Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control received a $122.6 million modification to a previous Air Force contract on March 14 to ramp up production of stealthy, long-range AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile/Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles.
In a contract award, the Pentagon said the deal is for “tooling and test equipment needed to increase production quantities” of the JASSM and LRASM. The work is to be done in Orlando, Fla., and completed by July 2028. The contract does not specify how many missiles Lockheed is gearing up to build at rate.
Lockheed and the Pentagon agreed on the original contract aimed at helping increase production in 2018, and this is the third time it has been modified. Collectively, the four awards are valued at $401.7 million.
For its own stockpiles, the Air Force requested 550 JASSMs in its fiscal 2025 budget request; the same number as it did in fiscal 2024. The missile costs about $1.5 million per round. The Air Force also contracts with Lockheed for the Navy’s purchases of LRASM.
The company referred queries about the contract to the Air Force.
Last year, Lockheed described an August 2024 contract modification as “part of the Large Lot Procurement pilot program with the U.S. government [that] enables the ability to increase annual production quantities by providing additional resources for long-lead procurements and facilitating production line efficiencies.” It said that multiyear procurements of weapons like JASSM and LRASM “are a key anti-fragility measure to increase industry resilience and ensure operations can be ramped more quickly.”
The company said it invested in “in the continued development [and] expansion” of JASSM and LRASM production in 2022, and in that year added a new 225,000-square-foot factory to existing production facilities to increase production quantities. The new facility includes “factory model forecasting, a fully-robotic paint line, and more automated processes,” the firm stated.
The JASSM and LRASM are externally nearly identical, but the latter is optimized for striking sea targets. The JASSM-ER (extended range) reportedly has a range of about 600 miles, but Lockheed last fall unveiled an unsolicited proposal for the JASSM-XR, a longer variant of the munition with a range company officials suggested will near 1,000 miles. Lockheed builds JASSM and LRASM in Troy, Ala.
Lockheed MFC’s Michael Rothstein, vice president for strategy and requirements, air weapons, and sensors, told Air & Space Forces Magazine in a recent interview that the company sees the JASSM/LRASM as the “high end” of a high-low munitions mix, complementing the relatively inexpensive munitions the Air Force is seeking under the Enterprise Test Vehicle program and other initiatives. Lockheed is offering its own version, called the Common Multi-Mission Truck, which Rothstein said in its basic form could cost as little as $150,000 per round.