Sea Power: Mini-Aegis offering from LM | ADM April 2012

Katherine Ziesing | Sydney

The Aegis combat system is well known for larger warships but Lockheed Martin is looking to present a stripped down version for smaller vessels in the Asia Pacific region.

“We’ve gotten the Aegis system to the point where it’s fairly open, using Open Architecture principles, and now scalable depending on the vessel,” Dale Bennett, President of Maritime Systems & Sensors (MS2) at Lockheed Martin explained to ADM. “We are able to scale the software solution to meet the needs of various platforms that are out there.”

The company is keen to offer a similar variant currently used on the US Coast Guard vessels for the Offshore Combatant Vessel, Bennett said. This smaller version, known as the Agile variant of Aegis, will continue to be developed with the wider Aegis program. Lockheed is now developing the next technology insertion point, known as baseline 9, in the Aegis the program.