Lockheed fights for lost radar contract

Lockheed Martin is fighting for a $30 million Navy contract to develop a new radar system that it lost to one of its biggest rivals.

Raytheon Co. won the engineering and manufacturing development contract for the Air and Missile Defense Radar S Band to develop a missile defense system for multiple ship classes.

The capabilities to be developed will simultaneously support the detection of ballistic missiles as well as air and surface threats. The system will consist of S-Band radar, X-band radar and a radar suite controller.

Centurion Research Solutions estimates that the value of the contract is $30 million.

Lockheed has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office and a decision is due Feb. 5.

The Navy says it needs increased radar sensitivity and bandwidth over current radar systems for the ballistic missile defense portion. For the area of air defense and self-defense capabilities, increased sensitivity and clutter capability is needed. One of the features the Navy wants is the ability to detect and track what it calls “very low observable/very low flyer” threats when there is a lot of other objects and vessels in an area, so called clutter.