Israel To Buy The F-35 If Their Conditions Met

December 1, 2009 by Matthew Potter · Comment
Filed under: Business Line, Companies, Contract Awards, Countries, Department of Defense, Events, FMS, Israel, Lockheed Martin, Military Aviation, Services, U.S. Air Force, development program, production program 

Israel would like to buy the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) to add modern, stealthy aircraft to its fleet of F-15 and F1-6 aircraft. As with the previous generation of United States aircraft they would also like the ability to integrate their own electronics and weapon systems on it. The Israelis have done this with all the weapons they have bought or captured over the years.

They rely on their own sophisticated defense industry to develop systems that they would like to put on the various platforms that they operate. The U.S. has resisted the Israeli requests in a bid to protect the technology and systems developed for the F-35. The Israelis have been negotiating this issue for several months and have won most of what they want but the desire to put their own electronic warfare system has things stymied. The U.S. will allow radar and weapons to be added but do not want to open the software at that level to Israel.

The contract could be for up to seventy-five aircraft total making Israel one of the largest purchasers and would certainly help the program facing budget issues and delays. The more that the U.S. is able to sell overseas the lower the average price of an aircraft will be. It behooves the U.S., Lockheed Martin and Israel to work out some sort of deal as the advanced capability of this aircraft will only help Israel in the future.

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U.S.A.F. To Upgrade Ground Based Surveillance Radars

May 15, 2009 by Matthew Potter · Comment
Filed under: Business Line, Companies, Contract Awards, Events, IT, Lockheed Martin, Military Aviation, Services, U.S. Air Force, development program 

The Air Force awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin to assist in the development of their next generation ground based air surveillance radar. The contract is worth about $25 million overall. It is for support of the Three-Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar.

The word “expeditionary” in the title indicates that this will be deployable to forward locations. The radar will be advanced enough to search for small, stealthy aircraft to carry out air control and surveillance missions. In a lot of cases the Airborne Warning and Control(AWACS) aircraft carry out this mission but in some cases there is a requirement for a land based system to conduct the same types of missions. The radar would also be able to support operations in the United States.

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