U.S. Navy awards $43.7M for F-35 mission data lab upgrades

Lockheed Martin will upgrade the operating systems running the F-35 Lightning II reprogramming laboratories, which build the threat data the fighter needs for combat missions, under a $43.7 million contract modification the U.S. Navy announced on Oct. 28. Eighty percent of the work will take place in Eglin, Florida, and the remaining 20% in Fort Worth, Texas, with completion expected in April 2030.

F-35 cooperative program partners are paying $29,696,266 of the $43,673,774 total, or about 68%, while the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy each contribute $6,988,754 in fiscal 2026 aircraft procurement funds, all of it obligated at award. The Navy aircraft procurement account also funds U.S. Marine Corps aviation, and the announcement lists the U.S. Marine Corps among the services the labs support.

Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Maryland, issued the cost-plus-fixed-fee modification, designated P00025, without competition, adding new contract line items to contract N00019-22-C-0046. The announcement does not name the operating systems being replaced, the laboratories or hardware affected, or how the partner share is divided among countries.

The labs produce mission data files, the libraries of radars, missiles and aircraft that an F-35’s radar, electronic warfare suite and other sensors use to recognize and classify what they detect in a given region. The files are loaded onto each jet before flight from a portable drive.

At Eglin, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps personnel of the 513th Electronic Warfare Squadron, part of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, run the United States Reprogramming Laboratory, which produces mission data for U.S. jets and tests it on a hardware-in-the-loop line against simulated threat signals before release to the fleet. The squadron was activated at Eglin on April 23, 2010, to operate the lab, then valued at $300 million.

A 2017 U.S. Air Force account of the squadron’s work said mission data does not carry over automatically, so the squadron had to rebuild and repackage the files for each new version of the aircraft’s operating system. That refers to the software on the jet rather than the lab computers covered by the new award, but it explains why lab infrastructure gets steady funding as the F-35 moves through successive software releases.

Federal spending records show N00019-22-C-0046 began on April 29, 2022, as a base year plus five years of sustainment support for the Australia, Canada and United Kingdom Reprogramming Laboratory and surrogate encryption work for the Norway Italy Reprogramming Laboratory, all for non-U.S. participants. The public announcements do not explain what the surrogate encryption support involves. In April 2025, a $22,126,598 modification (P00014) added maintenance and sustainment of the U.S. Reprogramming Laboratory and the partner support complex for the U.S. military, non-DOD partners and Foreign Military Sales customers. A further $23,312,570 modification (P00022) in April 2026 continued that work.

Lockheed Martin first set up the Australia, Canada and United Kingdom Reprogramming Laboratory, known as ACURL, at its Fort Worth plant and moved it to Eglin under a $7.5 million modification awarded in 2018. British and Australian officials opened the lab there in February 2020, when it reached initial operating capability, and kept Canada’s name on the facility even though Ottawa had stepped back from the F-35 at the time. British and Australian staff now run the center as the reactivated 80 Squadron, which develops, verifies and validates mission data files for the three allies.

The Norway Italy Reprogramming Laboratory opened nearby on June 27, 2019, and was formally accepted on Sept. 22, 2021. Israel’s F-35 software work runs under a separate arrangement, and the U.S. Navy added $11.4 million in April for three additional software builds for Israel’s fleet.

Since N00019-22-C-0046 now sustains both the U.S. lab and the partner labs, the operating system work could cover either, and the Oct. 28 announcement describes it only as covering laboratory facilities and systems sustained for the U.S. services and the cooperative partners.

A separate $111.1 million modification to another Lockheed contract, N00019-20-C-0026, funded a minimum viable product of a Common Reprogramming Tool meant to replace the legacy programming tools used across the reprogramming labs. Lot 18 orders also bought multi-ship infrared search and track and Band 5 radar warning receiver hardware for development work at the U.S., ACURL and Norway-Italy labs. Each new sensor on the aircraft needs matching hardware and data in the labs, as will the 432 electronic warfare modification kits the U.S. Navy ordered for $991 million in May.