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Lockheed Martin awarded JSF
10/27/2001
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon selected Lockheed Martin Corp. as the primary contractor for the new Joint Strike Fighter – the richest defense program in history.
Lockheed's victory in the five-year competition with Boeing Co. had been expected for weeks in defense circles.
The program initially is valued at about $200 billion over 30 years, though it could grow over time because of sales of JSFs to foreign governments and follow-up support, parts and maintenance contracts.
The program is expected to secure the future of Lockheed's Fort Worth fighter plant for decades.
The JSF won't reach full production until the end of the decade. But Lockheed officials expect the program to save as many as 7,000 of the 11,300 jobs at the factory over the next five years.
Work on the factory's mainstay F-16 Fighting Falcon is to wind down during that period.
The contract initally calls for production of 3,002 of the new stealth aircraft for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and for Britain's navy and air force.
But as was the case with the 1970s-vintage F-16, originally built solely for the U.S. Air Force, more jobs could be added in coming decades at Fort Worth as export sales materialize.
Analysts have predicted for years that the loser of the JSF competition would be eliminated from the fighter plane business - at least as a prime contractor.
That assessment may turn out to be harsh, however, because Boeing may still have a significant role in the JSF even though its design wasn't selected.
Lockheed, for example, is the prime contractor on the Air Force's new F-22 Raptor, but Boeing has a 30 percent piece of the work as a production partner.
Anticipating that Boeing would lose the deal, lawmakers from Missouri and Washington state in recent weeks talked of possible legislation to mandate splitting the contract between the companies 50-50.
Boeing's fighter plane factory is in the St. Louis district of House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo. Its military aircraft division is headquartered in Seattle, where corporate headquarters was located until it moved to Chicago last summer.
Pentagon officials rejected the idea of splitting the contract last year, saying it would cost too much to set up two production lines.