Defense News:
Lockheed Martin and MBDA Deutschland are expecting to sign a contract with Germany next year to produce the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) and with that stamp of approval the pair is setting their sights higher.
“We think that MEADS has the opportunity to be the NATO air and missile defense system,” Marty Coyne, Lockheed Martin’s MEADS director, told a few reporters at DSEI.
And the market for modernized air and missile defense capability is a gold mine. “We estimate it conservatively at $100 billion over the next 15 plus years,” Coyne said.
“We also consider ourselves right now in the lead,” he added, because the program is nearing the end of a 10-year development process that has culminated in three successful flight tests, bringing key components to a very high technology readiness level.
It wasn’t long ago when the future of MEADS was hanging in the balance. MEADS started as a tri-national agreement among the US, Germany and Italy. The US eventually scrapped plans to buy the air and missile defense system meant to replace Raytheon’s Patriot system, but agreed to spend $800 million to finish a two-year proof-of-concept phase that means all three countries can access the technology developed through the program.
The future of the program depended on Germany choosing the system because Italy, which wants MEADS, couldn’t afford to go it alone. So Lockheed and MBDA waited more than a year for Germany to conduct an analysis before making a final decision on a system.
In June, Germany ultimately decided to finish developing and to produce MEADS TLVS, which will fire both longer-range PAC-3 missiles and German IRIS-T short-range missiles, Wolfram Lautner, head of communication at MBDA Deutschland, said.
Lockheed was also hoping to clinch a win in Poland in its “Wisla” competition for a new air and missile defense system, but because Poland decided it needed a system that was already fielded, the country dropped MEADS, which is nearing the end of its development.
But now that the MEADS program is moving full steam ahead toward an official contract signing with Germany by the end of 2016, the two companies that will co-produce the system are looking toward expansion…
