Lockheed Martin has won a U.S. Army contract to develop and test prototypes for unmanned convoys that would shelter soldiers from some of the dangers inherent in moving supplies through hostile territories, a mission behind numerous casualties in the Iraq War.
Military personnel will conduct demonstrations using the prototypes developed through the so-called Expedient Leader-Follower program to establish operating procedures and shape future weapons programs, Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed said in a statement. Autonomous vehicles are among an array of state-of-the-art equipment, including hypersonic missiles and directed-energy lasers, in which the U.S. faces a 21st-century arms race, according to a strategy outlined by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in January.
Lockheed’s job in the latest contract, whose value wasn’t disclosed, is “to help coordinate a number of systems and vendors in achieving mature, reliable autonomous convoys,” said Gaylia Campbell, a vice president for the firm’s Missiles and Fire Control unit. The initiative “will equip a number of existing military ground vehicles with scalable robotic technology through the integration of modular kits, common interfaces and an open architecture to increase operator safety, improve situational awareness and increase resupply efficiency,” she said.
Along with guerrilla fighters armed with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, soldiers in military convoys routinely grapple with the challenges of supporting long-term missions, inclement weather and nighttime operations, all of which hinder human drivers. Self-operating vehicles, along with those that require only limited manpower, can ease such obstacles, making them a priority among the military’s planned investments with increased Congressional funding.
A two-year agreement ratified by lawmakers in March raised the cap for defense spending to $700 billion for fiscal 2018, which ends Sept. 30, and to $716 billion for 2019. Lawmakers are still determining actual appropriations for the coming year, and lower limits will return in 2020, unless Congress suspends them.
Investing in unmanned combat vehicles gives the Army “a great deal of flexibility in terms of how we employ them on the battlefield,” Secretary Mark Esper told the Senate Appropriations Committee in May. “In cases where you could see see — much as we saw in the Iraq War – exposed convoys of soldiers moving supplies from, let’s say, Kuwait to Baghdad, if you had vehicles that could traverse that difficult road unmanned, it would reduce the vulnerability of our soldiers.”
This spring, Lockheed Martin won a separate contract worth as much as $928 million linked to the military’s modernization effort, involving the development of a hypersonic Air Force missile, which can fly five times faster than the speed of sound.
The company’s shares fell 0.74 percent to $321.70 in New York trading on Monday, paring their gain over the past year to 11 percent.
