Industry prepares for new Navy missile program.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Global Defense

* Three major defense contractors are poised to vie for a pending Navy contract that would increase the littoral combat ship's survivability by equipping it with a powerful, long-range missile.

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Last fall, Director of Surface Warfare Rear Adm. Peter Fanta indicated that there was a need to equip the LCS with an over-the-horizon missile capability and signaled that the service would look for a mature, commercial-off-the-shelf technology to fill the gap. The system would fit into the Navy's "distributed lethality" concept.

A request for proposals for the over-the-horizon missile program is slated for release by the end of the year, according to a Navy spokesperson. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and a Raytheon-Kongsberg team are expected to compete.

Boeing's Harpoon system--which the company plans to offer for the missile program--was tested in July on board the USS Coronado, an Independence-class LCS, during the Navy's Rim of the Pacific exercise, said Jim Brooks, director of Boeing Cruise Missile Systems.

"[We] went out to RIMPAC to do a firing that was fundamentally to demonstrate the integration of Harpoon onto LCS and to show it could be safely employed. That was successful," he said. "They were able to fire the missile. Everything worked on the ship as expected and it allows them to deploy to the Pacific later this year."

The service used a Harpoon Block 1C missile that was already in its inventory as well as one of its own launch systems, he said. The test was put together within a few months, he added.

"We've built over 7,500 Harpoons, about half of those for the U.S. Navy and half for our 29 international partners and allies. That really gives us a broad base to draw from, not only in terms of integration of Harpoon on new platforms, but also that infrastructure across the world that helps to support Harpoon," he said

The Navy is currently implementing the Block 2 version of Harpoon on the F/A-18 and P-8. That will give the system a network-enabled capability, he said.

With the Harpoon, Boeing is focusing on "incremental innovation," Brooks said. When the RFP is released for the over-the-horizon missile, the company plans to offer the Navy its Harpoon Block 2 Extended Range variant, he said.

"What we're doing with the extended range variant is adding capability," he said. "It's a continued evolution of that product line, and so that will give us the ability at very long ranges tying into that network to defeat those...