Breaking Defense

Japan plans to publicly award a contract for work on a joint US-Japanese Glide Phase Interceptor program by March 2025, the head of the Japanese defense ministry’s guided weapons efforts told Breaking Defense in a recent interview.

On May 15 Washington and Tokyo signed off on a formal agreement for GPI co-development that tasks Japan with building “rocket motors and propulsion components” for the interceptor, built to take down hypersonic weapons during the glide phase of flight.

The Pentagon said the joint project “will deliver a regional defensive capability over time as part of a holistic layered defense architecture.” The US Missile Defense Agency, which is leading the overall development effort, is expected to choose either Northrop Grumman or RTX as the prime contractor by the end of fiscal 2024.

Meanwhile, Japan will award a contract for its own work on the program “by March next year,” said Kazuya Yonekura, director of guided weapons project management division of the Japanese ministry of defense (MoD).

“Regarding the Japanese company which will be participating in this GPI project, we are going to do the public offering and then we’ll award a contract to a company,” Yonekura during a May 22 interview at MoD headquarters in downtown Tokyo.

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