The Army on Thursday awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] a $430.9 million production contract for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers to help replenish stockpiles of the weapon sent to Ukraine.
“This award will enable us to replenish our own inventory while providing critical capabilities for our allies and international partners,” Doug Bush, the Army’s top acquisition official, said in a statement. “We remain committed to getting things on contract as quickly as possible to ensure our stocks are rapidly replenished.”
The U.S. has been providing HIMARS launchers and associated GMLRS rockets, also built by Lockheed Martin, to Ukraine to assist in its fight against Russia’s ongoing invasion.
Last month, the Army noted it awarded Lockheed Martin a $14.4 million production deal to help replenish HIMARS stockpiles (Defense Daily, Nov. 17).
To date, the U.S. has committed to supplying Ukraine with 38 HIMARS launchers and more than half of those are currently in place and being used on the battlefield.
James Taiclet, Lockheed Martin’s chairman, president and CEO, said in October that the company met with its suppliers to work toward increasing HIMARS production to 96 units per year (Defense Daily, Oct. 18).
The Pentagon has previously detailed more than $1 billion in contracts it has awarded since April to begin replenishing stockpiles of weapons sent to Ukraine, to include another $33 million to Lockheed Martin for HIMARS in August, with the department having identified $7 billion in total replacement actions (Defense Daily, Sept. 9).
Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, reiterated his goal remains to replenish inventories of equipment sent to Ukraine on a ‘one-to-one’ basis, either with current systems or next-generation updates (Defense Daily, Sept. 7).
“The Department continues to focus on accelerating contracting actions and providing a persistent demand signal to our partners in industry,” LaPlante said in a statement on Friday. “This award is another example of the steps we are taking to replenish stockpiles and strengthen the industrial base.”
Bush in November cited HIMARS, along with GMLRS and Patriot missiles, as munitions programs that could “potentially” benefit from the ability to use multi-year contracts for procurement, if Congress were to grant such an authority (Defense Daily, Nov. 22).
“A great advantage of multi-year contracts is you usually save a lot of money. You stabilize the industrial base and you stabilize suppliers because there’s hopefully a four- or five-year contract for something versus one year at a time, where you get more variance. The downside of multi-years are you don’t have quite as much flexibility year-to-year. But there are many benefits,” Bush told reporters at the time.