Officials of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) in Dahlgren, Va., announced a $36.4 million contract Tuesday to the Lockheed Martin Corp. Mission Systems and Training segment in Moorestown, N.J., to install Aegis Ashore equipment at the missile-defense site in Redzikowo, Poland.
Aegis Ashore is the land-based component of the Aegis ballistic missile defense (BMD) system developed originally for deployment at sea aboard specially equipped U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers.
Lockheed Martin to install, integrate, and test Aegis Ashore equipment in a deckhouse and deckhouse support building at the Redzikowo, Poland, missile-defense site. Aegis is not a military acronym, but is the name of the shield of the Greek God Zeus.
Related: Army ready to begin construction of Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense site in Poland
The land-based Aegis Ashore system is designed to be removable to support worldwide deployment. In addition to Aegis BMD at sea, Aegis Ashore is part of Phased Adaptive Approach (PAA) Phases II and III, MDA officials say.
Aegis Ashore uses the same AN/SPY-1 radar; command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) systems; Vertical Launch System; computer processors; display system; power supplies; and water coolers that are used onboard the Navy's new construction Aegis BMD destroyers.
U.S. and Polish government officials staged a ground-breaking ceremony last May at the Redzikowo missile-defense site, which is part of a larger initiative to help defend NATO countries from nuclear ballistic missile attack.
A separate Aegis Ashore anti-missile battery is operational in Deveselu, Romania, to help defend Southern Europe, and the Redzikowo, Poland, Aegis Ashore site will help defend Northern Europe when it becomes operational in 2018.
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The Aegis ballistic missile defense system uses the Lockheed Martin Aegis weapon system and the Raytheon RIM-161 Standard Missile 3. Subcontractors include Boeing Defense, Space & Security; Alliant Techsystems (ATK); Honeywell; Naval Surface Warfare Center; SPAWAR Systems Center; Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL); and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory.
Aegis Ashore is designed to defeat short-to-intermediate-range ballistic missile threats. The European Phased Adaptive Approach is designed to deal with Iranian short- and intermediate-range ballistic missile threats to U.S. assets, personnel, and allies in Europe.
On this contract Lockheed Martin will do the work at the Aegis Ashore missile-defense site in Redzikowo, Poland, and should be finished by December 2018. For more information contact Lockheed Martin Mission Systems and Training online at www.lockheedmartin.com/us/mst, or the Missile Defense Agency at www.mda.mil.
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