The June 30 contract runs production and engineering for the air defense radar through 2031. The program’s radar work lives on Electronics Parkway, the campus that has anchored Salina’s defense economy since 1946.
The U.S. Army closed out June with a nearly $3 billion commitment to the radar line that calls the town of Salina home. On June 30, the Army awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth $2,998,742,163 for production of the Sentinel A4 air and missile defense radar and its supporting engineering services, according to the Defense Department’s daily contract digest. The Sentinel A4 is built at the company’s Electronics Park campus, the 181 acre complex six miles from downtown Syracuse, where Lockheed vice president Rick Cordaro’s radar and sensor systems organization delivered the program’s newest production radar to the Army this February.
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The Pentagon’s announcement lists the winner as Lockheed Martin Corp. of Liverpool, New York, the mailing address for a campus that sits in the town of Salina. The contract carries an estimated completion date of June 29, 2031, and was issued by Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, under contract number W31P4Q-26-D-0016. The solicitation went out over the internet and drew exactly one bid.
That lone bid tells its own story. Lockheed Martin has been the Sentinel A4’s only builder since September 2019, when the Army handed the company the program’s original development award, a deal reported at the time at $281 million and covering 18 radars. Seven years later, the follow-on production agreement is more than ten times that size. The new contract is structured as a mix of fixed price incentive, cost plus fixed fee, and cost no fee line items, with work locations and funding to be set order by order as the Army buys radars and services against it over the next five years.
What the Army is buying
The Sentinel A4, designated AN/MPQ-64F1, is the Army’s replacement for the older Sentinel A3 short range air defense radar. Where the A3 dates to an earlier generation of air defense, the A4 was designed around threats that barely existed when its predecessor entered service: cruise missiles flying low and fast, small unmanned aircraft that are cheap to launch and hard to see, and the rockets, artillery and mortar rounds that have defined recent conflicts.
The technical leap is in the antenna. The Sentinel A4 uses a 360 degree active electronically scanned array, a design that steers its beam electronically instead of waiting for a dish to rotate, built on solid state modules with gallium nitride transmitters and digital processing. Gallium nitride, a semiconductor material that handles higher power and heat than older components, is the same technology at the heart of the most advanced radars now entering U.S. service. Lockheed’s product materials describe the A4 as a program of record solution designed for a 40 year service life.
“This delivery is a major milestone in getting next-generation radar capability to the warfighter,” Cordaro said on February 2, when Lockheed announced it had shipped the first Sentinel A4 from the program’s second low rate initial production lot, a batch of 19 systems. The company said the radar had completed the first phase of the Army’s initial operational test and evaluation and had been integrated with the Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control system, the network that ties Army short range air defense units together.
The pitch behind the program has been consistent since the beginning. “We believe we provide the lowest risk and best value solution for the U.S. Army that will help protect our warfighters for years to come,” Rob Smith, then Lockheed’s vice president and general manager for radar and sensor systems, said when the original development contract was announced in September 2019.
Already in soldiers’ hands
The radar the Army just committed billions to is no longer a lab project. On April 22 of this year, soldiers of the 35th Air Defense Artillery Brigade trained on newly fielded Sentinel A4 radars at Camp Humphreys, South Korea, in an exercise the Eighth Army documented as part of its modernization push. Army photographers captured Pfc. Issac Johnson fastening down components and prepping the trailer mounted array for operation while Spc. Steven Rivera checked its controls. The exercise, in the Army’s own words, trained Eighth Army soldiers to operate the newly implemented radar. Machines that began their lives on a production floor in Onondaga County now stand watch near one of the most heavily defended borders on earth.
Sentinel A4 is one of several programs keeping the Salina campus busy. On April 7, 2025, Lockheed delivered the first TPY-4 long range radar to the U.S. Air Force under the service’s Three-Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar program, known as 3DELRR. The TPY-4, also built at the Syracuse area plant, is fully digital at every transmit and receive element, software defined, and transportable by C-130, C-17, truck, rail or helicopter. Lockheed says its radars are deployed in more than 45 nations on six continents.
The plant behind the radar
Electronics Park was originally constructed in 1946 for General Electric, which made the campus the center of its electronics operations in the decades after World War II. Drivers on Henry Clay Boulevard still pass the campus’s most recognizable feature, the cluster of white geodesic radomes that shelter radar equipment under test, a landmark as familiar to Salina and Mattydale residents as any water tower. Today the park operates as a multi tenant industrial campus with Lockheed Martin as its largest tenant, alongside the Laboratory Alliance of Central New York, Gallagher Electric, Integrated Medical Devices and a Best Western hotel. CenterState CEO, the regional business group, operates the park through its Electronics Park LLC arm with Michael Lacey as site manager.
The Lockheed operation there has been growing for years on the strength of the radar order book. In February 2023, syracuse.com reported the plant had created 150 new jobs in 2022, bringing its workforce to 2,000 people, and planned another 300 hires in 2023 to reach 2,300, which would make the workforce the largest at the site since 2013. Most of the openings were engineering roles: systems, software, hardware, power, radio frequency and mechanical engineers, along with manufacturing positions.
“It’s really the current programs we have are expanding and we’re constantly addressing new needs,” Chandra Marshall, then the vice president of radar and sensor systems and general manager of the Salina plant, told the outlet at the time. The programs she pointed to read like a preview of this summer’s news: the Q-53 counterfire radar, the TPY-4 with international partners including Norway and projected sales of more than $1.3 billion over ten years, electronic warfare systems, towed array sonar, and a Sentinel A4 program the report said was expected to be worth up to $3 billion. That estimate turned out to be almost exactly right. The June 30 award came in $1.3 million under the $3 billion mark.
Why the structure of the deal matters
A contract of this type is a ceiling, not a check. The $2,998,742,163 figure is the maximum value of orders the Army can place through June 29, 2031, and the Pentagon’s announcement notes that work locations and funding will be determined with each individual order. That gives the Army flexibility on quantities and timing, and it means the year by year impact in Salina will depend on how quickly the service converts the framework into radar buys.
The single bid is worth pausing on, too. When a solicitation goes out over the internet and only one company answers, it usually means the market has already decided who can do the work. Lockheed has been the Sentinel A4’s designer and sole builder since the 2019 development award, it owns the tooling and the trained workforce, and no competitor bid to take the production line away. For taxpayers, sole source arrangements put the burden on Army contracting officers to police pricing. For the workforce in Salina, the same arrangement reads as job security: the production line and the institutional knowledge that runs it exist in one place.
The early signals point toward volume. The Army has already moved the program through two low rate initial production lots, and the February delivery started the flow of the second lot’s 19 systems. The Camp Humphreys fielding shows the service is pushing the radar to operational units in a priority theater rather than letting deliveries stack up stateside. And the five year window of the new agreement lines up with the Army’s broader rebuild of its short range air defense force, the layer of protection that counters exactly the drone and cruise missile threats the A4 was designed around.
For the town of Salina, a community of neighborhoods like Mattydale and Galeville that has hosted heavy industry at Electronics Park for eight decades, the contract is a long runway. Defense programs rise and fall with budgets, but a sole source production agreement with a 2031 horizon, layered on top of active Air Force and international radar work at the same campus, is about as durable as manufacturing news gets in Central New York.
What to watch next
The immediate milestones are concrete. Eighteen more radars from the second production lot remain to be delivered following February’s first shipment. The Army must place its first orders against the new $2,998,742,163 agreement for work to begin flowing under it. And Lockheed’s hiring pace in Salina, which was 300 planned positions in the last publicly reported year, will show whether a nearly $3 billion order book translates into another expansion of the largest defense workforce in Onondaga County. The order window stays open until June 29, 2031.
Sources & Verification
U.S. Department of Defense daily contract announcement, June 30, 2026, contract W31P4Q-26-D-0016 (as published in the DoD contracts digest and confirmed verbatim by two independent outlets below). ClearanceJobs, “Army Awards Lockheed Martin Nearly $3 Billion for Sentinel A4 Radar Program,” July 1, 2026, news.clearancejobs.com/2026/07/01/army-awards-lockheed-martin-nearly-3-billion-for-sentinel-a4-radar-program/. GovConWire, “Lockheed Martin Lands Potential $3B Army Contract for Sentinel A4 Radar Production,” July 1, 2026, govconwire.com/articles/lockheed-martin-army-sentinel-a4-radar. Lockheed Martin news release, “Lockheed Martin Delivers First Sentinel A4 from LRIP 2, Advances Toward Full-Rate Production,” February 2, 2026, news.lockheedmartin.com. Lockheed Martin news release, “Lockheed Martin Delivers First U.S. Air Force TPY-4 Radar,” April 7, 2025, news.lockheedmartin.com. Military Embedded Systems, “Air and missile-defense radar contract signed between U.S. Army, Lockheed Martin,” September 27, 2019. The Defense Post, “Lockheed Martin Bags $2.9B US Army Deal for Sentinel A4 Radar Production,” July 1, 2026. Syracuse.com via AviationPros, “Lockheed Martin To Hire 300 in Salina, Swelling Workforce To Biggest in 10 Years,” February 17, 2023. CenterState CEO, Electronics Park LLC program page. U.S. Army photographs and captions, 35th Air Defense Artillery Brigade Sentinel A4 training, Camp Humphreys, South Korea, April 22, 2026, via Wikimedia Commons (DVIDS). Reporter: Mike Rivera. Edited by: the CNY Signal news team. Published: July 16, 2026.
