US Air Force Could Award Long-Range Radar Contract Next Week

The U.S. Air Force is close to naming the winner of a contract to produce long-range, ground-based sensors for tracking hostile aircraft and missiles, Defense News reported Wednesday.

Aaron Mehta writes that Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) and Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) are competing for the Air Force’s Three Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar development program.

The 3DELRR contract could be awarded next week and the selected contractor will work to build 35 air defense radars for the service, according to Defense News.

Mehta reports the branch plans a critical design review of the system by the end of the first quarter of 2015.

The Air Force also expects the technology to enter low-rate initial production in early fiscal 2018 and achieve initial operational capability by fiscal 2020.

3DELRRs will be built to replace the branch’s legacy AN/TPS-75 field radars, according to Mehta’s article.

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New Threats, New Technologies Push New USAF Radar Program

WASHINGTON — For years, the AN/TPS-75 has been the US Air Force’s “grab and go” radar system. Get it into an operational field, set it up, and it provides wide-range coverage of what is going on in the skies.

But like so much of the service’s technology, the TPS-75 needs revitalization. The threat environment has changed, and new technologies could render the radar “incapable of detecting some current and emerging threats,” according to service budget documents.
Enter the Three Dimensional Expeditionary Long Range Radar (3DELRR) program. The service plans to replace the TPS-75 with 3DELRR toward the end of the decade, assuming the budget holds.

In the Pentagon’s fiscal 2014 budget request, the service asked for $70.1 million in research, development, test and evaluation funds for the radar program, a figure Congress knocked down to $54.1 million in the National Defense Authorization Act.

For fiscal 2015, the Air Force has again sought an increase, this time to $88.8 million. That request rises to $98.2 million in fiscal 2016, and then drops to $68.6 million in fiscal 2017, $24.7 million in fiscal 2018 and $35.7 million in fiscal 2019.

A timeline included in the budget notes a goal to get 3DELRR out for initial deployment by fiscal 2020, which may explain why those figures drop over time; as the program gets closer to procurement, the need for research funding slows down. Low-rate initial production is scheduled to begin by early fiscal 2018.