F-35 fleet gets nearly $1B electronic warfare upgrade

Lockheed Martin has secured a $991 million contract to produce electronic warfare upgrade kits for 432 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters across three U.S. military services and a substantial international customer base, in one of the largest single F-35 modernization awards in the program’s history.

The Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Maryland, issued the firm-fixed-price order on May 15, 2026, against a previously established basic ordering agreement, covering production and delivery of material modification kits that will retrofit existing F-35s with modernized electronic warfare systems and related capability upgrades, according to the Department of War contract announcement. Work will be performed at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics’ facility in Fort Worth, Texas, with completion expected by March 2032.

The distribution of 432 kits across the customer base reveals both the domestic priority and the international reach of the F-35 program. The U.S. Air Force receives the largest American allocation at 97 kits, followed by 133 kits destined for non-U.S. Department of War participants, 106 for Foreign Military Sales customers, 54 for the Marine Corps, and 42 for the Navy, per the contract announcement. The combined international allocation of 239 kits, covering both FMS customers and non-U.S. participants, actually exceeds the total U.S. military allocation of 193 kits, underscoring how deeply the F-35 program has embedded itself in allied air forces and how tightly those allies’ modernization timelines are now linked to American procurement decisions.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, developed by Lockheed Martin and operated by the United States and more than a dozen allied nations, is the Western world’s primary fifth-generation multirole combat aircraft. The program encompasses three variants: the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing version flown by the Air Force and most international partners, the F-35B short takeoff and vertical landing variant operated by the Marine Corps and several allied nations including the United Kingdom, and the F-35C carrier variant operated by the Navy. All three variants share a common electronic warfare architecture, which means a modernization of that system can be developed once and applied across the entire global fleet, the logic that makes a 432-kit production order economically and operationally coherent.

Electronic warfare capability is one of the F-35’s defining attributes and, in the eyes of many analysts, one of its most important competitive advantages over fourth-generation fighter aircraft. The AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare system integrated into all F-35 variants provides the aircraft with threat detection, identification, and geolocation across a wide frequency spectrum, enabling pilots to detect and react to radar emissions and missile guidance signals before those threats can successfully engage the aircraft.

The system also supports electronic attack functions, allowing the F-35 to jam or deceive adversary radar and communications systems, and it feeds data into the aircraft’s broader sensor fusion architecture that integrates inputs from radar, electro-optical systems, and datalinks into a single tactical picture for the pilot. Modernizing that system is not a routine maintenance action — it is a direct response to the continuous evolution of adversary air defense capabilities, particularly those developed by China and Russia, which have invested heavily in radar technologies specifically designed to detect and track low-observable aircraft like the F-35.