Lockheed Martin led Team Athena to compete for GBAD programme

A team of US and British aerospace and defence companies have announced the formation of Team Athena, which will compete for the Ground Based Air Defence (GBAD) Phase 1 program. GBAD will update and integrate the UK's existing Rapier and Starstreak air defense systems. The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is responsible for the programme and is expected to award two contracts for Phase 1 in late 2002, with work scheduled to commence in 2003.

Team Athena is a consortium of companies under the leadership of Lockheed Martin. It consists of Westland Helicopters Ltd, INSYS Limited, Systems Consultants Services Ltd, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), and the Weapon System Design Authorities (WSDA) that include Thales and MBDA.

"Team Athena is uniquely qualified to integrate the existing UK weapons systems with a state-of-the-art Air Defence Command, Control, Communications, Computing, & Intelligence (ADC4I) solution," said Ian Stopps, Chief Executive of Lockheed Martin UK Limited. "Team members were selected because of their ... expertise in the fields of air and missile defense, synthetic environment capabilities, supportability/logistics capability, communications and land digitisation as well as delivery of total integrated system-of-systems solutions. Team Athena companies encompass every relevant project and technical discipline required to fully meet the GBAD IPT expectations."

Lockheed Martin will provide systems engineering and integration, operations research, system analysis, and ADC4I development expertise to the team.

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