U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jackie Zheng, left, avionics specialist, 113th Wing, District of Columbia National Guard (DCNG), briefs Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, right, director, Air National Guard, on the radar being replaced by the Northrop Grumman SABR Active Electronically Scanned Array radar now equipped on F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft assigned to the DCNG on Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on June 9, 2022 (U.S. Air National Guard Photo)
By Frank Wolfe |
1 year ago |
02/01/2023

The U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin [LMT], and L3Harris Technologies [LHX] held a critical design review (CDR) last month for the L3Harris AN/ALQ-254(V)1 Viper Shield electronic warfare system for foreign military sales (FMS) of the Block 70/72 F-16 fighter. The Air Force said that Viper Shield passed the CDR.

Viper Shield, which is to provide offensive and defensive EW through multiple digital radio frequency, memory-bassed jamming, “is the highest-performance, lowest-risk EW option for F-16 Vipers in an increasingly dangerous world,” Ed Zoiss, president of L3Harris Space and Airborne Systems, in Melbourne, Fla., said in a Jan. 30 statement.

L3Harris said that late last year Viper Shield “demonstrated interoperability” with the Northrop Grumman [NOC] AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR), an Active Electronically Scanned Array. Northrop Grumman received an up to $1 billion contract for 372 F-16 SABRs in December 2019 (Defense Daily, Oct. 15, 2020).

“With the approach of the next [Viper Shield] critical milestone in the second quarter of 2023, Viper Shield will return to the Lockheed Martin Systems Integration Lab with newly integrated hardware and software to demonstrate full integration of the next planned increment of capabilities with the F-16 Block 70/72 FMS aircraft,” L3Harris said on Jan. 30.

While Northrop Grumman’s AN/ALQ-257 Integrated Viper Electronic Warfare Suite (IVEWS) beat out the L3Harris Viper Shield for equipping U.S. F-16s, L3Harris anticipates that its system may one day go on U.S. F-16s.

Last March, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) said that the command’s Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate issued an unpriced change order (UCO) to Northrop Grumman for IVEWS and that AFMC plans to begin IVEWS production and fielding next year (Defense Daily, March 16, 2022).

The ALQ-257 “leverages an open systems, ultra wideband architecture providing greater instantaneous bandwidth needed to defeat modern threats” and “shares a common technology baseline with the AC/MC-130J Radio Frequency Countermeasures Program and (Northrop Grumman) AN/APR-39 radar warning receivers,” Northrop Grumman has said.

IVEWS “is vital to increase the protection of our F-16 operators as they execute their missions in contested environments,” Air Force Maj. Charles Prichard, chief of electronic warfare integration at AFMC’s Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate, said in an AFMC statement last March.
AFMC said then that IVEWS will allow future upgrades for the F-16, including the fiber optic towed decoy, adaptive/cognitive processing, and Open System Architecture compliance.
The U.S. government “offers interested FMS countries a choice of EW systems on F-16 Block 70/72 Foreign Military Sales aircraft, which is typically determined by performance requirements and their ministry of defense preferences,” AFMC wrote in an email answer to questions on Feb. 1. “Each FMS partner, as a sovereign entity, chooses the EW solution that is the best overall fit for their needs. Competition among EW suppliers often results in improved performance and lower costs for all F-16 partners, including the USAF.”