Lockheed Martin received a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) contract worth $64.3 million for F-16 Foreign Military Sales (FMS) mission planning.
It involves FMS to Slovakia, Bulgaria, Taiwan, Morocco, Greece, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia and Thailand, a U.S. DoD release today said.
This contract provides for the development, integration, test and delivery of the Joint Mission Planning System Unique Planning Component/Mission Planning Environment software updates.
Work is expected to be completed by January 2029.
In October, L3Harris Technologies won $93 million F-16 self protection systems. Even this deal involved FMS to support Air Forces of Chile, India, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Turkey, Iraq and Morocco.
F-16 for India
Lockheed Martin offered India its newly configured F-21 jet to be manufactured indigenously in India in a bid to compete for $ 15 billion aircraft competition. The company had earlier pitched their F-16V5 Block 70 aircraft.
The F-21 is rumoured to a rebranded version of the F-16V, the most advanced variant of the American jet. As per Indian media, the F-21 has 12,000 hours of service life airframe as against F-16’s 8,000 hours. It reportedly has completely different airframe, weapons capability, engine matrix and availability of engine options.
Vivek Lall, former Vice-President of Strategy and Business Development of Lockheed Martin had earlier said that if India decides to buy the F-21 jets then the company will not sell them to anyone else and will set up an F-21 manufacturing facility with Tata Group and create an ecosystem for the overall growth of India’s defence manufacturing.
