U.S. Army awards NG $4.8B for helicopter missile defense

Helicopters have carried flares to dodge heat-seeking missiles since the late 1960s. The U.S. Army just committed nearly $4.84 billion to replace that decades-old defense with a laser that jams the missile itself.

The Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, awarded Northrop Grumman the firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract on September 8 for full-rate production of the Common Infrared Countermeasures system, known as CIRCM. Only Northrop Grumman bid on the work. The contract runs through September 30, 2035, though the Pentagon’s notice did not specify how many units it covers or how funding breaks down year to year.

CIRCM mounts on helicopters and some small fixed-wing aircraft to counter MANPADS, the shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles that have proven lethal against low-flying aircraft in recent conflicts. In Ukraine, MANPADS supplied by the U.S., UK and Poland have downed numerous Russian helicopters since 2022, underscoring just how vulnerable rotary-wing aircraft remain to this class of weapon.

Instead of dumping flares and hoping a missile’s seeker gets confused, CIRCM detects an incoming missile using warning sensors already on the aircraft, then fires a laser directly at the missile’s infrared seeker, distorting its view of the target and steering it off course. The company says the whole sequence takes only a few seconds. At the core of the system is a quantum cascade laser, a solid-state laser technology the Army selected in part because it can jam multiple incoming missiles at once and continues working in poor weather, unlike earlier infrared jammers that struggled in cloud cover or rain.

The Army launched the program to meet a Tri-Service requirement, meaning the Army, Navy and Air Force all agreed on a common specification so the same system could go on multiple services’ aircraft rather than each branch developing its own jammer. Northrop Grumman won the engineering and manufacturing development contract in 2015, beating out BAE Systems after both companies had spent several years in an earlier technology-maturation phase. The Army took delivery of its first CIRCM systems in 2016, and the system replaced the older Advanced Threat Infrared Countermeasures suite that had been in service since the 1990s.

CIRCM has since gone on the Army’s AH-64 Apache, CH-47 Chinook and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. Northrop Grumman has said the system reached its 500th delivered shipset within two years of entering full-rate production.

As of this year, the company says nearly 700 CIRCM systems have been installed on rotary-wing aircraft worldwide, logging more than 70,000 operational flight hours. In March 2026, Northrop Grumman reached a separate agreement to supply CIRCM for Germany’s new CH-47 Chinook fleet, extending the system to at least one allied air force beyond the United States.

The system’s open architecture is designed to let the Army swap in new hardware or software as missile threats evolve, without redesigning the aircraft’s survivability suite from scratch.