The Navy in March awarded BAE Systems a $95 million contract for research, development and low-rate initial production on electronic warfare (EW) Advanced Survivability Pods for the P-8A Poseidon aircraft, the company said this week.
The contract, awarded March 29, plans for the work to mostly occur at BAE’s facility in Nashua, N.H., and Austin, Texas, and is expected to be finished by January 2030.
This cost-plus-fixed-fee order is against a 2021 previously issued basic ordering agreement and includes $14 million in Navy funds obligated at the time of award in March.
The company noted the parent contract previously had BAE design, build, and test a demonstration pod. The EMD contract followed successful airworthiness and effectiveness testing.
Jayne Shelton, a program director At BAE Systems’ Countermeasure and Electromagnetic Attack business, told Defense Daily the EMD contract is expected to be complete in 2027, with EMD pod shipsets delivered to the Navy in late 2026 and early 2027.
The company this week explained these pods provide early threat detection and counter inbound threats via electronic warfare.
It also underscored the pods have an open architecture design that allows for quick and “affordable modernization” while being able to host third-party EW techniques and compatible with future threat-detection and decoy countermeasure capabilities.
“We’re working closely with the U.S. Navy to deliver innovative solutions to protect this critical, high-value aircraft. We quickly prototyped a very capable system using proven technology to defend against air-to-air and surface-to-air guided threats,” Don Davidson, director of Advanced Compact Electronic Warfare Solutions at BAE Systems, said in a statement.
BAE also said the pods are part of BAE’s Intrepid Shield layered approach to aircraft and ground survivability and it can be “rapidly adapted for other high-value airborne assets, enabling them to operate in contested environments.”