Defense News:
WASHINGTON — The long-delayed German medium range air-and-missile defense deal with Lockheed Martin and MBDA is expected to be complete by roughly the end of 2018, according to Lockheed’s executive vice president in charge of the company’s missiles and fire control business.
The team of Lockheed, MBDA Deutschland and Italy’s Leonardo submitted a complete proposal to the German government to develop the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), in late 2016, with the hope the team would be on contract in early 2017. And according to Frank St. John that timeline has slipped by nearly two years.
“We will go through what I hope is a short negotiation process given the months that we’ve spent kind of pre-working all of this and then by the end of the calendar year or again shortly thereafter — these things never happen when you want them to — we will be under contract and will start the development of that,” St. John told Defense News in a March 5 interview at the company’s Arlington, Virginia, office.
