pod

Lockheed Martin has received a new full-rate production contract, valued at $233 million, for Block II IRST21 infrared search and track sensors to go into pods for U.S. Navy and U.S. Air National Guard fighters. For the Navy, in particular, this is a notable move forward given the reliability and quality control issues the service has faced with its podded configuration of the IRST21 for years now.

The Navy officially declared initial operational capability (IOC) with its version of the IRST21, also known by the designation AN/ASG-34A(V)1, back in November 2024. Limited operational evaluations, including as part combat operations in the Middle East, had been ongoing since at least 2020.

The Navy’s pod, developed for use on the service’s the F/A-18E/F Super Hornets consists of a modified FPU-13/A drop tank with the IRST sensor in a redesigned front section, as you can learn about more in this past TWZ feature. Air Force F-15C/D Eagles, which are now in the process of being retired, and F-16C/D Vipers, have been flying for years with IRST21s integrated into modular, multi-purpose Legion Pods from Lockheed Martin. Legion Pods with IRST21s are part of the sensor suite for the Air Force’s new F-15EX Eagle IIs, as well. Though they have the same IRST sensor at their core, which allows for shared contracts like the one announced today, the Navy and Air Force efforts are distinct, with major differences in the respective pod designs.

The Navy’s pod, developed for use on the service’s the F/A-18E/F Super Hornets consists of a modified FPU-13/A drop tank with the IRST sensor in a redesigned front section, as you can learn about more in this past TWZ feature. Air Force F-15C/D Eagles, which are now in the process of being retired, and F-16C/D Vipers, have been flying for years with IRST21s integrated into modular, multi-purpose Legion Pods from Lockheed Martin. Legion Pods with IRST21s are part of the sensor suite for the Air Force’s new F-15EX Eagle IIs, as well.

As designed, the ASG-34A(V)1 has long been set to offer a valuable new way for Navy Super Hornets to spot and track airborne threats. IRST systems offer particular advantages when it comes to detecting stealthy crewed and uncrewed aircraft, as well as missiles, designed to evade traditional radars. IRSTs also scan passively, so they do not send out signals that can alert an opponent to the fact that they are being tracked, and are also immune to expanding adversary electronic warfare capabilities. The information from IRSTs can also be fuzed with that from radars, datalinks, and other passive sensors to provide major synergistic capabilities.

When carried by a Super Hornet, “the IRST acts as a complementary sensor to the aircraft’s AN/APG-79 fire control radar in a heavy electronic attack or radar-denied environment,” according to the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Test and Evaluation. “It operates autonomously, or in combination with other sensors, to support the guidance of beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles.”

IRST systems, in general, have experienced a renaissance within the U.S. military amid a steadily growing ecosystem of stealthy aerial threats, especially emanating from China. IRST technologies are also evolving, including with the emergence of systems that can be distributed around an aircraft using smaller individual sensors, which are also sometimes less complex and costly.

The Navy’s particular efforts to field this capability for its Super Hornets, which trace all the way back to 2007, have faced hurdles. The service only formally initiated work on the improved Block II IRST21 in 2018, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional Watchdog. A Block II prototype pod first flew on a Super Hornet the following year.

Quality control and reliability issues continued to dog the program afterward, as you can read more about here. Following the IOC declaration, a full-rate production decision was expected to come in January 2025, but was delayed.

“The program reported that it would not reach a full-rate production decision by its baseline schedule threshold in January 2025 due to delays incurred during flight testing,” according to a GAO report published in June 2025. “IRST officials told us that operational tests were delayed by 2 months due to software defects that caused IRST pods to falsely report overheating.”

“Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) officials told us that the defect was relatively easy to fix and would likely have been addressed during developmental testing had the program allocated more time for that testing,” the GAO report added. “The program now expects a full-rate decision in June 2025. This is the second time the program breached its baseline schedule in the past 3 years.”

GAO’s June 2025 report also said that DOT&E remained of the view that “the pods were extremely unreliable.”

“These officials said that the program improved pod reliability as it made software updates but only managed to achieve 14 hours mean time between operational mission failures – short of the 40 hours required,” the report said. “As such, DOT&E officials said that deploying the IRST pods without improving their reliability would transfer risk to the Navy’s fleet. Program officials noted that IRST initial capability was achieved without any noted limitations.”

“IRST Block II operational flight test events demonstrated tactically relevant detection ranges against operationally relevant targets and the ability to translate these long-range target detections into stable system tracks to facilitate weapons employment,” DO&TE had said in its own most recent annual report, covering work done during the 2024 Fiscal Year. “The Navy must continue to improve the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet’s operating software and address existing deficiencies to effectively integrate IRST into aircraft fire control solutions.”

“IRST Block II demonstrated significant reliability problems during operational testing. Throughout the test period, IRST Block II suffered from hardware and software deficiencies, which required the aircrew to restart the pod multiple times,” that report added. “Troubleshooting and repair often exceeded the abilities of Navy maintenance crews and required assistance from Lockheed Martin. Many of these problems were discovered during integrated and operational test after the Navy completed a minimal developmental test program with the representative hardware.”

It is curious to note that there has been no commensurate reporting of reliability or other issues with the IRST21/Legion Pod combination that has been seen flying on Air National Guard F-15s and F-16s for years now. At the same time, whether or not the Air Force has experienced any troubles with those IRST pods is not entirely clear.

To what degree remaining issues on the Navy side have been addressed and/or mitigated is also unclear, and TWZ has reached out the service, as well as Lockheed Martin, for more information.

The decision now to move ahead with full-rate production of the IRST21 is certainly a new vote confidence, especially when it comes to the Navy program.

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New pictures offer the best look to date of an Air Force HC-130J Combat King II combat search and rescue aircraft (CSAR) carrying an Angry Kitten electronic warfare pod. Originally developed to simulate enemy electronic warfare attacks during training and testing, Angry Kitten has been evolving into a system that could help protect friendly aircraft from those threats during real combat missions. Pairing HC-130Js and the pods is now being eyed as part of the answer to an increasingly vexing question of how to provide adequate CSAR coverage for future operations in and around heavily contested airspace.

Fred Taleghani of FreddyB Aviation Photography caught the HC-130J Combat King II with the Angry Kitten pod flying around Point Mugu, California, back on September 11. The aircraft in question belongs to the California Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing, which is based at Moffett Federal Airfield, situated some 275 miles to the northwest. HC-130Js can support CSAR missions in various ways, including by helping to deploy pararescuemen, refueling HH-60W Jolly Green IIs and other helicopters, as well as Osprey tilt-rotors, in mid-air, and acting as airborne command and control nodes.

The Angry Kitten pod is seen mounted via a Special Airborne Mission Installation and Response (SABIR) system installed in place of the HC-130J’s left rear paratrooper door. SABIR includes a pylon on an arm that can be extended below the aircraft’s fuselage while in flight, giving whatever is loaded onto it a more unobstructed field of view. The replacement paratrooper door also features an enlarged observer’s window. It can be fitted with a chute for launching sonobouys, smoke markers, and other similar tubular payloads, though it is not clear if that capability is installed on this Combat King II. The port for the chute is visible, but it may be blanked off. The U.S. military and foreign armed forces use SABIR as a relatively simple way to integrate other sensors and systems onto different C-130 variants, as you can read more about here.

The Angry Kitten-toting HC-130J is understood to have been in the Point Mugu area at the time to take part in the U.S. Navy-led Gray Flag 2025 test and evaluation exercise, which ran between September 5 and 19. It was staged out of Naval Base Ventura County and involved sorties over the expansive Point Mugu Sea Range. Gray Flags are regularly used to showcase new and improved munitions and other advanced capabilities, such as electronic warfare systems, including ones that are still in development. Units from across the U.S. military, as well as key American allies, routinely take part. Combat King IIs have participated in these exercises in the past.

As noted, Angry Kitten is not new. Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) began development of the podded system in 2013, and it first started flying under the wings of F-16 Viper fighters in 2017. Angry Kitten is an outgrowth of the AN/ALQ-167 electronic warfare pod, variants of which have been in use for decades, primarily to mimic hostile electronic warfare threats for training and testing purposes. There are also documented examples of AN/ALQ-167s being used on aircraft during actual combat missions, at least on an ad hoc basis.

Unlike the older AN/ALQ-167s, Angry Kitten is designed to be more readily modifiable and updatable to more rapidly adapt in parallel with the threat ecosystem. This is enabled in part by advanced Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) technology, which allows radio frequency (RF) signals to be detected and ‘captured,’ as well as manipulated and retransmitted. Electronic warfare systems that use DRFM can project signals from hostile radars (and radar seekers on missiles) back at them to create false or otherwise confusing tracks. Data collected via DRFM can also be used to help improve and refine the system’s capabilities, as well as for other intelligence exploitation purposes.

In general, electronic warfare systems need to be able to accurately detect, categorize, and respond to waveforms based on information contained in their built-in threat libraries to work most effectively. This, in turn, requires specialists to routinely reprogram systems to keep them as up to date as possible. Automating and otherwise shortening that process at every step of the way by developing what are known as cognitive electronic warfare capabilities has become a major area of interest for the entire U.S. military. The absolute ‘holy grail’ of that concept is an electronic warfare system capable of adapting its programming autonomously in real-time, even in the middle of a mission, as you can read more about here.

With all this in mind, and given prior operational use of the AN/ALQ-167, it’s not hard to see how interest has grown in using Angry Kitten to help shield friendly aircraft from threats during real-world missions.

“We had a jammer called ‘Angry Kitten.’ It was built to be an adversary air jamming tool,” now-retired Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly, then commander of Air Combat Command (ACC), told TWZ and other outlets back in 2022. “And all of a sudden, the blue team said, ‘you know, hey, we kind of need that, can we have that for us?’ And so I see this iterating and testing our way into this.”

To date, in addition to F-16s and HC-130s, Angry Kitten is known to have flown on Air Force A-10 Warthog ground attack jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones, as well as Navy F/A-18s fighters. As of March, the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center (AATC) said there were plans to at least evaluate the pod on KC-135 and KC-46 aerial refueling tankers.

It’s also interesting to note the parallels here with the U.S. Marine Corps’ Intrepid Tiger II electronic warfare system, which has been fielded in different podded forms for the AV-8B Harrier jump jet and the UH-1Y Venom armed light utility helicopter. A roll-on/roll-off version for the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor is in development, and there are plans to integrate the capability in some form onto the KC-130J tanker/transport. Different variants of Intrepid Tiger also offer degrees of secondary intelligence-gathering capabilities.

AATC has also explicitly highlighted the potential benefits of combining Angry Kitten with the HC-130J in the context of the CSAR mission.

“Angry Kitten pod is showing promising results in protecting larger radar cross-section (RCS) platforms that traditionally lack robust electronic warfare capabilities,” according to a release AATC put out in March. “This success is particularly significant for combat search and rescue platforms that often operate in contested environments without electronic warfare protection.”

“We had minimal hopes for what we could do for larger body aircraft, but it’s showing that we actually have good effects,” Chris Culver, an electronic warfare engineer involved in the work, had said.

For years now, TWZ has been highlighting growing concerns about the basic feasibility of traditional fixed-wing CSAR aircraft and helicopters performing their mission amid a threat ecosystem that is steadily expanding in scale and scope. Future high-end fights, such as one against China in the Pacific, will involve air operations in areas where even stealthy platforms are expected to be increasingly at risk. In 2022, the Air Force announced it was scaling back purchases of new HH-60W CSAR helicopters in light of this reality. Top service officials have talked in the past about having to approach this still critical mission set differently going forward.

“There are a lot of other assets around that, if somebody goes down at sea, for example, we could use to pick them up,” then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in 2023. “We’re going to do it [the CSAR mission] with existing assets, either our own or provided by other military departments.”

Many of these same general concerns apply to the Air Force’s existing non-stealthy KC-135 and KC-46 tanker fleets. Air Force officials regularly point to add-on defensive capabilities, which might include Angry Kitten, as one near-term option for increasing the survivability of its key aerial refueling assets.

Integrating Angry Kitten on larger aircraft could have other implications as another important stepping stone for new cognitive electronic warfare capabilities.

“The C-130 testing features innovative real-time updates to electronic warfare techniques,” according to the AATC release in March. “Unlike the F-16 tests, where pre-programmed mission data files were used, the C-130 testing includes development engineers aboard the aircraft who can modify jamming techniques mid-mission based on feedback from range control.”

“They are making changes [in] real-time to the techniques and pushing updates to the pod, seeing the change in real-time,” Culver, the electronic warfare engineer, had also said. “This approach allows for rapid optimization of jamming techniques against various threat systems.”

A follow-on Advanced Test and Training Capability (ATTACK) pod, also referred to unofficially as Angry Kitten Increment 2 Block 2, is also now in the works. The “next-generation system will feature a complete hardware refresh, transitioning from analog to digital receivers for improved sensitivity and frequency agility,” according to AATC.

Altogether, the HC-130J seen carrying the Angry Kitten pod around Point Mugu earlier this month is an important sign of things to come.

Contact the author: [email protected]

Footage has emerged taken from the cockpit of a Russian fighter jet, showing a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol plane fitted with a secretive radar pod during a mission over the Black Sea. The video underscores the growing importance of the P-8 for intelligence gathering in critical theaters such as the Black Sea, an active war zone, where a tense standoff continues between NATO and Russian assets, on the margins of the conflict in Ukraine.

The video in question was published on the Russian aviation-connected Fighterbomber channel on Telegram and shows a mission that reportedly took place today, August 27. Publicly available flight tracking data does show a Navy P-8 mission over the Black Sea today, although we can’t be sure it was the same aircraft involved.

A tweet with embedded flight tracking data shows a P-8 flight from today, out of Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy, and flying for four hours over the Black Sea, including at a distance of around 50 nautical miles from Russian airspace, off the Black Sea city of Sochi:

It’s also unclear what Russian aircraft was involved, although it is certainly a fighter from the Flanker series, perhaps a Su-35S, a type that has been noted flying such interception missions in the past.

What’s most notable about the video, however, is the extended antenna for the AN/APS-154 Advanced Airborne Sensor, or AAS, the elongated pod that is sometimes seen fitted under the P-8’s fuselage. As we have discussed in depth in the past, this is a powerful radar system that entered development in 2009 and began testing in 2014. This may even be the first time that the pod has been observed in the Black Sea. It’s also very rare to see the antenna extended, usually it is tucked tightly below the aircraft’s fuselage in its stowed position.

P-8A 169336 returns from a short flight, showing off a new kit.

It Is now equipped with the AN/APS-154 AAS, and the Lockheed Multi User Objective System. This is now the second P-8 in the Navy fleet with this setup. pic.twitter.com/0qxklubbvw

— 𝗦𝗥_𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 (@SR_Planespotter) April 28, 2025

The footage provides an especially good and very rare view of how the pod is deployed in flight, using the Special Mission Pod Deployment Mechanism (SMPDM). By extending the pod well below the fuselage while in flight, the radar’s fields of view are no longer obstructed by the P-8’s two engines.

Details about the AAS pod and its capabilities remain strictly limited. We know that it was developed by Raytheon and that it is based around an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. This has a moving target indicator (MTI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) functionality, making it suitable for tracking moving targets below at sea and on land. It is able to detect and make SAR imagery of ships at considerable distances and can also collect very high-quality radar imagery of objects of interest for further analysis, even at night and in poor weather.

In addition, the pod may well have secondary electronic warfare capabilities. You can read much more about this sensor and what it offers to the Navy’s Poseidon fleet here.

The Black Sea, with its combination of maritime activity and proximity to an intense ground war in Ukraine, is an ideal theater of operations for the AAS-equipped P-8.

As TWZ has observed in the past:

“The AAS is also specifically designed to work in littoral regions where it might have to scan both water and land areas simultaneously. Traditional surface search radars are typically optimized for one environment or the other, or have dedicated modes for each, and generally have difficulty covering both at the same time.”

Since before the full-scale Russian invasion, an armada of NATO intelligence-gathering aircraft has been patrolling over the Black Sea, as well as elsewhere in proximity to Russian and Ukrainian borders. RC-135 Rivet Joints and RQ-4 drones, to name just two, have long been staples in the airspace over the Black Sea.

As for the P-8, its value in the region, especially when equipped with the AAS pod, is obvious, providing the ability to monitor, with great acuity, various objects of interest, including moving ones, both in the water and on land.

Having the AAS-equipped P-8 in this area, combined with the aircraft’s existing electronic intelligence, networking and data-sharing capabilities, makes for a very powerful standoff targeting platform. Data can be fed to other assets in the air, at sea, or on land. It can detect ships moving from great distances, even small ones, and than ‘image’ them using its powerful radar. Detecting and cataloging enemy air defense emissions and radar mapping shore and inland targets is all in a day’s work for this highly unique aircraft.

The aircraft, outfitted in this way, also provides a partial replacement for the EP-3E Aeries II, which has now departed U.S. Navy service. The AN/APS-154 is also a direct successor to the equally secretive AN/APS-149 Littoral Surveillance Radar System, another podded Raytheon AESA radar that was carried by some P-3C Orions.

The latest encounter between a P-8 and a Russian Flanker seems to have passed without incident, although there is certainly a precedent for some more tense intercepts over the same waters.

In September 2022, a Russian Su-27 Flanker fighter fired an air-to-air missile toward a U.K. Royal Air Force RC-135W Rivet Joint over the Black Sea, although the details of exactly why that happened remain somewhat unclear.

According to one account, a Su-27 pilot misinterpreted an instruction from a radar operator on the ground and thought he had permission to fire on the RC-135. The Russian pilot achieved a missile lock on the British aircraft, then fired a missile that “did not launch properly.”

In March 2023, an encounter between a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drone and two Russian Su-27 fighters over the Black Sea resulted in the drone being lost. A video released by the Pentagon soon after seems to confirm that one of the Su-27s struck the drone’s propeller, although it remains unclear to what degree that action was deliberate or a misjudgment.

U.S. Department of Defense video showing part of the encounter between a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 and two Russian Su-27 fighter jets over the Black Sea on March 14, 2023, that resulted in the drone being lost:

The video of the P-8 being intercepted by a Russian fighter once again highlights the relatively intense activity by surveillance aircraft and the fighters that monitor them in some of the tensest skies in Europe.

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