When the Navy and Marines upgraded the radars of their legacy F/A-18 Hornets, they found themselves with a supply of still quite functional APG-65 radars. They also found themselves wanting to upgrade the night/all weather capabilities of the Marines AV-8B Harriers. In a common sense move that I didn’t know the Department of the Navy had in them, they shoehorned the surplus radars into the existing Harrier fleet.
Click to greatly embiggenfy.
The grey dot just above the radome is the sensor head of a forward looking infrared (FLIR) thermal imager. From a day only, visual dive bombing platform, to a night/all weather attack platform capable of delivering precision munitions, the Harrier has come a long way.
But they’re still not going to fit in the back of that Herk.