Lockheed Martin Wins $79.5M Contract to Provide an Open Architecture Combat Management System

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

The U.S. Navy selected Lockheed Martin’s COMBATSS-21 as the combat management system for the Navy’s frigate ship program. COMBATSS-21 is the combat management system in operation on the Freedom variant Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). The five-year contract, which is worth up to $79.5 million, covers fiscal years 2016-2021.

COMBATSS-21 (COMponent-BAsed Total-Ship System—21^st Century) is built from the Aegis Common Source Library (CSL), and shares a pedigree with the Aegis Baseline 9 software developed for the Aegis cruiser and destroyer fleet, as well as international ships, the Aegis Ashore system, LCS and the Coast Guard National Security Cutters.   

“We look forward to providing this combat management system to the frigates and potentially other platforms across the U.S. Navy, as it will bring commonality across the fleet of surface combatants and is a step toward realizing the vision of distributed lethality,” said Rich Calabrese, director of Mission Systems at Lockheed Martin. “Using the CSL enhances life-cycle affordability by reducing costs for integration, test and certification—and delivers an open combat system architecture in line with the Navy’s objective architecture, driving affordability and increasing interoperability across the entire fleet.”

The CSL allows surface combatants to rapidly and affordably integrate new capabilities across the fleet. This means that ships using a CSL-derived combat system can incorporate new sensors, weapons and capability upgrades to keep pace with evolving threats. The benefit of the surface combatant CSL is that these updates become available for rollout across other ship classes.

“We can build capability, get it into the CSL and then deploy it in a ship class when the Navy determines the need,” Calabrese said. In this way, capability developed on a forward fit program may be applied to ships already in service.

As the Aegis Combat System Engineering Agent, Lockheed Martin provides modern combat management systems and conducts the entire combat system integration life-cycle that enables navies around the world to achieve their most critical mission objectives. Lockheed Martin has successfully delivered and integrated Aegis and Aegis-based products on 126 platforms in eight nations, with an additional 23 under construction or planned. Aegis and Aegis-derived systems are in service in U.S. Navy cruisers, destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, Coast Guard National Security Cutters and Aegis Ashore sites. The navies of Japan, Spain, Norway, the Republic of Korea, and Australia have also chosen Aegis to protect their nations.

About Lockheed Martin

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 98,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.