Since launching a brand new strategy three years ago to surge Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] adoption of business technologies to reinforce its solutions for its Defense Department and international customers, the corporate is trying to expand this effort around its production capability and resiliency, James Taiclet, chairman, president, and CEO, said on Monday.
The primary expansion of the 21st Century Security vision is in the realm of strengthening the provision chain to be more resilient and to rapidly scale, Taiclet said through the company’s second quarter earnings call.
In June, Lockheed Martin and Recent York-based semiconductor manufacturer Global Foundries (GF) began a strategic collaboration to incentivize the domestic semiconductor supply gain partially through the use of GF’s chips for defense applications. Partnerships like it will “ensure access to ‘Made in America’ microelectronics for our platforms and systems,” Taiclet said.
The second area is to bolster “international production and sustainment operations,” he said, highlighting investments the corporate has make in Australia, the UK, Germany and potentially Poland.
“So, we’re going to proceed to expand internationally to be sure we now have a resilient supply chain and we now have sustainment operations where our customers can use them to discourage future conflict world wide,” Taiclet said.
In February, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman [NOC] and Germany’s Rheinmetall signed a letter of intent for the German company to grow to be a second supplier for F-35 fighter aircraft center fuselages in Germany, expanding production capability. Rheinmetall is slated to start producing the fuselages in 2025.
Taiclet launched 21st Century Security shortly after taking the helm at Lockheed Martin in June 2020 and commenced constructing digital technology partnerships with business firms in areas like 5G.MIL, artificial intelligence and distributed cloud. The corporate has already achieved successes and begun to generate revenue from these efforts, he said through the earnings call.
Throughout the DoD’s Northern Edge joint military exercise this spring, Lockheed Martin showcased its 21st Century Security “digital technology architecture” as a part of Indo-Pacific Command’s joint fires network by demonstrating “digital command and control, or C2, to synchronize joint all domain operations” near Alaska, he said.
“The exercise demonstrated the power to successfully integrate with each Lockheed Martin and third-party platforms and aircraft, including F 35s,” he said. “The system performed C2 functions across all of the military services, all levels of operation and across multiple domains from space to air to surface. That is the primary time joint force synchronization has been demonstrated at this scale. It was a serious milestone for all joint all domain command and control interoperability and our company’s vision for twenty first Century Security.”