By Marina Malenic
Lockheed Martin [LMT] yesterday announced receipt of a $107 million contract for a seventh production lot of the JASSM cruise missile.
Lot 7 production will bring total contracted quantities to 1,053, according to a Lockheed Martin press statement. The new contract is for procurement of 111 missiles, along with related systems engineering and flight test support.
The Pentagon last month certified a restructured program for JASSM consisting of two separate increments: the JASSM Baseline increment and the JASSM-Extended Range (ER) increment (Defense Daily, May 5).
The baseline JASSM configuration has a range greater than 200 nautical miles. The ER variant is projected to reach targets at distances greater than 500 nautical miles.
Development and testing activities for the JASSM-ER are scheduled to resume this month, with a Milestone C production decision scheduled for fiscal year 2010, according to the Air Force. Also scheduled for FY ’10 is the start of the development of a Maritime Interdiction/Anti-Surface Warfare version of JASSM.
Last summer, then-Pentagon acquisition executive Ken Krieg approved phase one of the Air Force’s JASSM reliability plan (Defense Daily, July 20). That plan was designed to resolve difficulties that have marred the missile’s performance record in test flights to date (Defense Daily, June 7).
The Air Force said at the time that Lockheed Martin agreed to a cost-sharing arrangement for phase-one activities, with Lockheed Martin providing $38 million and the Air Force contributing the remainder from funds already obligated to the program. The service also instituted a joint management structure with Lockheed Martin that includes executive oversight from both sides and a rule-set for measuring reliability (Defense Daily, Oct. 17, 2007).