By Marina Malenic
Raytheon [RTN] executives last week expressed confidence in their ability to deliver on a fixed-price deal for a new air-launched precision-targeting weapon for the Pentagon.
The Air Force earlier this month awarded the company a $450.8 million contract to develop a Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) under increment II of that program. Service officials were planning as late as last fall to issue a “cost type” contract with incentives. They revised the strategy because, they said at the time, the technology was mature enough for the issuance of a fixed-price incentive-fee contract (Defense Daily, Dec. 18, 2009).
Harry Schulte, vice president of the Air Warfare Systems product line at Raytheon, said the company is prepared for the additional risk that a fixed-price contract places on the manufacturer.
“We have a good plan” for the development work, Schulte told reporters during an Aug. 24 briefing. “We assume that not everything will go 100 percent right, but we think we’ve covered any additional risk.”
SDB II is a joint Air Force and Navy program. The weapon is a precision-strike standoff munition designed to defeat moving targets in all weather conditions from up to 40 nm. As required by the Pentagon, Raytheon’s GBU-53/B solution incorporates a seeker that features three modes of operation: millimeter-wave radar, uncooled imaging infrared and semiactive laser.
Tom White, Raytheon’s SDB II program director, added that the weapon is “designed to be simple to manufacture.”
“That gives us optimism that we can do very well with this design,” he explained.
White said the company has made fixed-price deals with components suppliers for nearly all of the necessary materials. He said the first four production lots are expected to include 1,300 units total. The first full-rate production lot would include 1,050 units. SDB II is scheduled to enter low-rate initial production in 2013.
The Pentagon plans, on average, to spend between $62,000 and $81,000 per round in 2005 dollars, White added.
The Air Force expected to begin flying the bomb on deployed F-15E Strike Eagles by 2017. Initial operational capability (IOC) on Navy and Marine Corps F-35s is expected in 2018.
The Air Force wants to buy 12,000 of the weapons, and the Navy and Marines have plans to procure approximately 5,000 between the two services. Raytheon officials said they expect the production contracts to eventually be worth some $2 billion over the life of the program.
Raytheon unseated legacy SDB manufacturer Boeing [BA], which for the new competition had partnered with Lockheed Martin [LMT]. The contractors had been asked to maintain the airframe and weight of the original Boeing-manufactured SDB in the follow-on competition. Boeing has said it will not protest the decision.
SDB II flight testing is expected to begin next year, according to the Air Force.