26 juin 2018 | International, Terrestre
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has awarded Lockheed Martin a $358 million production contract for the Army Tactical Missile System, which allows for a service life-extension program for old missiles, the company announced Monday. The firm will also produce new missiles for a Foreign Military Sales customer, Lockheed added.
ATACMS is the Army's only surface-to-surface, long-range, 300-kilometer missile system. According to a Lockheed spokesperson, the missile system performs well in operations and is highly reliable.
But the Army is burning through a variety of its precision missiles in operations that have been heating up in various theaters, and the service is taking steps to ensure its inventory is refreshed and robust going forward.
The service life-extension program, or SLEP, will allow customers to be able to upgrade existing Block 1 and Block 1A missiles with new technology and double the range, a Lockheed statement notes.
When an old ATACMS comes through the SLEP line, it's “essentially a brand-new missile, and it's reset to [a] 10-year shelf life,” a Lockheed spokesperson told Defense News.
By: Jen Judson
In December 2014, the Army awarded Lockheed a contract to modernize the ATACMS weapon system, and the company embarked on an effort to upgrade and redesign all the internal electronics, developing and qualifying a new capability for a proximity sensor that enables ATACMS to have a height of burst.
ATACMS has a 500-pound class Harpoon warhead intended for point detonation, but giving the missile a height-of-burst capability increases its area effects for imprecisely located targets, the spokesperson said.
As part of the SLEP program for expired or aging ATACMS, Lockheed will clean up the old motors and then go through a remanufacture and final assembly process that incorporates the installation of the upgraded electronics.
Lockheed is set up, under the current contract, to update or build new missiles at a rate of 320 a year at its Camden, Arkansas, Precision Fires Production Center of Excellence, but there is a surge capacity of 400.
Still, the company is posturing to reach a rate of 500 new and upgraded ATACMSs per year based on interest and anticipated orders, the spokesperson said.
Lockheed has produced over 3,850 ATACMS missiles, and more than 600 of them have been fired in combat.
ATACMSs are packaged in a Guided Missile Launch Assembly pod and is fired from the Multiple Launch Rocket System family of launchers.
20 février 2023 | International, Terrestre
L’armée américaine a annoncé un contrat de près d’un milliard de dollars pour augmenter la production de munitions d’artillerie de calibre 155 mm, utilisées en grande quantité par l’Ukraine.
16 avril 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
By: Andrew Chuter LONDON — The British government has hit the pause button on its integrated defense review as it pours its efforts into battling the coronavirus crisis, Cabinet Office officials have told the parliamentary Defence Committee. “The Cabinet Office has informed the defence select committee that work on the integrated review has been formally paused across Whitehall,” the committee announced April 15. Committee chair Tobias Ellwood said in a statement that the move by the Cabinet Office, the department leading the review, was the right move to take given the crisis. “There would be no point in conducting an in-depth review of the nation's defence and security challenges to an artificial deadline, especially at a time when Whitehall is rightly focusing on tackling conronavirus,” Ellwood said. The recently appointed Defence Committee chair said that when the review restarts it will have to do so “with the added consequences of the pandemic to be considered.” A spokesperson for the Defence Committee said the Cabinet Office had not given any indication as to when it might start to ramp up the review effort again. However, two sources tell Defense News that the review could go on ice for up to a year. In a letter announcing the pause, deputy national security adviser Alex Ellis said that while the review was on hold, the government would be retaining a “small core capacity to think about the long-term effects of COVID-19 and issues expected to be covered in the Integrated Review." This team will be very limited in size and function, he added. The Ministry of Defence already faced mounting budget problems before the pandemic struck. Now, the massive economic crisis facing the British government makes it highly unlikely any additional cash will be found for defense, despite the prominent role the military is playing here combating the virus. The review was initiated immediately following Boris Johnson's election as prime minister in early December. Johnson promised it would be the most fundamental review of its kind since the end of the Cold War. Defense, security, foreign policy and international development strategy were to all be part of the effort. The review was scheduled by the government to be completed by July, a timescale the Defence Committee, analysts, lawmakers and others all said was too quick. Johnson first signaled his intention to slow down work on the review in a letter to Ellwood and two other committee chair dated March 24. “We have diverted resources from across Government and the Civil Service to work on COVID-19, scaling back efforts on the Integrated Review,” Johnson said at the time. Quizzed last month by parliamentarians about a possible delay to the review, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the government was open-minded about putting the work on hold. “There is no ideological block or determination to carry on come what may," Wallace said then. “With this coronavirus growing, if it is the right thing to do, we will absolutely pause the review if necessary; if not, we shall move forward.” Jon Louth, an independent defense analyst, believes the government may have to start the review process over again, given the changing circumstances. “I think we are close to going back to square one, if the budget settlement for defense is to be unpicked and secured as part of a late Autumn or Spring [2021] government-wide spending review,” he said. “Who could have any confidence in what the defense equipment program funding settlement would actually be? It could involve unpacking current contracts, but also unpick some of the ambition we have in terms of new things. “What we have and what we would like are going to be colored by a budget settlement smaller than people were anticipating; in fact, quite substantially smaller. Whether that means the MoD starts to think about reprofiling things to the right or really starts taking strategic choices, we will have to wait and see,” added Louth, who until recently was a senior analyst at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/04/15/uk-hits-pause-on-defense-review-due-to-coronavirus/
29 mars 2023 | International, Terrestre
BAE Systems' York facility will move some programs elsewhere to make room for an accelerating Armored Multipurpose Vehicle production line this summer.