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2022-10-02

Lockheed Stays Ahead with Mission-driven Transformation

The threats warfighters face while completing their missions continue to evolve in complexity, scale, and severity. They need the right tools to complete their mission and return home safely.

Lockheed Martin is transforming the business to ensure the warfighter is prepared for those ever-evolving missions with tools that match.

Two of those tools include the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) for the United States Air Force (USAF) and the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) for the United States Navy.

JASSM has experienced over 20 years of successful partnership with the USAF, providing continued significant long-range, precision engagement capabilities for air-to-ground missions. It is still relevant to the warfighter today.

LRASM, a fairly new cruise missile variant, continues to witness increased demands due to its exceptional capabilities. Armed with a penetrator and blast fragmentation warhead, LRASM employs precision routing and guidance, day or night in all weather conditions.

Both cruise missiles are anticipated to be essential to the warfighter for years to come. How does the company ensure that the cruise missiles remain relevant? With transformation that is driven by the mission.

StarDrive Programme

With the introduction of StarDrive to speed up the development process and digital techniques applied to start-up programmes such as the Stand-in Attack Weapon (SiAW), Lockheed Martin has embarked on a transformation journey with every facet of the business, including products in different life-cycle stages.

Accelerating the delivery of advanced capabilities to the warfighter is one of Lockheed Martin’s stated priorities and its Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) is key to getting there.

With an MBE, Lockheed Martin provides customers with an integrated digital environment that spans the entire life cycle of a programme, including adding upgradeable product improvements to existing programmes —– such as JASSM and LRASM — to further their lifespan.

Lockheed Martin is partnering with customers to smartly incorporate digital engineering tools and tapping into the modelling and simulation data they have acquired over 40 years of experience with missiles to evolve these products quickly and affordably. By implementing advanced modelling, simulation and machine learning, as well as software factories, the company has more flexibility to upgrade the munitions through incremental and continuous evolution.

Each time a flight test is performed —whether in the field or in the lab —real data are compared to projected data and calculations are updated. This helps ensure the actual test performance meets or exceeds requirements, which further improves development costs and accelerates schedules.

These approaches and tools help to not only improve on the systems themselves, but also discover ways of integrating the systems onto new platforms, such as the F-35.

Integrating JASSM, LRASM and new technologies onto the F-35 suite continues to increase multi-role mission capabilities, helping to continue to make the F-35 the most lethal, stealthy and survivable aircraft.

In addition to F-35 integration, Lockheed Martin is investing in the continued design and development of LRASM, which includes surface-launched variants to support the U.S. Navy’s ‘Distributed Lethality’ concept.

The LRASM surface-launched variants include a vertical launch system, the design of a topside (or deck-mounted) launcher configuration for integration on multiple surface ships, and a mobile-launcher variant that will provide forward-based ground forces an anti-surface weapon capability.

New Digital Tools

As well as new digital tools to enhance the product capability, Lockheed Martin is incorporating process automation within key steps in production to increase throughput, ensure quality control and save on costs.

JASSM advanced manufacturing factory includes analytics stations, process automation, dynamic model forecasting and virtual reality troubleshooting controls.

The manufacturing environment is digitally simulated to increase downstream efficiency to automatically capture design specifications and content for inspection planning to integrate those product enhancements into the next iterations quickly.

The same production line is leveraged on JASSM and LRASM, which offers tremendous opportunities to reduce time, risk and cost.

In June, Lockheed Martin opened a new 225,000-square-foot production facility with dynamic factory model forecasting, a fully-robotic paint line, and more automated processes.

The new intelligent factory is in addition to current production facilities that have delivered nearly 4,000 JASSMs and LRASMs to customers.

The digital engineering, advanced modelling and simulation, model-based approach, software factories, intelligent manufacturing facilities, and people, will allow Lockheed Martin to produce these systems at high capacities while evolving the product to increase capabilities.

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