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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Dawson who wrote (16030)	4/30/1998 1:30:00 PM
From: BuzzVA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

The following news should be a HUGE user of FC, I would think. ----------------------- 04/30 12:13 Pentagon to announce winner of big defense contract (Editors: Pentagon announcement set for 5 p.m. EDT) By Charles Aldinger WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon was set Thursday to announce the winner in a multibillion dollar competition between Boeing Co. and a team headed by Lockheed Martin Corp. to design a system to defend the United States against ballistic missile attack. The Defense Department scheduled an afternoon news conference to announce the initial contract of up to $2 billion or more to design and integrate a controversial ''National Missile Defense'' (NMD) system over the next three years. But the long-term stakes are far higher. The winner would take the lead in a plan that could mean $10 billion to defense firms in the next decade, including a separate competition to build a rocket-fired weapon to destroy approaching warheads. Lockheed, teamed with Raytheon Co. and TRW Inc.in the United Missile Defense Co., is competing with Boeing to become NMD's lead integrator of weapons, radars and communications for the program. But many defense experts and, indeed, military officials, are wary of moving too quickly on a program being pushed by Congress. They say cutting-edge technology needed to find, track and shoot down missiles in flight is far from mature. ''There is no room for error. This thing has to work the first time (against an attack) or it's worth nothing at all,'' analyst John Pike of the private Federation of American Scientists told Reuters in Washington this week. The NMD idea, which grew from former President Ronald Reagan's more ambitious ''Star Wars'' program to protect U.S. cities from a massive Soviet nuclear attack, is now aimed at stopping a smaller attack or accidental launch by another country against the United States. The winner of the initial competition will have to design over the next three years a system of ground-based interceptor missiles, space-based satellites for missile launch detection and communications - tying it all together with sophisticated battle management control. If such a system works in tests and the United States determines that a sufficient threat exists from nuclear or other long-range missile attack, the Pentagon has promised Congress that it could order the system deployed by 2003. The United States has spent about $50 billion with little success on nuclear missile defense since Reagan suggested his plan more than a decade ago. The U.S. military is also currently trying to develop an even more limited Theater Missile Defense (TMD) program to protect troops and bases from missile attack around the world. But that program has experienced four successive failures by Lockheed Martin's proposed antimissile weapon because of technical and other glitches. Boeing and Raytheon are now involved in a separate NMD competition to develop an antimissile weapon that could be fired using a ground-based rocket to hit warheads in space. That weapon, dubbed the ''exo-atmospheric kill vehicle'' (EKV), is in the early stages of development. ^REUTERS@ Reut12:14 04-30-98