Northrop Grumman secures $1.8B deal for LITENING targeting system

The targeting pod that lets American fighter pilots spot and destroy enemy targets from miles away just secured funding that will keep it flying for the next decade, backed by a contract nearly $2 billion in size and locked in through the year 2035.

Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., based in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, has been awarded a contract with a ceiling of $1,840,000,000 to continue producing, sustaining, and upgrading the LITENING Comprehensive Advanced Targeting Pod, a piece of equipment mounted beneath a combat aircraft that lets pilots and weapons officers see, track, and precisely engage targets on the ground or in the air from a safe standoff distance.

The agreement, structured as an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract, sets a maximum spending limit rather than a guaranteed payout, meaning the Air Force can order additional pods, upgrades, and support services over time up to that ceiling without renegotiating the underlying deal for each individual purchase. Work will take place at Northrop Grumman’s Rolling Meadows facility, with the contract running through December 31, 2035, giving both the company and the Air Force a decade-long planning horizon for one of the military’s most heavily used targeting systems.

LITENING, formally designated the AN/AAQ-28(V), is a self-contained, multi-sensor pod that hangs from an aircraft’s weapons pylon and packs forward-looking infrared cameras, high-definition video, and laser sensors into a single unit, letting aircrews detect, automatically track, and identify targets at long range under a wide variety of battlefield conditions, whether that means daylight, darkness, or degraded visibility. The system has become one of the most widely fielded targeting pods in the American arsenal, flying on aircraft including the A-10 Thunderbolt II, B-52 Stratofortress, C-130 Hercules, F-15E Strike Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, F/A-18 Super Hornet, and AV-8B Harrier, giving the Air Force, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, and Marine Corps a common piece of targeting hardware across a remarkably diverse mix of airframes rather than each aircraft type relying on its own separate, incompatible system.

Northrop Grumman has delivered more than 900 LITENING pods to American forces and international customers, and the company says the fleet has logged more than 3 million total flight hours, with operational availability reaching as high as 95 percent, a reliability figure that matters enormously for equipment pilots depend on to safely identify targets before releasing a weapon. The current export configuration, LITENING G4, remains authorized for sale to NATO allies, extending the pod’s reach well beyond American squadrons into partner air forces that have adopted the same core targeting technology.

This latest award builds directly on a similar, though smaller, contract the Air Force gave Northrop Grumman back in January 2019, a $1.3 billion IDIQ deal covering LITENING sustainment, production, software, and upgrades over a shorter timeframe. The new $1,840,000,000 ceiling represents a substantial increase over that earlier agreement and extends the program’s contracted support horizon by several additional years, a signal that the Air Force expects to keep flying and maintaining LITENING pods well into the mid-2030s rather than transitioning to a fundamentally different targeting system anytime soon.

The Air Force classified this contract as a sole source acquisition, meaning officials awarded the deal directly to Northrop Grumman without opening it to competitive bidding from other companies, a common arrangement for follow-on sustainment work tied to a system only the original manufacturer holds the technical data, tooling, and accumulated engineering knowledge to service and upgrade effectively. Fiscal Year 2026 operations and maintenance funds totaling $42,911,770 were obligated at the time of the award, representing the initial slice of spending against the contract’s much larger overall ceiling, with additional funding expected to follow as the Air Force issues specific task orders against the agreement over its nearly decade-long lifespan. The Precision Attack Contracting Branch at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, the office responsible for managing precision-guided weapons and targeting system contracts across the Air Force, is overseeing the deal, designated FA8540-26-D-B001.

What this contract does not specify is exactly how many new pods the Air Force plans to order, which specific upgrades take priority, or how spending will be distributed across the contract’s roughly nine-year window, details that will presumably emerge gradually as individual task orders get issued against the broader agreement. The Air Force’s own contract notice offers no further elaboration on those specifics, leaving the total scale of new production versus pure sustainment work an open question for now.