Washington: Lockheed Martin announced the launch of Strigo, a new line of modular missile and sensor hardware, along with a dedicated product centre designed to get weapons into the field faster. The line covers radio-frequency sensors, missile datalinks and missile seeker technologies, all built on a common baseline architecture.
The company said the shared architecture allows Strigo hardware to be reconfigured for different missions, including air defence, missile defence and air-to-surface strike.
Lockheed calls the Strigo Product Centre a storefront for “ready-now and near-ready” hardware that it said can be adapted to customer needs. The company said the modular approach also lowers life cycle costs, though it stopped short of citing dollar figures. Lockheed said it has made a $250 million internal investment in the product centre to date.
The centre was established less than two years ago and has already carried several concepts from initial design through testing, according to the release. The company said the centre can move a concept from sketch to tested solution in months rather than years, allowing it to have parts on the shelf before the military even asks for them, in some cases.
Stacy Kubicek, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Sensors and Global Sustainment, said in the release that the product centre’s emphasis on early research allows the company to “test and deploy new solutions at unprecedented speed,” adding, “That’s how we turn ‘what if’ into ‘what’s next’ faster than ever before.”
Lockheed said technologies developed through the Strigo family played a role in developing the Increment 2 seeker package for the US Army’s Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which is replacing the Army Tactical Missile System. The seeker package adds a sensor in a missile’s nose that locates and tracks its target in the final phase of flight.
Lockheed said it flew Increment 2 for the first time in March, travelling 350-kilometres, or more than 217 miles, in a flight that gathered performance data. The company did not report an intercept.
Strigo is the latest in a string of announcements this year in which Lockheed has pitched itself as building weapons faster and cheaper. In March, the company opened a Rapid Fielding Centre that builds prototypes and early production runs under one roof, part of a larger plan to build or upgrade factories.
In July, it introduced the PAC-3 ACE, a Patriot interceptor it says will cost less than half as much as a PAC-3 MSE. These latest moves are pitched as supporting the Arsenal of Freedom, the Pentagon’s term for the munitions industrial base buildup.
Lockheed’s release was short on details regarding the size, structure or location of the Strigo Product Centre. It did not name any contracts, customers or delivery timelines beyond the PrSM reference.
