Washington Business Journal:
Lockheed Martin Corp doubled down on its pitch to outfit the Navy’s amphibious fleet with its signature missile defense system Monday, and expressed a desire to equip older destroyers with state-of-the-art radar systems.
All these efforts would present an opportunity for the Bethesda defense company to add about 48 more ships to its portfolio of air and missile defense work.
Jim Sheridan, director of Aegis U.S. Navy Programs at Lockheed, told reporters at a press briefing in Crystal City Monday that the Aegis Combat System could soon make its way onto amphibious ships, reinforcing a sales opportunity that he first told me about back in April 2016.
The ships that Sheridan is referring to are the San Antonio-class Amphibious Transport Docks. In December 2015, Newport News-based shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. (NYSE: HII) won a $200 million contract for engineering and design on the 12th San Antonio class ship in the fleet. Lockheed hopes that Aegis could be built onto that ship.
That 12th ship, known as LPD-28, could then serve as a springboard for Lockheed to outfit the other 11 San Antonio class ships — LPD-17 through LPD-27 — with Aegis systems.
Aegis includes the radar, sonar, launch systems and weapon control systems found on a number of U.S. Navy and international ships. It searches, detects, tracks and engages enemy ships, submarines, aircraft and missiles at sea. Currently, the U.S. Navy has 63 cruisers outfitted with the technology and another 22 cruisers. There are 21 ships internationally employing Aegis, with customers in Australia, Japan, Spain, Norway and South Korea.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency has also taken the Aegis technology and deployed it on-land in Romania, with another missile defense site planned for Poland. This version of the system is known as Aegis Ashore.
“We put it ashore, we put it on Aegis cruisers, we put it on destroyers — why not put it on something else?” Sheridan told me in April.
Currently the amphibious ships are built with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Raytheon Co.’s (NYSE: RTN) Ship Self-Defense System. Aegis would be an upgrade because it has ballistic missile defense capabilities that SSDS does not…
