HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Lockheed Martin [LMT] won a $320 million contract to extend its work on the missile defense system’s integrating element to integrate the new Long-Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR), the company said Tuesday.
Lockheed Martin leads the Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) Command, Control, Battle Management and Communications (C2BMC) system team. C2BMC is the integrating element of the ballistic missile defense system (BMDS), providing situational awareness and battle management capability. It also pulls together various sensors to various missile defense interceptors. The system has been operational since 2004.
The contract, awarded in late March, will have Lockheed Martin’s team integrate the LRDR and other sensors that provide advanced tracking capabilities into the BMDS in the latest spiral or software version. This will extend work on C2BMC through December 2022.
“Using an agile development process, the team will enhance C2BMC’s threat characterization, tracking and advanced threat warning capabilities through integration with both new and enhanced sensor capabilities,” the company said in a statement.
Stephen Froelich, director of Missile Defense Solutions at Lockheed Martin, further explained the contract in an interview with Defense Daily during the annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium here.
The purpose of the contract is to “increase the capability of the system, primarily the increase is with the LRDR radar that will be deployed up in Alaska. So we will incorporate all of the capabilities of that radar. So that is a pretty significant capability upward with regard to the performance of that radar and all of the missions it will do,” Froelich said.
As part of this spiral upgrade, the company will also upgrade the key algorithms in track management, battle management, detection of systems, and incorporating intelligence. “It’s all about multi-information fusion into the system,” Froelich added.
He underscored three factors tend to drive this kind of increase in capability in MDA awards: new technology developments and capability, adversarial behavior, and normal technical refresh.
In this case LRDR is a new capability. Lockheed Martin is upgrading its algorithms to respond to new adversarial threats and/or making constant improvements based on new sensor data, adding new fusion algorithms, “and then there’s just the normal Moore’s Law cycle of our hardware,” Froelich said.
The company also noted the contract will further harden the cybersecurity posture of C2BMC.
Photo: MDA
“Nothing happens in DoD anymore without cyber hardening. So the MDA is really investing appropriately in cyber hardening of the system, from inside and outside,” Froelich added.
Lockheed Martin is also developing C2BMC within its agile iterations architecture to consistently work on incremental capability delivery so it can demonstrate capacity earlier.
In this case, the company is six months into the program and is already demonstrating capability to control LRDR
“In the past that would have taken years, that would have been something we would be demonstrating a couple years from now. We’re able to demonstrate that today, that we have that kind of capability,” Froelich said.
The C2BMC team also includes Northrop Grumman [NOC], Boeing [BA], Raytheon [RTN], and General Dynamics [GD].
The company underscored there are 36 C2BMC locations around the world including U.S. Strategic, Northern, European, Indo-Pacific, and Central Commands.