The Army is planning for a Milestone C decision to move its Stinger missile replacement program into production around the second quarter of fiscal year 2028, service officials have said.
After selecting Lockheed Martin
[LMT] and RTX [RTX] for the ongoing competitive development effort, the Army has said it plans to continue working with the two vendors over the next couple years before culminating in a “shoot-off” to inform next steps.
“Then, based on affordability aspects that have yet to be determined, we may continue to carry two vendors or we may downselect to one and then go into a three-year, very intense, aggressive developmental effort to try to get to a material solution that I can transition into potentially a major acquisition pathway,” Brig. Gen. Frank Lozano, the Army’s program executive officer for missiles and space, told reporters recently.
Lozano confirmed in late March 2023 that the Army had chosen Lockheed Martin and RTX for a Next Generation Short Range Interceptor (NGSRI) to develop a replacement for the Stinger missile, which has been manufactured by RTX (Defense Daily, March 28 2023).
“We’re looking for something that has a shorter time of flight, that has greater range and that has a seeker and a warhead tailored more toward [threats like]…fixed-wing aircraft, the new variants of rotary-wing aircraft that we’re seeing and especially against the UAS threat that we’re seeing continually evolve almost on a weekly or monthly basis,” Lozano told reporters.
In a Request for Information notice released on March 22, the Army detailed its need for a replacement missile “to meet increasing demand and growing threat capability,” noting the Stinger-Reprogrammable Microprocessor will become obsolete in FY ‘23 and that the “current Stinger inventory is in decline.”
The NGSRI program is the third increment of the Army’s Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) initiative, with the first increment focused on the Stryker-mounted SHORAD equipment package and a second on integrating a 50-kilowatt laser on a Stryker.
The Army recently renamed its M-SHORAD Inc. 1 as the SGT Stout system, and confirmed its acquisition objective could potentially grow from 312 up to 361 systems (Defense Daily, June 21).