With upgrades to its electronic warfare system, the F-16 will continue to be one of the most capable fighters in the world for decades to come.
Commentary
While the U.S. Air Force has been talking for decades about replacing its F-16s with the F-35, the backbone of U.S. combat power is still provided by the
Air Force’s 935 F-16s, which run circles around the F-35 when it comes to providing real-world combat power via
sustained sortie generation rates that the F-35 can only dream about.
With upgrades to its electronic warfare system, the F-16 will continue to be one of the most capable fighters in the world for decades to come.
The electronic warfare upgrades for new Block 70/72 F-16 “Super Vipers” for sale to foreign militaries will be provided by L3Harris,
which is under contract by Lockheed Martin to provide the systems. Northrup Grumman will be providing upgraded electronic warfare capabilities for
the Air Force’s existing F-16s.
Electronic warfare/electromagnetic warfare is a must for a modern fighter. It involves using the electromagnetic spectrum or directed energy to control the relevant electromagnetic space to attack an enemy or impede enemy operations. For example, an electronic warfare system on a fighter could be used to jam an enemy fighter’s ability to lock on to a target or provide a warning when the fighter is illuminated by radar or lasers, etc. In short, it uses electromagnetic waves to attack the enemy, protect the fighter and other friendly forces, and provide critical situational awareness that assists the fighter crew in decision-making, thereby increasing the likelihood of mission success.
For the brand new Block 70/72 F-16s, L3Harris will be providing a tailored all-digital electronic warfare system. This system, the AN/ALQ-254(V)1 “
Viper Shield,” completed its second interoperability test in November 2023 and is scheduled to go into production in quarter four of 2025. Going forward, it'll be the new electronic warfare baseline for Lockheed Martin’s newest, most advanced F-16s being sold to foreign countries.
The Viper Shield upgrade addresses new radar-based threats and is being tested to ensure that it’s fully interoperable with the F-16’s APG-83 fire control radar. The recently completed test demonstrated that Viper Shield’s electronic warfare functionality isn’t interfered with by the APG-83’s radar pulses. According to an L3Harris
statement, the 12-hour-plus test “proved Viper Shield’s ability to filter out signal processing streams from the APG-83 radar pulses without any performance compromise.”
According to L3Harris’s Anna Gragossian, the Viper Shield “eliminates analog performance issues, like only detecting one signal at a time, and its digital architecture can detect multiple signals at the same time, which with the analog version was not possible.”
Key Viper Shield capabilities include its advanced digital radar warning receiver technology that’s fully integrated with the F-16’s new APG-83 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. This provides a significant improvement in radar detection over the legacy radar warning system and better situational awareness. Along with improved radar detection, the Viper Shield will provide digital-based jamming capabilities superior to that of legacy systems.
IVEWS is also fully digital and is fully integrated with the F-16’s APG-83 AESA radar. As is the case with L3Harris’s Viper Shield, Northup Grumman’s IVEWS also takes advantage of the F-16’s world-class APG-83 radar to provide powerful directional jamming capabilities. The production and fielding of the IVEWs on U.S. Air Force F-16s is expected to begin in 2024.
Not enough specific performance information is available to compare the performance of the two new electronic warfare system suites, but it’s normal practice for systems designed for use by the U.S. military by U.S. defense contractors to be more capable than those sold to foreign militaries. Consequently, it’s likely that Northrup Grumman’s IVEWS is at least marginally more capable than L3Harris’s.
Regardless of exactly how the two new electronic warfare system packages stack up against each other, with these kinds of upgrades and a whole lot of
doubt about the F-35’s future, the F-16 should be positioned to serve as the Air Force’s workhorse for decades to come.
And while the F-35 is a much larger, more expensive, and far more complex plane, for many scenarios, the F-16, with its vastly superior reliability and sortie generation rates, will be able to provide more real-world combat power. This is quite a testament to the vision of the
Fighter Mafia and the
engineers at General Dynamics who turned that vision into the F-16 some 50 years ago.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
