The Naval Air Systems Command awarded Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company a $991,127,074 firm-fixed-price contract modification on May 15, 2026, covering 432 electronic warfare modification kits for the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. The kits break down across variants and customers: 97 for the Air Force, 54 for the Marine Corps, 42 for the Navy, 106 for foreign military sales, and 133 for non-Department of Defense customers. Work will be performed primarily in Fort Worth, Texas, with completion expected by March 2032.
Electronic Warfare Modernization at Scale
The modification kits covered by this award are part of the F-35's ongoing electronic warfare capability expansion, which upgrades the aircraft's AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare system with improved threat detection, geolocation, and jamming functions. The F-35 relies heavily on its sensor fusion architecture — including electronic warfare, radar, and electro-optical targeting — rather than traditional stealth-plus-range strategies, so sustained investment in EW hardware upgrades is essential to keeping the aircraft competitive against evolving adversary integrated air defenses.
The scale of this award reflects the maturation of the F-35 program: with more than 900 aircraft delivered worldwide and production rates stabilizing, the program is now entering a sustained modernization phase where capability upgrades flow through fielded fleets rather than initial production configurations. Lockheed Martin delivers EW kits under a separate production stream from airframe lots, allowing the government to accelerate or decelerate modernization independent of new-build schedules.
The 106 FMS kits included in this award span multiple partner nations. The F-35 program has 17 international partners and customers, many of whom are simultaneously receiving new aircraft and retrofitting earlier-delivered jets with more capable systems as block upgrades are finalized. The FMS kits allow those governments to access the same hardware as U.S. service users rather than receiving a downgraded export variant.
Contract Structure and Program Context
The firm-fixed-price structure places cost and schedule risk on Lockheed Martin, which is appropriate for a mature modification kit program where design specifications, supplier relationships, and production processes are well established. FFP is the standard contract type for production quantities of defined items in the F-35 program, and NAVAIR's consistent use of FFP for kit deliveries reflects confidence in the program's manufacturing baseline.
The March 2032 completion date gives Lockheed Martin approximately six years to deliver 432 kits, a schedule that aligns with the broader F-35 Continuous Capability Development and Delivery (C2D2) roadmap, which defines how capability upgrades are tested, certified, and delivered to fielded aircraft. The C2D2 process replaced the earlier block-upgrade paradigm and is designed to deliver improvements on a rolling basis rather than waiting for large, infrequent software and hardware drops.
The $133 million in non-DoD customer kits is unusual in a DoD contract announcement and reflects purchases by international partners who are using U.S. defense acquisition channels rather than direct commercial agreements. NAVAIR administers many FMS cases for F-35 partners, making it the contracting authority even for kits that will ultimately be installed in non-U.S. aircraft.
What It Means for Contractors
The $991 million modification underscores that the F-35 program's economic center of gravity has shifted from initial production toward modernization and sustainment. Firms in the F-35 supply chain — electronic components, cooling systems, software integration, test equipment — should expect sustained demand for EW-related work through the early 2030s as the government works to maintain parity with adversary air defense developments. Competitors seeking EW work on the F-35 face a very high barrier to entry given Lockheed Martin's system-of-record status and the classified nature of the threat data that drives EW requirements.
F-35 EW System Architecture and Upgrade Challenges
The AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare system on the F-35 is a fully integrated, hardware-software system that collects signals across a wide frequency range, processes them against a threat library, and automatically recommends or executes countermeasures with minimal aircrew intervention. This level of automation requires the system's threat library — the database of radar parameters, missile guidance frequencies, and jamming countermeasures — to be updated continuously as adversary systems evolve. The modification kits funded by this contract allow the physical hardware to keep pace with software updates that reflect new threat library entries from classified intelligence sources, ensuring that fielded F-35s can respond to threats that did not exist when the aircraft was originally delivered.
The challenge of EW modernization at scale is that an aircraft's electronic warfare system interacts with every other avionics subsystem — radar, communications, datalink, navigation — and hardware changes must be validated against the integrated avionics architecture before aircraft return to operational status. This integration testing is conducted at the F-35 Integrated Test Force at Edwards Air Force Base and Pax River, with each hardware modification requiring a new round of airworthiness qualification. The multi-year timeline of this contract reflects not only the production schedule for the kits themselves but the testing and qualification pipeline that must process each configuration before fleet-wide rollout.
Lockheed Martin has structured the F-35 EW modernization program around block updates that bundle hardware and software changes into tested, certified packages rather than fielding hardware and software upgrades independently. This "block" approach reduces the number of unique aircraft configurations in the fleet, simplifying maintenance and logistical support even as the capability baseline advances. The 432 kits in this award represent one such block's hardware requirement, matched to the corresponding software release that defines the new threat response capability the kits enable.
Foreign military sales partners receive equivalent EW hardware through the same Lockheed Martin production stream, subject to export licensing through the State Department's Foreign Military Sales program. The technology released to FMS customers is typically equivalent to U.S. service configurations but may exclude the most sensitive elements of the threat library and jamming algorithm suite that are restricted to U.S.-only distribution under program classification controls. These technology release conditions are negotiated during each FMS case approval and may limit how FMS customers configure their aircraft for specific operational scenarios, ensuring that the most sensitive jamming capabilities remain within the U.S. and closest ally communities.
