track an individual item through its supply system.

By Pentagon standards the dollar figure is small, and the more telling detail is the reason the U.S. Navy gave for the purchase. According to the announcement, the requirements stem from the Naval Surface Force’s North Star goal of 75 mission-capable ships and include fleet stocking increases from remodeled allowances for operational availability and endurance supply, along with higher stock levels at forward-deployed sites. Allowance change requests and maintenance activity account for the rest of the demand.

An allowance is the quantity of a given part that a ship or support site is authorized to carry, so raising those levels means more spare radar and fire-control components kept aboard ships and at overseas depots closer to where the fleet operates.

All three systems sit at the heart of U.S. Navy air and missile defense. SPY-1 is the main radar of the Aegis combat system on Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers, while the MK 99 controls the illuminators that guide Standard Missile-2 interceptors onto their targets in the final seconds of flight. The X-band SPY-3 radar is fitted on Zumwalt-class destroyers and Ford-class aircraft carriers.

Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener, then commander of Naval Surface Forces, set the 75-ship North Star target in 2022 and aimed to reach it by fiscal 2024, a number that represented nearly half of the 164 surface ships in the fleet at the time. Under the surface force’s definitions, a mission-capable ship has completed basic certification and can deploy, though it may not yet be cleared for high-end combat. Surface force leaders said in early 2024 that the fleet had not yet reached the target, eighteen months into the two-year plan.

Raytheon already holds a larger slice of Aegis work this year, having received a $271.5 million contract on Aug. 3 for MK 99 fire control equipment, Aegis modernization hardware and engineering support, with options that could raise its value to $302.5 million.

Raytheon will perform 95% of the new order in Andover, Massachusetts, and the remaining 5% in Chesapeake, Virginia, with deliveries expected to run through December 2034. The U.S. Navy is paying with fiscal 2026 working capital funds that will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year, and Naval Supply Systems Command Weapon Systems Support in Philadelphia awarded the order on a sole-source basis after soliciting only Raytheon.