Big U.S. Missile-defense Deal Delayed Again

Oct 19, 2011 By Jim Wolf/Reuters - AviationWeek.com

The Pentagon has delayed until December the award of a contract that could unseat Boeing as the current prime contractor for the U.S. long-range missile shield.

A team led by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon is vying with Boeing to expand and maintain the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, hub of layered antimissile protection.

The award has slipped to December “because evaluation won’t be completed until then,” Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, said in an emailed reply to Reuters.

In June, the agency had announced it was postponing the selection of a winner until November. It said then that more time was needed to weigh the rival bids.

The GMD contract’s value to Boeing will have been about $18 billion from January 2001, when it formally became the system’s prime contractor, through the end of this year, Jessica Carlton, a company spokeswoman, said in an email.

Boeing is teamed for the competition with Northrop Grumman Corp , which has designed and deployed the systems’s command-and-control apparatus.

GMD uses radars and other sensors plus a 20,000-mile fiber optic communications network to cue interceptors in silos in Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

The shield has been shaped initially to guard against ballistic missiles that could be fired by Iran and North Korea. It is the only U.S. defense against long-range ballistic missiles that could be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.