Northrop Ready to Start Production on New F-16 EW Suite; First Units Going to Middle East

Four years after being selected to provide a self-defense electronic warfare suite for the F-16, Northrop Grumman expects to enter production with the ALQ-257 Integrated Viper Electronic Warfare Suite, or IVEWS, as soon as next year and to field the system in combat in the Middle East as quickly as possible.

The initial production tranche for the Air Force will be on 72 Block 50 F-16s, with more likely to come as production spools up, Northrop vice president of targeting and survivability Jim Conroy told Air & Space Forces Magazine in an interview.

In the reconciliation bill passed by Congress this summer, there was $187 million allocated to “wrap up some of the final stages of [engineering and manufacturing development], some of the formal test activities, and then actually start some initial production,” Conroy said.

The fiscal 2026 appropriations bill—still yet to pass—has $250 million for the “first full-rate production lot,” Conroy added. “So it’s a fully-funded program. We’re ready to start production.”

The initial 72 F-16s are to be fitted under an Urgent Operational Need from U.S. Central Command, which determined the suites are required for F-16s operating in the theater.

U.S. Vipers there have been busy over the past few years. F-16s based in the Middle East in the last two years have shot down Iranian drones fired at Israel, operated above surface-to-air missiles fielded by the regime of former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad and his Russian backers, faced off Moscow’s warplanes, come under threat from Iran and its proxies, fended off Houthi attacks out of Yemen—and even gone into Iran itself as part of Operation Midnight Hammer. The Houthis in particular have been innovative with their air defenses and downed around two dozen American MQ-9 Reaper drones.

“This is one of many efforts to keep our fourth-gen platforms competitive as the adversary advances,” Lt. Gen. Derek France, the commander of Air Forces Central, told reporters at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September. “That’s the bumper sticker, if you will.”

That bumper sticker was part of a push by France and his team for higher-ups to act fast.

“Both CENTCOM and the Department look at a myriad of competing things to figure out what their priorities are,” France said. “But that’s the push from us. It’s one of several things that we think are important for us.”

The system will work on any of the “post-Block” F-16 aircraft, meaning Block 40 and later, Northrop says. The Air Force has about 600 such fighters, though it has not officially committed to buying IVEWS for all of them.

“So, how fast can we go? How quick can we get them installed? Those are the conversations we’re having with the U.S. Air Force right now,” Conroy said. Final assembly will take place at Northrop’s Rolling Meadows, Ill., facilities, but Conroy said the supply base spans many states. There’s no official timeline for filling the requirement; it’s “as soon as they can … get them,” Conroy said.    

Northrop started flight testing on IVEWS in September 2024, and after 250 hours in the air, the operational assessment finished in April. The system was deemed effective against representative threats, clearing the way for the Air Force to spend money to buy the system. The Urgent Operational Need came in September, and the IVEWS was successfully integrated with the Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR) this month, according to an Oct. 27 Northrop press release.

The ALQ-257 is an internal line-replaceable unit, unlike earlier F-16 self-protection electronic warfare systems like the ALQ-131 or ALQ-184 pods, which are mounted on the centerline station under the aircraft. That means the system will free up an external station for fuel or weapons.

The electronic warfare domain is “continuing to advance at an exponential rate,” Conroy said, and the F-16 is in urgent need of a modern, integrated EW suite.

“It is absolutely critical for survivability, given the changing [radio frequency] environment,” he said. A number of international F-16 partners are likely interested as a result. Turkey has already signed up to equip its F-16s with IVEWS when it becomes available.

The threat environment “is not the same … that we had over two decades ago,” when the Air Force last faced a combat opponent with modern air defense systems, Conroy said. In those days, threat installations were mostly fixed.

“You knew exactly where the threat radars were and you could almost pre-plan the missions” to deal with them, he said. “You knew where they were operating and they were always operating the same way. It was a really stable landscape.”

Now, threat radars are largely mobile, and unlikely to reveal their location until just before starting an engagement at close range.

“What’s happening is, they’re waiting until you’re within the weapons engagement zone, and then they turn on. So you can’t just pre-plan how you’re going to execute your mission, because you don’t know where the threats are going to be,” he said.

The radio frequency environment is also more densely populated with cell towers, TV and Wi-Fi stations, satellite radios, “and the adversary uses all this RF noise to hide,” Conroy said.

The IVEWS sifts through all those signals, finds the ones that pose a threat—Conroy called it “the needle in the haystack”—and jams them.

“And just as our systems have become more and more software-dependent … the threat radars have also done that. So you need to have a system that is extensible and is adaptable to that changing environment,” he said.

The IVEWS does not require the F-16’s active electronically-scanned array radar to work, Conroy said. The two systems can use the same portion of the spectrum at the same time without interfering with one another.

“There is no filtering, blanking, or reduction of the radar’s coapabilities while IVEWS protects the platform,” Northrop said in a press release. “The two systems communicate digitally on a pulse-to-pulse basis, so each is aware of what portion of the spectrum the other is using at every moment. Pilots can carry out intense radar tasks without compromising the ability of IVEWS to counter adversary threats.”  

The bulk of IVEWS operational testing—in a “relevant environment”—was completed by the end of 2024, but the two F-16s used in the evaluation have continued to fly out of Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., since, racking up more than 200 sorties and 300 flight hours, Conroy said, “to find the limits of the system.” The system flew in the 2021 exercise Northern Lightning.

Conroy said the IVEWS was not designed to harmonize with other fighter EW suites, like the F-15’s Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System, but they don’t interfere with one another—as seen in USAF exercises—and there’s no reason the data they collect can’t be shared, Conroy said.

The aircraft has “flown in one-v-one conditions, one-v-many … against the most advanced platforms. They’ve gone against ground platforms, surface, and a combination of all of those.”

The IVEWS is not limited to detection, identification, and countermeasures, but can also geo-locate adversary emitters. On some previous systems, geo-location couldn’t be done simultaneously with the other functions. The geo-location happens automatically and is transparent to the pilot.

Northrop is working with Lockheed on supplying IVEWS to foreign customers of the new-build F-16V if they request the system. Installs on new-build aircraft would happen at Lockheed’s Greenville, S.C. facility, but can be done elsewhere as well.