U.S. Navy orders five more radar systems from Saab

Saab Inc. has been awarded a $74,636,753 contract modification to produce five more AN/SPN-50(V)1 shipboard air traffic control radars for the U.S. Navy, the Department of War announced August 24.

The modification adds the units to an existing firm-fixed-price contract managed by Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Maryland.

The radars are built to replace the Navy’s aging AN/SPN-43C air traffic control radar aboard Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and large-deck amphibious assault ships. The AN/SPN-50(V)1 is one of the U.S. versions of Saab’s Sea Giraffe Agile Multi Beam radar and serves as the primary system for tracking and directing both manned and unmanned aircraft within roughly 50 nautical miles of a ship.

Work under the modification will be split between Saab’s facility in Syracuse, New York, which will handle 58.9% of the effort, and Gothenburg, Sweden, which will handle the remaining 41.1%. The work is expected to be completed by May 2029.

The Navy will obligate $14,961,358 in fiscal 2026 other procurement funds and $13,947,430 in fiscal 2026 Shipbuilding and Conversion funds at the time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The contract was not competitively bid.

The Navy first ordered SPN-50 radars from Saab in 2016 under a $38 million contract covering the engineering and manufacturing development phase, with an initial batch of three systems planned over four years. The Navy has continued placing incremental orders since then, including a $25 million contract in 2020 for two units destined for the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) and the then-under-construction amphibious assault ship USS Bougainville (LHA-8), and a $47.5 million order in December 2023 for three more systems.

In October 2024, the Navy ordered three additional SPN-50(V)1 units under a $41.7 million contract. The Navy has said it plans to procure 25 AN/SPN-50 radars through fiscal 2028, though the total procurement number and timeline have shifted somewhat across previous contract announcements.

Part of the push to replace the older AN/SPN-43C stems from spectrum reallocation. In recent years, regulators reassigned the top quarter of the AN/SPN-43C’s frequency band to commercial fixed wireless use, according to Navy officials, which restricts air traffic control and air search radar operations within 50 nautical miles of the coast using that older system.

The current modification is designated as a low rate initial production order, indicating the Navy is still ramping toward full-rate production of the SPN-50 system rather than manufacturing radars at a mature, steady-state pace.