JSTARS Team

Northrop Grumman announced today that it will team with Gulfstream and L-3 Communications to compete to recapitalize the Air Force's Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System fleet.

Northrop, JSTARS incumbent, and L-3 had already announced their interest in the program but not as a team with Gulfstream, which is a subsidiary of General Dynamics.

Tom Vice, Northrop Grumman's corporate vice president and president of the company's aerospace systems sector, said in a June 12 statement that the team's expertise is "unmatched."

"We meet or exceed the Air Force's acquisition requirements by integrating our team's independently developed, mature and proven systems at the lowest cost, with the lowest risk to provide an innovative acquisition solution," Vice said.

Other companies eying the program are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Raytheon.

Inside the Air Force reported last week that House lawmakers want the service to prepare a report outlining plans to keep the JSTARS fleet operational well into the next decade:

The House Appropriations Committee, in its mark of the Pentagon's fiscal year 2016 spending bill, would direct the Air Force to detail how it plans to keep the JSTARS -- and its suite of sensors and computers, some of which are long overdue to be updated -- current until the replacement system begins coming online in the next decade.

"Since the Air Force's Next-Generation JSTARS aircraft is not expected to achieve initial operational capability until 2023, one year later than previously projected, the Air Force will be operating the existing JSTARS fleet until well into the 2020s," a report accompanying the committee's bill states.

The House lawmakers direct the Air Force secretary to submit a report next spring that details how the service "will address global air traffic management mandates, as well as the potential degradation of mission performance due to projected [diminishing manufacturing sources] requirements, until the E-8 is replaced by the next-generation systems," the panel wrote in the report.