U.S. Navy Expands SEWIP Contract to Enhance Warship Anti-Ship Missile Defenses

Military Sentinel, Washington – The U.S. Navy has moved to bolster the electronic defense capabilities of its surface fleet, awarding Lockheed Martin a $208.96 million contract modification to continue production of the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) Block 2 system.

Announced by the Department of Defense, the new funding underscores the service’s accelerating efforts to protect surface combatants against increasingly complex radar-guided anti-ship missiles and electronic interference in contested operational environments. With cumulative options that could push the total value to $1.7 billion, the multi-year manufacturing effort aims to equip more surface warships with advanced threat detection sensors.

Expanding Electronic Support Architecture

The freshly funded contract modification focuses on the continued delivery and hardware refresh of SEWIP Block 2, which serves as the electronic support pillar of the broader upgrade roadmap. Unlike active jamming systems, Block 2 concentrates on upgrading shipboard sensors to improve the detection, classification, and precise tracking of electromagnetic emissions.

Work on the systems will be primarily executed at Lockheed Martin facilities in Liverpool, New York, and Lansdale, Pennsylvania, with completion projected for September 2029. This sustained production pipeline ensures that destroyers, amphibious ships, and auxiliary vessels maintain pacing capabilities against fast-evolving radio frequency threats. Modern anti-ship missiles rely heavily on advanced active radar seekers and frequency-hopping guidance links, making early passive detection vital for crew survivability and countermeasure deployment.

The SEWIP Roadmap: From Detection to Disruption

The U.S. Navy’s incremental modernization strategy divides electronic warfare enhancements into distinct evolutionary blocks. While Block 2 establishes superior situational awareness through enhanced electronic support measures, subsequent tiers such as SEWIP Block 3 introduce active electronic attack capabilities.

Block 3 incorporates active electronically scanned array (AESA) technology to actively disrupt, deceive, and neutralize incoming missile seekers and hostile targeting networks. Integrating these modular upgrades onto surface combatants allows the fleet to transition from passive warning to active electronic suppression, creating a multi-layered defensive shield around carrier strike groups and surface action groups.

Strategic Implications for Contested Waters

The sustained investment in shipboard electronic warfare highlights the changing character of modern naval warfare. Potential adversaries continue to field long-range, high-speed anti-ship cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons designed to overwhelm traditional kinetic interceptors.

Because interceptor missile magazines on destroyers and cruisers are finite, electronic warfare systems provide a deep, non-kinetic layer of defense capable of degrading incoming threats before they enter terminal attack phases. By expanding sensor fidelity and processing speed across the fleet, the Navy seeks to reduce reaction times for combat information center crews facing saturation attacks.

As manufacturing work proceeds through the end of the decade, the Navy plans to integrate these upgraded sensor suites across additional surface combatant hulls, ensuring fleet-wide resilience against complex multi-axis missile threats.