U.S. Navy Awards General Dynamics $988M Contract to Upgrade Fleet-Wide Command Networks.

General Dynamics Information Technology has secured a $988 million Navy contract to sustain and modernize fleet-wide C5ISR systems under the SACSS program. The award underscores the Navy’s commitment to maintaining resilient command, communications, and surveillance networks as maritime operations become increasingly contested.

General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) has been awarded a $988 million Ship and Air Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Systems Support (SACSS) contract to continue modernizing U.S. Navy fleet C5ISR capabilities, according to information released by the company on January 12, 2026. Issued in December 2025, the contract includes a one-year base period, four one-year options, and an additional six-month option, signaling the Navy’s intent to sustain long-term modernization capacity rather than pursue a one-time upgrade.
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GDIT won a $988 million Navy SACSS contract to modernize fleet C5ISR, boosting command, communications, and surveillance across destroyers, carriers, and Coast Guard vessels (Picture source: General Dynamics).

While the press release is careful not to list specific boxes and baselines, the operational meaning of SACSS is clear: this aim is to turn “digital transformation” into a shipboard reality. GDIT says it will deliver integration, engineering, procurement, logistics, and installation services across surface combatants, aircraft carriers, Coast Guard vessels, manned and unmanned aircraft, and shore stations. In plain terms, that is the end-to-end pipeline that takes new radios, network stacks, crypto, data links, processing hardware, antennas, and mission applications from a program office to a pier-side or flight-line installation, then validates performance before the platform goes back to sea.

GDIT’s own earlier SACSS program descriptions add technical texture that matters to operators. The company highlights pier-side ship modernization designed to update combat systems while ships remain in the water, including physical infrastructure connections and ship operational verification testing. It also points to heavy fabrication work, such as building and welding external sponsons, large structural additions used to mount weapons or mission equipment, illustrating that C5ISR modernization often requires ship alterations, not just swapping servers.

The tactical payoff is decision speed and network survivability under pressure. Navy leadership has been explicit that future sea control will be contested across the electromagnetic spectrum and the information domain, and that the service must close the kill chain faster with a resilient web of sensors, command nodes, platforms, and weapons tied together through the Naval Operational Architecture. This requirement is not an abstract doctrine: it is a direct response to adversaries with long-range missiles and robust maritime surveillance capabilities that can punish any unit that radiates carelessly or cannot fight through degraded communications.

For distributed maritime operations, the plumbing is the weapon. The Navy’s DMO concept depends on resilient communications and networking to coordinate widely dispersed forces and still concentrate effects. SACSS-style integration is the enabling mechanism that keeps the web coherent as software versions change, cyber vulnerabilities are discovered, or new gateways are fielded to connect legacy combat systems with newer data fabrics.

At the system level, Navy program-of-record building blocks show what “modernize C5ISR” typically touches. The command-and-control portfolio includes systems that generate near-real-time maritime situational awareness and common operational and tactical pictures for ships and shore nodes, as well as shipboard processors that handle tactical data links and feed combat systems on Aegis- and Ship Self-Defense System-equipped ships. Even when GDIT is not the original designer of these systems, SACSS is the kind of contract that installs, integrates, patches, and verifies them as an operational stack.

This is why guided-missile ships are central to the business case. Aegis destroyers and cruisers live or die by the quality of their track picture and the speed at which offboard and onboard sensor data becomes a fire-control-quality solution for air defense, sea control, or ballistic missile defense. Modernized data links, command-and-control processing, and hardened networks are what let a ship participate in cooperative engagement, manage dense link architectures, and keep fighting when the adversary is jamming, spoofing, or cyber probing the tactical edge.

Carriers and Coast Guard vessels gain differently but no less decisively. Carriers function as strike group command hubs whose air wing tempo depends on reliable, secure connectivity between airborne sensors, the ship’s combat direction systems, and the broader joint force. Coast Guard cutters operating in defense support roles and combined tasking need interoperable communications and shared operational pictures to plug into Navy and coalition networks without becoming the weak link. GDIT’s inclusion of shore stations and aircraft also points to a fleet architecture where maritime operations centers, training pipelines, and deployed detachments must share the same trusted data and cyber posture as ships at sea.

GDIT framed the contract bluntly: “C5ISR systems are foundational to how our Navy senses, communicates, and fights in the modern battlespace,” said Brian Sheridan, the company’s senior vice president for Defense. For the Navy, SACSS is less about buying a single product and more about buying time, resilience, and combat credibility, keeping today’s fleet tactically relevant while new hulls are still years away.