Italy has formally launched one of Europe’s most ambitious surface-combatant programmes, signing a contract worth approximately €3.7 billion for a new generation of DDX destroyers. The programme combines Fincantieri’s naval platform expertise with Leonardo’s combat-system capabilities and is designed around an increasingly important requirement for European navies: the ability to defend fleets and wider operational areas against sophisticated air, ballistic and hypersonic missile threats.
The contract was signed on 24 September between OCCAR and Orizzonte Sistemi Navali, the joint venture owned 51 per cent by Fincantieri and 49 per cent by Leonardo. OCCAR describes the award as covering development, production and initial in-service support for the first destroyer with an option for a second, while Fincantieri presents the overall programme value at approximately €3.7 billion, including around €1.3 billion in options, with delivery of the two vessels scheduled for 2033 and 2035.
The industrial division is unusually clear. Fincantieri expects subcontracts worth approximately €1.8 billion, including around €800 million in options, and will act as platform system integrator, while Leonardo is expected to receive around €1.7 billion, including approximately €480 million in options, and will be responsible for the combat system.
The physical size of the new ships reflects their intended role. At approximately 180 metres in length and 13,500 tonnes displacement, with a crew of 251 and a range of around 4,000 nautical miles, the DDX will be substantially larger than many contemporary European destroyers and frigates and will provide the space, electrical capacity and cooling required by increasingly powerful sensors, communications systems and future weapons.
Air and missile defence sits at the centre of the design. Leonardo’s combat architecture will combine the new SADOC 5 C5I system, a high-power fully digital S-band AESA radar and MBDA weapon systems, with the companies explicitly describing the ship as capable of integrated air and missile defence against conventional missile, ballistic and hypersonic threats.
This is strategically important because the role of the destroyer is changing. European navies traditionally designed their major escorts primarily around protection of carrier or amphibious groups, but the proliferation of ballistic missiles, long-range anti-ship weapons, one-way attack drones and increasingly complex saturation attacks is turning large air-defence warships into mobile nodes of a wider NATO sensor and interceptor network.
The DDX design reflects that transition from individual warship to distributed combat system. Fincantieri describes a highly digitalised platform based on its Navis Sapiens concept, in which information from sensors, weapons and technical systems is collected through a common digital backbone and can be used for operational decision-making, maintenance and lifecycle management, while the ships will also be able to control unmanned surface and underwater assets.
Power generation and management are equally significant. The design incorporates a direct-current sub-network with energy storage, new systems for managing thermal and electrical loads and an advanced ship-management architecture, features that are becoming increasingly important as high-power AESA radars, electronic warfare systems and potentially future directed-energy weapons place unprecedented demands on warship electrical systems.
There is some ambiguity in public descriptions of which existing Italian ships the DDX will replace. OCCAR states that the new vessels will replace the two ageing Durand de la Penne-class destroyers, while Fincantieri describes DDX as the evolution and replacement of the Horizon class; specialist reporting notes that Italy’s Horizon vessels are expected to undergo modernisation and remain in service well beyond the arrival of the first DDX, making the new ships better understood as technological successors to Horizon while replacing Durand de la Penne in the fleet structure.
That distinction points to the scale of Italy’s wider naval ambition. Rather than merely replacing ageing hulls on a one-for-one basis, Rome is building a force in which large surface combatants can provide area air defence, long-range strike, anti-submarine warfare and multi-domain command and control while operating as part of interconnected national and multinational formations.
The programme also matters industrially because Italy retains national control over both the platform and much of the combat-system architecture. Fincantieri and Leonardo together cover ship design, integration, radars, command systems, electronics and much of the systems engineering required to produce a highly complex warship, while missile capabilities are supplied through the wider European MBDA structure.
Across Europe, naval modernisation is increasingly being driven by the same threat environment that has already transformed land-based air defence. Ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, long-range precision strike and large numbers of comparatively inexpensive unmanned systems require ships with deeper magazines, more powerful sensors, higher levels of automation and enough electrical and computing headroom to absorb capabilities that may not yet exist when the hull enters service.
Italy’s DDX programme is therefore significant beyond the two ships themselves. It illustrates the emergence of a new European surface-combatant model in which the warship is conceived less as an isolated weapons platform and more as a heavily networked, power-rich and continuously upgradeable node in a broader air, missile and multi-domain defence architecture.
The first DDX is not expected until 2033, leaving ample technological and threat evolution before the class enters service. Yet the decision being taken now is already strategically revealing: Italy is betting that future maritime power will depend not only on how many ships a navy can deploy, but on how effectively those ships can sense, connect, process and engage across domains while surviving increasingly sophisticated missile attacks.