Raytheon has locked down an $8 billion contract to modernize the communications systems that let the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center talk to its forces during a crisis, with modernization, production restart services and technical studies stretching over a decade at company facilities in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and Largo, Florida. The deal, finalized this week, arrives alongside a second, much smaller Raytheon award from the Navy worth $15.1 million for radar and weapons-targeting hardware destined for the fleet.
The headline figure is eye-catching, but it represents a ceiling rather than cash in hand. As reported by AL.com, the Pentagon awarded the contract to cover work expected to wrap up by October 2036. According to the Department of War, the Air Force has so far obligated just $800,000 in fiscal year 2026 research and development funds toward that $8 billion ceiling, roughly 0.01 percent of the total. Indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts like this one set a long-term spending cap, with actual task orders funded piecemeal as the work is scheduled.
A Decade of Work Split Between Two States
The Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center’s Strategic Communications Division at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts issued the contract as a sole-source award, meaning it was never opened to competitive bidding. The same Department of War contract notice confirms the decision was made without a competing proposal. The work will support the AN/USQ-225 weapon system, the technical framework that protects military communications against electronic jamming and high-altitude electromagnetic pulse events during a potential nuclear conflict, according to Defensemirror.com.
Raytheon has built protected satellite communications equipment for the military at its Marlborough and Largo plants for more than a decade, per The Defence Blog. The outlet notes that Raytheon took over leadership of the Air Force’s primary terminal program, the Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-Sight Terminals, from Boeing back in 2014. This latest award follows a pattern of expansion for the company’s terminal business: in March 2026, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center awarded Raytheon a $2.01 billion contract modification for Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite terminals, pushing that program’s ceiling to $2.97 billion through August 2031, according to GovCon Wire.
Satellites and Ground Terminals Moving in Tandem
The terminal contract lands amid a broader Pentagon effort to overhaul nuclear command and control infrastructure from the ground up and from orbit. That overhaul includes the Space Force’s July 2025 selection of Boeing for a $2.8 billion contract to build Evolved Strategic SATCOM satellites, part of a space segment projected to total $12 billion, per Defense WarRoom. Ground and airborne terminals have to be upgraded in lockstep with those next-generation satellite constellations to keep nuclear command connectivity unbroken…