L3Harris wins $876 million for Growler radar jammer

The U.S. Navy has added $876.4 million to L3Harris Technologies’ contract for the Next Generation Jammer Low Band, a radar-jamming pod for the EA-18G Growler electronic attack jet flown by the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force, the U.S. Department of War announced.

The award is a modification to the $587.4 million contract Naval Air Systems Command gave L3Harris in August 2024 to take the jammer through engineering and manufacturing development, the final stage before production. The new money is larger than that original award.

It pays for continued development of the pod, tooling, equipment and labor needed to build it, and delivery of test pods for system demonstration. It also covers additional cybersecurity work, along with logistics, testing and software support for both air forces. Work is scheduled to finish in fiscal 2031.

The modification is undefinitized, meaning the Navy authorized the work before the final terms and price were agreed. It is a cost-plus-incentive-fee deal, which reimburses L3Harris’s costs and pays a fee tied to performance targets. The Navy did not compete it.

Australia is putting in more money up front than the United States. At the time of award, the Navy obligated $3.65 million in fiscal 2026 research and development funds, while the Royal Australian Air Force contributed $23 million in cooperative funds.

Most of the work, 43%, will take place at L3Harris’s facility in Salt Lake City. The rest is spread across sites in Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Colorado, California, New York and Texas, with 3.4% performed in Australia.

The Growler is a modified F/A-18F Super Hornet built to jam and disrupt enemy radars and communications, clearing a path for other aircraft. Its main jamming system has long been the AN/ALQ-99 pod, first fielded in the 1970s. The Navy is replacing it with a family of Next Generation Jammer pods, each covering a different part of the radio spectrum.

RTX’s Raytheon builds the mid-band pod, the AN/ALQ-249, which already flies with the fleet. L3Harris’s low-band pod targets lower-frequency search radars. Those radars track targets less precisely than higher-frequency systems, but they can spot aircraft at long range and cue long-range missiles toward them.

L3Harris says the pod will let Growler crews suppress enemy air defenses with high-power jamming from standoff ranges, keeping the aircraft farther from the threats they are attacking.

Suppliers are already delivering hardware. In July, CPI Aerostructures of Edgewood, New York, received a $13.6 million contract from L3Harris to build pod structures for operational prototypes that will go to the Navy for fleet assessment and to extra test units for airworthiness and design checks. The company said it had delivered its first test article. Honeywell Aerospace joined the program in June 2025, and Marotta Controls announced contracts to support it this month.