Roster Spot

Reid Davis, Raytheon's manager of air and missile defense programs, has been appointed as the No. 2 person in charge of the Lockheed Martin-Raytheon team bidding for the multibillion-dollar contract to continue developing the Missile Defense Agency's Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, according to statements from both companies.

The two firms announced their partnership in August. According to today's Lockheed statement, Orbital Sciences Corp. has joined the team as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for the GMD boost vehicle, and Northrop Grumman has joined the team as an OEM for the GMD fire control and communications system.

Northrop Grumman announced in June that it had joined Boeing as its strategic partner for the GMD development and sustainment contract.

Mathew Joyce, Lockheed's GMD vice president and program manager, told Inside Missile Defense this morning at the Association of the United States Army's annual convention in Washington that proper firewalls had been set up to make sure there would be no information sharing between workers who worked for the same company but were on different teams, especially since MDA had prohibited potential offerors from forming exclusive teams:

There's several companies responsible for the fielding of the existing system -- Raytheon doing the [exoatmospheric kill vehicle]; Northrop Grumman doing the ground systems; Orbital Sciences doing the boost vehicle; so in order to create as level a playing field as they could for this competition, MDA said, "For you OEMs, no exclusive teaming," which means Raytheon couldn't team with us exclusively.

Both Lockheed and Raytheon officials believe they can successfully support MDA's new testing schedule of one intercept attempt per year, and that enough data from those attempts along with a number of ground-based simulations can be obtained to keep the program from getting delayed. As Lockheed Martin's Joyce tells IMD:

You get data in various methods . . . but you do get a lot of information from ground tests -- stockpile, target reliability. . . . Between the two of our companies, we're pretty proud of our modeling and simulation capabilities and you'll see us coming forward with more information about that over the next couple months which will help you understand why we think [that under the] current constraints we can support the reliability and effectiveness assessments of the system.

Can we test more than once a year? I think if you look at our track records, my most recent history is in THAAD where we flew four times a year, so we obviously have the demonstrated capability to fly more than once a year if that's what the program decides it needs to do.

Reid Davis of Raytheon, who was also at AUSA, says:

I think it's important to strike a balance, because what you've got to do . . . is you do want to prove out those models and simulations but you also have to do the rigorous engineering to make sure that you understand what happened in the flight test. So you’re going to learn something on every test. And so you want to make sure that you learn from [both simulations as well as actual flight tests] and carry those lessons forward so that you don't repeat those same mistakes -- if there were any -- in future flight tests.