Lockheed Martin wins $420 mln radar contract
(UPDATE: adds background)
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy on Tuesday said it awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. (NYSE:LMT - news) a $420 million contract to develop an S-Band radar for one component of a planned U.S. defense against long-range missiles.
It said work for the contract would be carried by Lockheed Martin Naval Electronic & Surveillance Systems in Moorestown, New Jersey, and was due to be completed by March 2007.
The radar is designed to help track and coordinate attacks on missiles in the middle of their long flights from launch to target. It would be part of a sea-based, mid-course defense in which projectiles are fired from warships at nuclear or other missile warheads high over the ocean.
The Navy said the contract had a cost ceiling of $420 million and contract funds would not expire at the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30.
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Contractors adapt to defense strategy
'The mission' is everything after Sept. 11, official says
By Lisa Smith, Medill News Service
Last Update: 6:46 PM ET Feb. 19, 2002
WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- Echoing President Bush's sentiments, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said Tuesday that the U.S. defense strategy of the future must be a "capabilities-based approach" guided by intelligence.
Wolfowitz described the Defense Department's priorities in the context of its budget for fiscal 2003 -- including homeland defense, information technology and intelligence gathering -- not to mention in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Bush's budget request runs to $379 billion for the upcoming fiscal year.
"Because we're at war, the imperative is even greater to cut things we don't need, and to hold the line on unnecessary increases," Wolfowitz said in an address to the annual defense conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
While calling the war against Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime in a victory, Wolfowitz stressed that there is still much work to be done to fight terrorism.
"It's going to be a long, hard and difficult campaign," Wolfowitz said, repeating what Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have said on a number of occasions. "The conflict is very far from over."
The United States must continue to join flexible international coalitions as it embarks on new missions in different areas of the world, he added.
"The countries who have been critical to our success in Afghanistan are not the same countries that are going to be critical now to our success in the Philippines or in some other part of the world," Wolfowitz said. "It's the mission that has to determine the coalition, not the coalition that determines the mission."
New U.S. allies will likely be people who end up terrorized by their own governments, like the Afghan people fought against the Taliban, he said.
And just as the Defense Department is changing how it operates to meet new challenges, so must private companies in the defense industry adapt their corporate strategies to respond to these changes, a panel of industry executives told the conference.
First and foremost, flexibility
"We need to adapt our company from the inside out," said Scott Seymour, president of the integrated systems sector of Northrop Grumman (NOC: news, chart, profile), a contractor that produces airborne radar equipment among other systems for the Pentagon.
Seymour said the Los Angeles-based company is developing ways to become more flexible as the industry moves away from a vertical hierarchy.
One of the most critical issues facing the traditionally rigid defense industry, especially after Sept. 11, is developing agility during this era of globalization, panel members said. But that's not to say it will be an easy task.
"It's unclear to us exactly how we align with this notion of globalization," said Robert Stevens, president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin (LMT: news, chart, profile), an aircraft builder that recently was awarded a multi-billion dollar contract by the U.S. Air Force.
The industry needs to realize that "change is something to be embraced," said Alison Wood, North American senior vice president of strategy and future systems for BAE Systems (UK:BA: news, chart, profile).
Last September's terrorist attacks also forced the defense industry to respond quickly to its customers, including the federal government, and gave industry workers a stronger sense of purpose, panelists said.
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