The American Lockheed Martin has laid the foundation for the construction of a new plant in the city of Troy, Alabama, which will work on the production of anti-aircraft missiles. This concerns both serial THAAD interceptors as well as the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI), that is a first line of defense, tip-to-tail interceptor within the Missile Defense Agency’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. Frankly speaking the maine mission of NGI would be to counter intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as russia’s Sarmat ICBM.
According to the report, the new enterprise will have an area of 87 thousand square feet (approximately 8 thousand square meters). Thus, the volume of existing local production capacities will be doubled.
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Defense Express notes that this is how the program of massively increasing the production of various types of ammunition and missiles, which was launched in the United States a few months ago, is being implemented. The existing industrial capacity is no longer enough, so new ones are being built.
In the case of THAAD, this is especially important, because during the war with Iran, the Americans spent more than a quarter of their own stocks of such interceptors. At the current rate of production, their restoration will take years. The current production rate does not provide timely replenishment of costs, so a decision was made to increase production volumes by 4 times over seven years.
What is more interesting here is that the new plant will also work on the NGI project – a new generation of interceptors, which is designed to counter current and future missile threats. This especially applies to shooting down intercontinental ballistic missiles, in particular the RS-28 Sarmat, which the russians cannot put into service.
Lockheed Martin received the contract for the development of NGI in 2024 and is to put the system into operation in 2028. Therefore, it is quite expected that the necessary production facilities are being built now.
It is worth remembering that it takes time to build factories and then bring them to full production volumes – in view of this, in order to have a higher production rate in seven years, new enterprises need to be built now. So in the near future we will see more such news from various companies.
Let us recall that Patriot missile shortage becomes critical after Gulf countries used over 1,600 interceptors
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