Lockheed Martin restarts Army’s ‘tactical mission’ production at Camden

Lockheed Martin has restarted its Tactical Mission System (TACMS) production line at the company’s facility in Camden, Ark.

For more than 20 years, TACMS (formerly ATACMS) was assembled on-budget and on- or ahead of schedule at the company’s facility in Horizon City near El Paso, Texas. In order to consolidate all of Lockheed Martin’s Precision Fires missile and rocket production at its Camden Operations, TACMS production was temporarily suspended in 2014 and relocated to Camden.

“Restarting the TACMS production is excellent news for our customers seeking deep precision fire support,” Ken Musculus, vice president-tactical missiles at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said in a Tuesday (March 29) statement. “This production re-start will yield greater flexibility and significant cost-savings on a program with a rich history of reliability, affordability and mission success.”

TACMS is a combat-proven precision deep-strike system with readiness rates exceeding 98 percent since the program’s initial fielding in 1990. Providing quick-reaction firepower with ranges up to 300 kilometers, the TACMS missiles can be fired from the entire family of MLRS launchers, including the lightweight High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).

Each TACMS missile is packaged in an MLRS launch pod and is fired from the MLRS family of launchers. TACMS is the only long-range tactical surface-to-surface missile ever fired in combat by the U.S. Army. Almost 600 TACMS have been employed to date, with the system demonstrating extremely high rates of combat accuracy and reliability.

Last month, Lockheed Martin officials said the nation’s largest defense contractor had withdrawn its protest of the $30 billion Joint Light Tactical Vehicle award, ending the defense giant’s six-month long legal battle to wrestle the highly-sought after military contract away from Wisconsin rival Oshkosh Defense.

At the time, a Lockheed Martin official told Talk Business & Politics that the planned JLTV production facility would continue to used for other manufacturing operations.

“Lockheed Martin’s Camden Operations continues to be a production center of excellence for the Corporation. We have recently received new orders extending THAAD and PAC-3 production, and our family of Tactical Missiles products, including HIMARS, TACMS and Guided MLRS, continues to evolve in both domestic and international markets.  We have a growing need for manufacturing/production space in Camden,” the company said in a statement.