SYRACUSE, N.Y. —Lockheed Martin [LMT] is set to begin delivering the next five Sentinel A4 radars to the Army in the coming weeks, which will be used for the program’s initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) phase starting in early fiscal year 2025.
David Kenneweg, Lockheed Martin’s program director for multi-mission air defense radars, provided the update last week, which follows the Army’s award of a low-rate initial production (LRIP) contract for 19 more radars over the summer and as the company works toward a goal of delivering two Sentinel A4s per month.
“Obviously, our factory is flexible enough to surge if needed to go greater than that. But that’s what our plan is right now,” Kenneweg told reporters during a media visit to Lockheed Martin’s facility here.
Lockheed Martin’s Sentinel A4 is the Army’s replacement for the Sentinel A3, built by Thales and RTX [RTX], and the first five radars were delivered to the service in late May 2022 (Defense Daily, June 10).
The upgraded version of the Sentinel radar, which provides air surveillance and fire control data, transitions the system to Active Electronically Scanned Array technology and is designed to identify and track multiple threats simultaneously, including cruise missiles, unmanned aerial systems, rotary wing and fixed wing aircraft, and rocket, artillery, and mortar threats.
“It truly is a digital radar. And so that…allows you to defend more against electronic attacks and to come up with different algorithms to continue to operate in denied environments where electronic attacks are happening,” Col. Jason Tate, project manager for the Army’s Search, Track, Acquire, Radiate, Eliminate (STARE) program office, told reporters during an early October briefing.
In October 2021, the Army awarded Lockheed Martin an accelerated contract to begin production on five additional Sentinel A4 radars, speeding up the program’s overall timeline (Defense Daily, Oct. 13 2021).
“The first one’s rolling off the line in Syracuse. And we’ll use those systems to continue to test. Specifically, we’ll use it for the [Indirect Fire Protection] system and other systems within the Army. And those systems will also be used in our IOT&E,” Tate said last month of the next five radars to be delivered to the Army.
Lockheed Martin’s contract to deliver the next 19 radars followed the Army’s Milestone C decision in July to move the Sentinel A4 program into low-rate initial production, which was informed by testing with the initial set of five radars.
“That authorized us to begin to proceed into the production and deployment phase. The Sentinel A4 decision came on time and on schedule,” Tate said.
Kenneweg told reporters last week deliveries under the LRIP contract for 19 radars are expected to begin in mid-2025.
The IOT&E phase will utilize the second group of five radars to be delivered soon, and is expected to inform a full-rate production decision around the third quarter of FY ‘25.
“We’re going through some more series of tests just to make sure that we’re setting ourselves up to be in the best position to move through IOT&E successfully. So we’re going to continue to do some performance testing and things like that. I can’t really get into the specifics, but that’s what we’re going to be doing,” Kenneweg said.
The Army has also selected Lockheed Martin’s Sentinel A4 to serve as the new radar for the National Capital Region-Integrated Air Defense System (NCR-IADS) and the platform is also set to place a role in the Defense of Guam architecture (Defense Daily, Oct. 14 2022).
“Without going into very specific details, I’ll just say that the system has been designed to be able to have a growth capability to it. And we’ll be looking at embracing that growth capability as we utilize those [radars] for other initiatives, such as the defense of Guam or the National Capital Region,” Kenneweg said.