The Air Force Thursday awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] nearly $449 million in contracts for Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM), according to a Defense Department statement.
One contract worth $233 million includes 190 JASSM baseline missiles and 40 of the extended range (ER) variant. It also includes systems engineering and foreign military sales (FMS) test assets, among others. This contract is three percent FMS for Finland and Australia, DoD said. A Lockheed Martin spokeswoman said Friday she was unsure when these missiles were due to be delivered.
The second contract, worth $216 million, includes 150 JASSM baseline missiles and 60 extended range missiles. These two contracts, Lots 11 and 12, also represent the third and fourth production lots for JASSM-ER, which successfully completed the Air Force’s initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) fight testing in August 2012.
JASSM has been integrated on Finland’s F/A-18C/D aircraft as well as Australia’s F/A-18A/B jets. The contracts awarded Thursday were production contracts, according to a Lockheed Martin statement.
The Air Force in June awarded Lockheed Martin $34 million to support additional integration of JASSM onto Finnish F-18C/D aircraft (Defense Daily, June 12). JASSM, a $6 billion program, came close to being canceled in 2009 after years of test failures where the weapon failed to detonate on impact due to harness cable issues (Defense Daily, May 18, 2009).
JASSM is an autonomous, air-to-ground, precision-guided standoff missile. Armed with a penetrator and a blast fragmentation warhead, JASSM cruises autonomously, day or night in all weather conditions. The missile employs an infrared seeker and enhanced digital anti-jam Global Positioning System (GPS) to find specific points on targets.