The U.S. Army awarded Raytheon a $1.7 billion contract to produce a new missile defense sensor that will replace the current Patriot system’s radar, according to an Aug. 28 Pentagon contract announcement.
The contract modification allows the company to build low-rate production Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Systems. The new award brings the cumulative total value of the contract to $3.8 billion.
The estimated completion date for low-rate production is the end of 2029.
A total of $435.7 million from fiscal 2025 Army missile procurement funds and $397 million in foreign military sales funds from Poland were obligated at the time of the award, according to the announcement.
The Army’s low-rate production lot will consist of roughly 10 radars. The service plans to build 94 radars total over the course of the program. Raytheon will also simultaneously build Poland’s 12 LTAMDS radars on order. Poland is the first foreign customer for the system.
“This contract highlights the need for LTAMDS amid increasingly complex and large raid threat tactics and underscores the U.S. Army’s confidence in the system’s advanced 360-degree integrated air and missile defense capability,” Tom Laliberty, Raytheon’s president of land and air defense systems, said.
“After achieving Milestone C earlier this year, Raytheon continues to ramp up production to meet the fast-growing demand from the U.S. Army and international partners,” he said.
The Army approved LTAMDS for low-rate production in April. The service has been working on replacing its aging Patriot air and missile defense system for over 15 years, initially running a competition for a full system before canceling those plans in favor of developing a new command-and-control system and a new radar separately.
The radar is a major modernization element for the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense system, along with a fully modernized — and already fielded — command-and-control capability called the Integrated Battle Command system.
The Army awarded Raytheon a contract in 2019 to deliver prototypes over five years. Building the radar rapidly was an ambitious challenge and the service decided to keep the sensor in testing for an extra year to ensure it was fully mature and ready for prime time.
LTAMDS went through eight major missile flight tests along with roughly 10,000 hours of other testing, including radiate time, radar tracking time and testing against wind, rain, dust and road marches, during which soldiers “kind of beat on them a little bit to see how they stand up,” Laliberty said in an interview earlier this year.
Currently the time to build an LTAMDS is about 40 months on the production line, but the Army is working with Raytheon and has hired a consulting company to work on supply chain management in order to accelerate production time to 36 months (a formal program objective).
The service is planning for the LTAMDS initial operational test and evaluation to take place in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 and has also sent LTAMDS downrange to Guam for additional evaluation. The capability arrived on the key island last month.
The service aims to reach full-rate production in 2028.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.