L3Harris

L3Harris Technologies was formed in June 2019 by the all-stock merger of Harris Corporation, a Florida-based communications firm with roots going back to 1895, and L3 Technologies, a New York-headquartered defence-electronics group spun out of Lockheed Martin in 1997. The combined company is headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, and run by chief executive Christopher Kubasik, who chaired L3 at the time of the deal and took the top job at the merged entity in June 2021. Its missile-solutions business, built around the 2023 acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, is run by president Ken Bedingfield.

The firm sits across command-and-control, communications, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance work. Its tactical-radio business, inherited from Harris, supplies the Falcon family of handheld and manpack radios used by US and allied forces, and dominates procurement across much of NATO. The night-vision line equips the US Army with the ENVG-B binocular, with a further order announced on 12 October 2026. The C3ISR portfolio runs from manned ISR aircraft conversions and SIGINT payloads to space-based missile-warning satellites built under the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer programme. Through Aerojet Rocketdyne it is now one of only two American suppliers of solid rocket motors, feeding programmes from GMLRS and Javelin to Standard Missile and Patriot.

The company’s most visible contribution to the current fight sits in counter-drone work. In October 2026 L3Harris began delivering its VAMPIRE system — a vehicle-mounted launcher firing laser-guided APKWS rockets, made by BAE Systems — to the US Army under a $106 million order, with the first units arriving within two months of contract. VAMPIRE was first fielded by Ukrainian forces in 2022 under US drawdown authority, and Kyiv has credited it with intercepting Shahed-type one-way attack drones; the Army buy brings the system into domestic service. Separately, the company said five of its systems reached what it calls “Jailbroken” clearance for autonomous operation at Army experimentation events earlier this month.

L3Harris reports annual revenue of around $21.9 billion, operations in more than a hundred countries, and roughly 50,000 employees. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange as LHX. The 2023 Aerojet Rocketdyne purchase, finalised at about $4.7 billion, folded the last remaining American competitor to Northrop Grumman in solid-rocket-motor production into the firm. The Federal Trade Commission cleared the deal only after extracting commitments on continued motor supply to competing primes.

That consolidation has drawn ongoing scrutiny. Critics in Congress and the think-tank community have argued the arrangement leaves the United States with a thin industrial base for propulsion at a moment when air-defence and anti-armour munition stockpiles have been drawn down by transfers to Ukraine. L3Harris components have also surfaced in open-source teardowns of Russian weapons recovered from the battlefield; the company says it complies with US export controls and has not been found in violation.

The firm positions itself as a mid-tier prime moving faster than the five largest American defence contractors, with its near-term growth tied to munitions throughput and to the Pentagon’s push to shorten the path from requirement to fielded system — an argument Bedingfield made in Defense One this October.