BALTIMORE, June 13, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) and Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) today announced the signing of an agreement to jointly pursue upcoming opportunities for Distributed Common Ground Systems (DCGS) that provide integrated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force.
A photo accompanying this release is available at http://media.primezone.com/noc.
The DCGS is designed to function as a single enterprise system for receiving, processing, exploiting and disseminating a wide range of multi-service data collected by sensors from military, national, joint, interagency, and multi-national assets to provide warfighters at the tactical level with information that is timely, relevant and useful for critical decision-making.
"Joining forces with Lockheed Martin will allow us to deliver the best value to all branches of the military and provide flexible and open architecture systems to joint deployed forces," said Taylor W. Lawrence, vice president and general manager of Northrop Grumman's C4ISR and Space Sensors Division. "Our two companies bring proven performance in the delivery of leading edge C4ISR networked systems."
"This is an exciting opportunity for our government and both companies," said John Mengucci, Lockheed Martin's vice president and general manager of Department of Defense Systems. "This powerful team, offering the most technically advanced, C4ISR capabilities in the industry, is positioned to deliver the best-value, lowest-risk DCGS solutions to all our customers."
The two companies will begin by having their respective systems engineers work to bring their software architectures together. After that, Lockheed Martin will integrate the DCGS Integration Backbone with best-of-breed applications from Northrop Grumman's and Lockheed Martin's multi-intelligence core as well as other community providers to create an interoperable DCGS capability for the Army, Navy, Air Force and U.S. Marine systems.
Both companies bring extensive experience on DCGS programs. Northrop Grumman first fielded the Army's Tactical Exploitation System in 2000, and since then has fielded related systems with the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force. Lockheed Martin has a solid reputation for successfully fielding and supporting Air Force DCGS components for more than 20 years and is a key part of the development of the Air Force's DCGS 10.2 system. Northrop Grumman is expected to take the lead in pursuing near-term Army and Navy business, while Lockheed Martin will take the lead on pursuing near-term Air Force Block 20 business.
Northrop Grumman's C4ISR and Space Sensors Division is part of the company's Baltimore-based Electronic Systems sector, a world leader in the design, development and manufacture of defense and commercial electronic systems and sensors, including airborne radar, navigation systems, electronic countermeasures, precision weapons, airspace management systems, communications systems, space sensors, marine and naval systems, government systems and logistics services.
Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin employs about 130,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services. The corporation reported 2004 sales of $35.5 billion.
