Lockheed Martin [LMT] is awaiting a final request for proposals (RFP) from the Army for its Joint Air-to-Ground Missile, which a company official told reporters is “imminent.”
Speaking at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference, the Lockheed Martin official said his office had wrapped up component qualification testing, the last step in the $60 million continuing technology development phase, and that the company had already been working on its proposal based on an already-released draft RFP. The official asked to speak on background due to security issues regarding the Hellfire missile, on which JAGM is based.
Lockheed Martin has built more than 65,000 Hellfire missiles and was well positioned to integrate the guidance section–which uses both a semi-active laser seeker and a millimeter wave radar seeker–with the existing missile system.
Last month, Lockheed Martin wrapped up component qualification testing on the hardware side, which is now considered fully qualified. The company is in the final stages of testing the software side, and the official said the software would be fully qualified in the next few weeks.
Once that testing wraps up, the Lockheed Martin JAGM will be at a technology readiness level 8, as well as a manufacturing readiness level 7-plus, since the an assembly line in a production-representative environment is set up and producing some parts in a pilot program.
The official said the upcoming engineering and manufacturing development contract would be open to full competition, though Lockheed Martin was the only company to go through the continuing technology development program with the Army. Raytheon [RTN] partnered with
Boeing [BA] for work in the technology development phase, but the team was not given a contract to continue work after the preliminary design review in spring 2013.
The winner of the EMD contract, which the Lockheed Martin official said should be awarded in July or August 2015, would work to integrate the JAGM with the two threshold platforms, the AH-64 Apache and the AH-1 Cobra. After about 18 months of EMD work, there would be two options for low-rate initial production lots, totaling 1,000 missiles in 24 months.