Northrop Grumman expands ties across Eastern Europe

Northrop Grumman announced a series of new industrial agreements with partners in Poland and Estonia on September 10, 2026, unveiled at MSPO, Poland’s largest defense trade show, in Kielce. The announcements span air-defense software, chain guns already mounted on Polish armored vehicles, and exploratory talks over a radar aircraft, tying several existing programs together under one push into the region.

The most developed of these threads involves the Integrated Battle Command System, known as IBCS, a network that fuses data from radars and other sensors so that whichever weapon is best positioned can respond to a threat, rather than each system working in isolation. Poland became the first customer for IBCS outside the United States, buying it as the backbone of its Wisła medium-range air defense program under a foreign military sale that dates back to 2018. Polish forces declared the first battery operational in 2023, and Poland has since become the first NATO country in Europe to bring the full system online, with additional Patriot-equipped batteries still being added.

Building on that foundation, Northrop Grumman signed new memorandums of understanding with two Estonian firms, Go Craft and DefSecIntel, aimed at pulling Estonian industry into IBCS-related work. Go Craft will focus on defense system integration, while DefSecIntel will handle specialized mast fabrication used in the systems that support IBCS. Northrop Grumman describes the goal as reinforcing IBCS as Europe’s preferred command-and-control system, though the agreements are non-binding and don’t commit either side to a specific contract or dollar figure.

A second, more mature thread runs through Poland’s own vehicle fleet. Northrop Grumman’s Bushmaster chain guns already sit at the center of Poland’s Rosomak wheeled troop carriers and the newer Borsuk tracked infantry fighting vehicle, mounted inside a remote-controlled turret called ZSSW-30 that Polish firm Huta Stalowa Wola developed with WB Electronics starting in 2013. Northrop Grumman is now deepening that relationship with Huta Stalowa Wola specifically, discussing a technology transfer that would let the Polish manufacturer build and service Bushmaster cannons domestically rather than importing them, a step aimed at meeting what the company describes as growing demand for medium-caliber firepower across the region.

Northrop Grumman also confirmed it remains in talks with Poland over its E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, a carrier-capable radar and command aircraft the U.S. Navy already flies to track aircraft and missiles over long distances and coordinate a response. The company said the conversation covers possible adoption, training and industrial cooperation, but it stopped short of describing any agreement, meaning Poland has not committed to buying the aircraft.

The final piece is Raid Hunter, a short-range air defense system Northrop Grumman unveiled publicly for the first time only last month, in August, at a symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. Raid Hunter pairs the company’s Bushmaster chain gun with guided 50mm ammunition designed to make in-flight course corrections as it homes in on drones or cruise missiles, an approach built to counter the kind of large, overwhelming drone swarms that have become common in the war in Ukraine. Rather than firing a single expensive missile at each incoming threat, the system is meant to unload dozens of far cheaper guided rounds from a magazine that can hold roughly 300, reloading quickly between engagements. Northrop Grumman test-fired the underlying gun at a range in Dahlgren, Virginia, in July, and has said further testing will continue through the rest of 2026, but the system has not yet been fielded operationally anywhere, in Europe or elsewhere.

Taken together, the announcements describe a company trying to widen its footprint across Central and Eastern Europe by layering new agreements onto programs it already has running in the region, rather than opening entirely new lines of business. Northrop Grumman has not disclosed the value of any of the new memorandums, a timeline for when Estonian firms might begin production work, or whether Poland’s interest in the E-2D will progress to a formal purchase request.