By Geoff Fein

Lockheed Martin [LMT] and its international partner, Danish defense firm Terma AS, are taking their work in open architecture systems to develop a ballistic missile defense (BMD) capability for non-Aegis European frigates, according to a Lockheed Martin official.

Dubbed BMD Flex, the concept is to develop a system that can take advantage not only of third party systems, but be able to use parts of BMD Flex for both military and civilian applications, Ric Rushton, director business development for Lockheed Martin, told reporters yesterday during a briefing at the annual Surface Navy Association symposium.

This project is specifically designed to help us bring forward international interoperability in command and control, he said.

“But it is also in our view an important demonstration of how you can leverage the concept of open architecture into the open business model we hear the U.S. Navy talk about and we see increasingly discussed in the international market,” Rushton added. “This capability called BMD Flex is a representation of what you can actually do with that and how can you get things like interoperability into many different kinds of systems especially in the quintessential network centric challenge of BMD.”

Lockheed Martin began the effort four years ago with Terma Denmark. Our original reason for establishing a relationship with them was under the Missile Defense Agency’s bilateral agreement for missile defense with Denmark,” Rushton added.

“We were encouraged to find a Danish defense technology company that could contribute to missile defense,” Rushton said. “We reviewed Terma’s capabilities and were very impressed with what they had done.”

Terma, just like Lockheed Martin, had been watching the U.S. Navy and they started talking about open architecture concepts, he said.

Terma then took their tactical combat system and re-engineered it in a service oriented architecture (SOA) environment, he added.

“They field their systems now in a SOA based capability called T-Core. We looked at that and said that is the concept we think can be leveraged, especially in places where you don’t have an Aegis baseline or a U.S. shore-based facility capable of BMD,” Rushton noted.

Lockheed Martin’s contributed software segments by taking its background in Aegis and Aegis BMD, and engineering discreet software segments to integrate into T-Core to provide capabilities.

BMD Flex was built to be a commercial-off-the-shelf capability that could be used in military applications as well a s multitude of civil applications, such as logistics and air traffic control, Rushton added.

“What that allows us to do is provide commercial-based frameworks that can go into a system like T-Core and then we can build a command and control capability,” he said.

The reason for doing that, Rushton added, was to take on the challenge of how to take non-Aegis European frigates and provide them some level of BMD capability.

“This capability bundle is looked at as one of those adjunct things you can put on their existing command and direction system in order to do that,” Rushton said.