Northrop Grumman Corporation has received a $325 million contract from the U.S. Air Force for continued support of the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS).
The 2021 contract executes the Total System Support Responsibility (TSSR) program for the E-8C Joint STARS fleet with Northrop Grumman as the prime systems integrator for total support and sustainment to the U.S. Air Force.
“We remain fully committed to delivering essential services for Joint STARS that Northrop Grumman uniquely provides to our warfighters,” said Janice Zilch, vice president, manned airborne surveillance programs, Northrop Grumman.
“The overall modification and sustainment work will ensure continuous safety and system readiness for the E-8C fleet against evolving threat environments.”
The Joint STARS TSSR program will provide programme management, engineering technical support, aircrew and maintenance training, supply chain and spares management, technical data and publications, program depot maintenance and overall customer support.
According to Northrop Grumman:
“Joint STARS delivers real-time battle management situational awareness and wide area search essential to the warfighter through continued investment and development in its mission systems hardware and software. It combines high fidelity wide-area moving target detection, synthetic aperture radar imagery and robust battle management systems to locate, classify and track surface targets in all weather conditions from standoff distances.”
Perhaps we need to buy a couple of these to replace our Sentinnels
You’re forgetting the very reason Sentinel was cut is due to lack of money to upgrade them and prevent obseletion.
Would have been nice if they could have upgraded the radar to the Multi-Platform Radar Technology Insertion Program (MP-RTIP) Radar . Much more capable than what the JSTARS currently has.
Wasn’t J-STARS supposed to be out?
Too big a cash cow for a few Congressmen/womens’ states. They going to milk this old bird as long as they can.
Total claptrap. The USAF J-STARS proposed retirement date is December 31, 2029. That’s almost nine years from now. This is a normal contractor support program.
Like to think that, if the US are planning to upgrade their J-STARs, we follow suit. Don’t want another E-3 AWACS episode, where ours become less effective because we failed to keep them ‘current’.