USS Pinckney destroyer set for new depot work through 2028

The U.S. Navy has awarded General Dynamics NASSCO $149.6 million to carry out a scheduled maintenance and modernization overhaul of the destroyer USS Pinckney (DDG 91), the ship that served as the lead hull for the Navy’s broader effort to upgrade its Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

The fixed-price incentive fee contract covers what the Navy calls a Chief of Naval Operations Availability, a scheduled depot-level maintenance period. The scope includes all labor, equipment, testing, facilities and quality assurance work needed to complete the modernization and repair effort. The contract includes options that could raise its total value to $149.9 million. Work will take place at NASSCO’s San Diego shipyard and is expected to run through September 2028, more than two and a half years from award.

The Navy is funding most of the contract, 91%, through fiscal 2026 other procurement funds, totaling $135.8 million. The rest comes from operations and maintenance funds and a small amount of weapons procurement money. About $12.9 million of that funding will expire at the end of the current fiscal year if not obligated. The Navy awarded the contract without competition, citing federal law that permits sole-source awards when only one contractor can meet the government’s requirements. Naval Sea Systems Command is managing the deal.

The USS Pinckney is an Arleigh Burke-class Flight IIA destroyer built by Ingalls Shipbuilding and commissioned in 2004. It is homeported in San Diego as part of Destroyer Squadron 23 and is named for William Pinckney, a Navy Cross recipient who rescued a fellow sailor aboard the carrier USS Enterprise during the Battle of Santa Cruz in World War II.

This new depot period follows the ship’s role as the pathfinder for the Navy’s DDG Modernization 2.0 program, a mid-life upgrade effort covering roughly 20 Flight IIA destroyers at an estimated cost of $17 billion across the fleet. Pinckney was the first ship selected to receive the program’s initial phase: installation of Northrop Grumman’s AN/SLQ-32(V)7 SEWIP Block 3 electronic warfare suite, which improves a ship’s ability to detect and jam anti-ship missiles. NASSCO completed that work on Pinckney in a roughly two-year modernization period that wrapped up in November 2023.

The DDG Modernization 2.0 program continues in two steps. After a ship receives the SEWIP Block 3 upgrade, it later returns for a second-phase overhaul that adds Raytheon’s SPY-6(V)4 radar and updated combat systems software. The Navy has already accepted two other Flight IIA destroyers, USS Chung-Hoon (DDG 93) and USS James E. Williams (DDG 95), after they completed their own modernization periods ahead of schedule earlier this year, while USS Halsey (DDG 97) remains in progress. Navy officials have said the program is structured deliberately to avoid the cost overruns and schedule delays that plagued the service’s earlier Ticonderoga-class cruiser modernization effort, which spent nearly $4 billion modernizing seven ships without extending their service lives as originally planned.

The Navy has not said whether this new $149.6 million depot period for Pinckney will include the second-phase SPY-6 radar installation or focus on other maintenance and repair work separate from the broader DDG Modernization 2.0 upgrade sequence.