Northrop Grumman Systems Go To War

by Len Lazarick

The normally effusive public affairs operation for the BWI-based Electronic Sensors and Systems Sector of Northrop Grumman, the nation's fifth largest defense contractor, was unusually mum about its products seeing action in the war in Yugoslavia.

Asked for a list of its radars and other systems in use in the Kosovo operation, a spokesman said, “we have no such information available” and referred the question to the Pentagon public affairs office.

Based on information from the Defense Department and published Northrop Grumman sources, here is a partial list of the company's products in current use, with emphasis on those systems manufactured at ES3 facilities in the Baltimore area.

( B-2 Stealth bomber: These $2.1 billion bombers developed and built by Grumman in California have seen their first combat action over Yugoslavia. An Air Force general said a single B-2 strike, because of its precision and fire power, is the equivalent of 1,500 B-17 bomber runs in World War II. The Pentagon is vague about how many B-2 sorties have been flown out of the 10,000 sorties so far in the war (as of April 24), but the number has been low. The B-2s require too much high maintenance to be deployed in Europe, and so must fly there from Missouri.

( AWACS: The Airborne Warning and Control system designed and built in Maryland is a key part of the coordination of the entire air war. The system is flown on aircraft of the United States, Britain, France and other NATO customers.

( Joint STARS: The Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System provides “around-the-clock real-time battlefield information essential to operational commanders,” says Northrop Grumman's web site. This radar system focuses on what is happening on the ground, and NG leads a group of U.S. and European companies that produce the system.

( F-16: Various models of this fighter are the real workhorse of the Kosovo war, having flown thousands of sorties, and they all have fire control radars built by Northrop Grumman. There are 6,500 of these planes around the world, most of them flown by the United States and other NATO nations.

( EA-6B Prowler: This fighter has been used extensively by the U.S. and Britain in knocking out Iraqi missile and radar sites. The long-range, all-weather Prowlers carry electronic countermeasure and ground-attack missiles to jam and destroy Yugoslav air-defense systems, reducing the threat to NATO pilots.

( Longbow Apache attack helicopters. These helicopters are designed to detect and destroy enemy tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery day and night. Northrop Grumman built the radar and tracking system so that a helicopter “can mask its presence by rising just high enough for the Longbow radar antenna to peer above and beyond surrounding terrain to detect and track targets without fully exposing itself to its enemy,” the company says. “New targeting information can then be routed to a self-contained, active radar seeker in the Hellfire missile,” built by Lockheed Martin.

The war so far has not produced increased earnings or higher stock prices for most defense contractors.

Northrop Grumman Corp.'s earnings were $104 million, or $1.50 a share, compared to an $18 million loss a year earlier. The results beat the $1.33 average estimate of analysts polled by First Call Corp. Sales rose 4.2 percent to $2.1 billion from $2.01 billion. It was the second consecutive quarter of lower profit for Northrop.

Net sales for ES3 were also flat at $615 million, but contract acquisitions rose to $575 million from $486 million in the first quarter of 1998. The company said it expected net sales at ES3 to be “essentially stable year over year, but we expect contract acquisitions to significantly increase through the remainder of 1999.”