U.S. Army Advances LTAMDS Radar Integration with PAC-3 Missiles for 360° Patriot Defense.

Lockheed Martin received a $33.8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract on Feb. 18, 2026, to support U.S. Army ground and flight testing that integrates the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor with PAC-3 interceptors. The award advances Patriot modernization by validating the 360-degree LTAMDS radar and ensuring reliable sensor-to-shooter performance before broader fielding through 2027.

Lockheed Martin has secured a $33.8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee award dated Feb. 18, 2026, to provide Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor (LTAMDS) PAC-3 system ground and flight test support for the U.S. Army under Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal. More than a routine line on a contracts page, the deal is a deliberate push to harden the Army’s next Patriot-era sensor-to-shooter chain just as LTAMDS transitions from engineering promise to operational proof. Under the award, work will be ordered as needed with locations and funding defined per task order, and performance is scheduled to run through March 31, 2027.
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Lockheed Martin is supporting U.S. Army ground and flight tests to validate LTAMDS 360-degree radar integration with PAC-3 interceptors, strengthening Patriot's sensor-to-shooter performance against cruise missiles, drones, and ballistic threats ahead of wider fielding through 2027 (Picture source: U.S. DoW).

On paper, the contract line is short. In practice, it sits at the hinge point between a new radar and a proven interceptor family that U.S. forces and allies depend on daily. LTAMDS is Raytheon’s next-generation Patriot radar replacement, designed from the outset to provide full-sector coverage and better performance against the threat set that now dominates air defense planning: low-flying cruise missiles, maneuvering ballistic and quasi-ballistic missiles, drones operating in clutter, and raid-scale attacks arriving from multiple azimuths. Raytheon describes LTAMDS as a three-array design, with a main front array and two rear arrays that work together for 360-degree detection and engagement support, and claims the primary array delivers more than twice the power of the legacy Patriot array while preserving customers’ investment in the Patriot ecosystem.

The Army’s decision to place a dedicated testing support award with Lockheed Martin rather than treating radar trials as a purely sensor-side activity reflects how Patriot has evolved. PAC-3 is not simply a missile; it is an integrated engagement stack where track formation, target discrimination, uplink timing, missile fly-out support, and terminal seeker behavior must align across radar, command-and-control, launchers, and interceptor software builds. LTAMDS is integrated through the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, enabling the radar to feed an operator's decision loop and then support the interceptor through fly-out to the engagement. That is exactly the seam where ground and flight test support becomes decisive: proving that track custody is continuous, that engagement-quality data arrives on time, and that the system behaves predictably under stress, clutter, and maneuver.

From an operational standpoint, LTAMDS paired with PAC-3 is aimed at restoring overmatch in the lower-tier fight, the critical terminal layer defending maneuver forces, air bases, logistics nodes, and high-value infrastructure. The shift to 360-degree sensing is not cosmetic. It closes a tactical vulnerability adversaries have studied for years: exploiting coverage gaps and geometry to saturate or confuse a defended sector, then forcing defenders into radar repositioning, sector management compromises, or late engagements. The Army’s emphasis on realistic test events is consistent with the broader LTAMDS maturation story, including multiple missile flight tests and thousands of hours of environmental and operational stressing intended to ensure the radar can survive real soldier handling, mobility demands, and harsh conditions.

PAC-3 MSE is a high-velocity hit-to-kill missile designed to defeat tactical ballistic missiles and air-breathing threats, with improved capability achieved through a higher-performance solid rocket motor, a modified lethality enhancer, more responsive control surfaces, upgraded guidance software, and other survivability and safety improvements. These upgrades are not abstract enhancements: they are specific design changes intended to expand battlespace performance against complex threats, while requiring only minor launcher modifications and benefiting from software upgrades such as Post Deployment Build-8.

Industry details underline why integration testing must be relentless. The PAC-3 seeker uses Ka-band millimeter-wave technology to provide active guidance for target acquisition, aim point selection, and terminal guidance, a demanding set of functions that depends on the quality and continuity of the engagement track delivered by the broader system. The PAC-3 MSE’s two-pulse motor and the role of attitude control motors enable precise endgame course refinement to ensure body-to-body impact. Those features deliver their promised advantage only if the radar and battle management chain provide stable handoff, accurate prediction, and robust midcourse support under operational conditions.

Why award this contract now, and why structure it as cost-plus-incentive-fee? The Army is moving LTAMDS into a period where schedule pressure collides with the need for proof, not promise. The service is preparing for initial operational test and evaluation and broader fielding, while pushing radars into demanding operational environments for evaluation. That timeline makes 2026-2027 the window where test data must harden into confidence, because every unresolved integration issue becomes exponentially more expensive once fielding and allied production lines accelerate. Incentive-fee mechanisms, used carefully, give the government a tool to reward measurable outcomes like test readiness, data delivery, defect closure rates, and on-time execution, rather than simply reimbursing effort.

U.S. force posture is increasingly shaped by the need to keep airfields, ports, and expeditionary nodes alive under precision strike pressure, especially in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe’s extended air defense contest. A modern radar that can see and fight in full sector, tied into a networked command system and paired with an agile hit-to-kill interceptor, is central to deterrence because it complicates adversary targeting math and raises the risk that a cheap saturation theory fails at the moment of execution. LTAMDS is advancing toward fielding as a 360-degree radar integrated into the Army’s broader air and missile defense architecture, with live-fire events guiding Patriot interceptors against representative threats.

Finally, the contract notice offers one additional clue that seasoned acquisition watchers do not ignore: only one bid was received. That is often what happens when the government is buying specialized integration knowledge, test tooling, and engineering support closely tied to proprietary interfaces and prior program work, not commodity services. In other words, this award is less about buying testing in the abstract and more about buying down the last pockets of uncertainty in a specific kill chain that must work on demand, under raid pressure, with soldiers operating the system and adversaries actively trying to break it. With March 2027 set as the completion marker, the Army is effectively paying to ensure that when LTAMDS and PAC-3 are asked to defend a runway, a brigade, or a critical node with seconds to spare, the system response is not a laboratory success story but a repeatable combat function.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.