Northrop wins $61M to upgrade Growler’s jamming receivers

Before any American strike package enters defended enemy airspace, an EA-18G Growler goes in first to blind the radars, jam the communications, and break the targeting chain that would otherwise kill the jets behind it. The Navy invested $61 million to significantly improve that aircraft’s ears.

The Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland awarded Northrop Grumman Mission Systems a $61 million contract for the production and delivery of upgrade components for the AN/ALQ-218 tactical jamming receiver installed on the EA-18G Growler, the U.S. Navy’s dedicated airborne electronic warfare aircraft. The contract covers 28 processor unit upgrade assemblies, 30 Digital Measurement Receiver upgrade assemblies, and 77 Low Band Dedicated Receiver assemblies, with work running through February 2030. All funding was obligated at contract award from fiscal year 2026 Navy aircraft procurement accounts.

The EA-18G Growler is a specialized variant of the F/A-18F Super Hornet, built by Boeing at its St. Louis facilities and flown by a crew of two: a pilot and a naval flight officer who operates the electronic warfare suite. Where a standard F/A-18F carries bombs and air-to-air missiles to attack targets directly, the Growler’s payload is electromagnetic: it suppresses and destroys enemy air defense radars, jams communications networks, geolocates hostile emitters for targeting by other aircraft, and disrupts the battlefield electronics that give an adversary the ability to detect and engage American forces. The aircraft’s mission spectrum includes suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses, standoff and escort jamming, communications disruption, and real-time electronic intelligence gathering. The Navy operates approximately 160 Growlers distributed across carrier air wings and land-based electronic attack squadrons, and the aircraft has been deployed in every major U.S. air campaign since its introduction in 2008.

The AN/ALQ-218, produced by Northrop Grumman’s Mission Systems division in Linthicum, Maryland, is the sensory core of the entire Growler electronic warfare system. The AN/ALQ-218 is a passive sensor system that functions as a radar warning receiver, electronic support measures system, and electronic intelligence collector, capable of operating across RF bands 0, 1, 2, and 3, covering pulsed and continuous-wave radar emissions while providing specific emitter identification. Passive means the system emits nothing itself, listening across the electromagnetic spectrum rather than broadcasting. This allows the Growler crew to build an extremely detailed picture of the radar and communications environment before committing to any jamming action, identifying the specific type of each threat system, its location, and its operating mode, before deciding what to do about it.

The upgrade components covered by the new contract address two elements of the AN/ALQ-218 that are critical to performance in modern electronic warfare environments. The processor unit upgrade, 28 assemblies of which are being delivered under this contract, handles the computational tasks of sorting, classifying, and prioritizing the enormous volume of electromagnetic signals the receivers collect in a modern threat environment, where dozens of radar and communications systems may be operating simultaneously across overlapping frequency bands. The Digital Measurement Receiver, 30 upgrade assemblies of which are included, is the component responsible for measuring the precise characteristics of intercepted signals with the accuracy required to identify specific radar and communications systems rather than generic signal categories. The 77 Low Band Dedicated Receiver assemblies address the lower frequency portion of the radio frequency spectrum, covering the wavelengths used by long-range surveillance radars, communications links, and some early warning systems that higher frequency receivers cannot efficiently cover.

The ALQ-218 airborne electronic attack systems enhancement involves a wideband RF receiver that detects, identifies, and geolocates enemy radar and communications emitters, with the enhancement improving sensitivity, processing speed, and threat classification in dense electromagnetic environments. That capability improvement matters specifically because the electromagnetic environment that modern military operations take place in has grown dramatically more complex compared to when the Growler first entered service. China and Russia have both invested heavily in frequency-agile radar systems that rapidly change their operating frequencies and waveforms to complicate detection and identification, sophisticated electronic warfare systems designed to counter NATO jamming aircraft, and dense communications networks that generate enormous volumes of signals traffic. An AN/ALQ-218 that was adequate for the electromagnetic environment of 2010 is measurably less capable against the environment that a Growler crew would face over the Taiwan Strait or the Barents Sea today.

The Growler upgrade program of which these AN/ALQ-218 components are a part extends well beyond the receiver systems. The broader Growler Block II modernization program, which the Navy began contracting in earnest through Boeing in 2025 and 2026, also includes the AN/ALQ-249 Next Generation Jammer Mid-Band pod developed by Raytheon, which replaces the decades-old AN/ALQ-99 Tactical Jamming System with an active electronically scanned array jammer capable of far more power, precision, and flexibility than its predecessor. Additional Block II upgrades include open mission systems modular computing architecture, reactive electronic attack with machine learning algorithms that allow the system to autonomously adapt jamming techniques based on observed threat responses, and Joint Tactical Terminal and satellite communications upgrades. The AN/ALQ-218 receiver improvements funded by the current contract provide the sensing foundation that all of those offensive jamming capabilities depend on: you cannot jam what you have not first detected, identified, and precisely characterized.

The EA-18G’s role became publicly visible in January 2026 when U.S. forces used Growlers to suppress Venezuelan air defense systems during Operation Absolute Resolve, enabling special operations helicopters to reach their objective and return without being engaged by surface-to-air missiles. That operation illustrated in compressed form what Growler crews practice for every day: arriving in a defended airspace before the strike package, mapping the threat, blinding or destroying what can be blinded or destroyed, and opening the window that other aircraft fly through. The AN/ALQ-218 upgrade contract is how the Navy ensures that window keeps opening, against threats considerably more sophisticated than what Venezuela operates.