The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that Raytheon and Boeing had picked up contracts worth up to a combined $766 million tied to the B-52 Radar Modernization Program.

It is a substantial sum for a programme whose central task is replacing one radar with another radar. It is also a reasonable measure of how difficult that turns out to be when the aircraft in question first flew during the Eisenhower administration and is expected to keep flying into the 2050s.

The good news is that the new radar is already airborne. The less good news is that it was supposed to have been flying two years ago.

Who got what, and why the headline is slightly misleading

The $766 million is a combined ceiling across two separate awards, and only one of them is actually about radar.

Raytheon took the larger share: an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $603 million covering production and sustainment of the AN/APQ-188 across the B-52 fleet, running through 20 August 2031. The Air Force obligated $46 million in fiscal 2026 aircraft procurement funds against the first delivery order. Work is spread across Forrest in Mississippi, El Segundo in California, McKinney in Texas and Warner Robins in Georgia.

Boeing’s piece is smaller and different in kind: a delivery order worth up to $162.97 million under an existing IDIQ, covering manufacturing, kitting and delivery of bomb rack modernisation system kits. That is weapons-carriage hardware rather than sensors, due for completion by 20 December 2028, with just under $35 million obligated so far.

From analogue to AESA

The radar being replaced, the AN/APQ-166, is an analogue mechanically scanned set of a generation that has otherwise almost entirely disappeared from front-line service. The AN/APQ-188 is an active electronically scanned array in the same family as the radars carried by modern fighters.

The practical difference is not simply resolution. An AESA has no moving parts to wear out, can interleave several tasks at once, generates far better ground maps, and is markedly harder to jam. For an aircraft whose survival strategy involves launching stand-off weapons from a long way out, the ability to find and classify a target quickly and reliably in bad weather is the whole job.

Boeing handed the first radar-equipped flight-test aircraft to the Air Force in December 2025. It had already completed ground integration and initial system checks at Boeing’s San Antonio facility before ferrying to Edwards Air Force Base, where the 419th Flight Test Squadron took it on.

A programme that has not had an easy decade

This is where the enthusiasm has to be tempered. Flight testing was originally meant to begin in fiscal 2024 and slipped to fiscal 2026. Reported total programme cost has climbed to around $2.58 billion, and the Air Force has already scaled back some of the capability it originally wanted from the radar in order to hold costs down.

None of that is unusual for an avionics retrofit on an aircraft type that entered service in 1955 and has been modified continuously ever since. Every B-52 is a slightly different accumulation of upgrades, and integrating a modern AESA into that wiring is genuinely hard engineering. It is still a delay.

The video above sets the radar work in the wider context of the B-52H to B-52J upgrade, of which new engines are the largest single element.

Why the Air Force keeps paying

The arithmetic is straightforward. The B-52 carries more ordnance further, for less money per hour, than anything else in the inventory, and it is the only bomber the Air Force expects to still be flying when the airframe turns a hundred.

That plan only works if the aircraft can see. Spending $603 million on a radar for a bomber older than most of the people maintaining it looks eccentric right up until you price the alternative, which is a new bomber fleet costing many multiples of that figure.

So the money keeps going in, the schedule keeps slipping to the right, and the Stratofortress keeps flying. It has been the pattern for seventy years, and there is no obvious reason to expect it to change now.

Sources: U.S. Department of War contract announcements (25 August 2026), GovCon Wire, Boeing media release (December 2025), Air & Space Forces Magazine.