The Pentagon has inked a contract with munitions supplier Raytheon representing the largest-ever buy of the company’s AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM).
Valued at some $1.2 billion, the deal for AMRAAM production Lot 38 will provide munitions to Bahrain, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine and the UK, in addition to the US Navy and US Air Force (USAF).
Raytheon describes the 11 September contract as its largest AMRAAM award to date. It comes just 15 months after a separate, nearly-as-lucrative AMRAAM order from the USAF in 2023 valued at $1.15 billion.
Both contracts covered the latest AIM-120D-3 and export-approved AIM-120C-8 variants of the AMRAAM, which have been upgraded with new guidance circuit cards to improve the missile’s range and its performance against radar-jamming and electronic countermeasures.
Those improvements were developed under the so-called Form, Fit, Function Refresh programme, also known as F3R.
“Air dominance is critical to staying ahead of increasingly advanced adversary threats,” says Raytheon president of air and space defence systems Paul Ferraro.
The record-setting missile order comes as demand for long-range precision munitions has surged globally – and as the defence industry struggles to expand production after decades of limited demand.
Jon Norman, Raytheon vice-president of defence systems requirements, tells FlightGlobal the company historically produced between 450 and 650 AMRAAMs annually.
Contracts for the last several production lots have increased that figure substantially.
“Annual demand for AMRAAMs currently sits around 1,200 units globally,” Norman said on 10 September.
Although intended primary as an air-launched weapon for fighter aircraft, AMRAAMs can also be fired by the Raytheon-Kongsberg National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), a ground-based air defence platform currently in combat service with the Ukrainian military.
Munitions producers throughout the Western world say they need consistent, multi-year orders from governments to support expanding production, which requires costly investments in new factories and equipment.
To support further expansion of production capacity at its Tucson, Arizona assembly plant (beyond the current level of 1,200 missiles annually), Raytheon would need to see demand consistently reach 2,000 units annually, Norman notes.
In recent years, Raytheon moved to restart production of another guided missile system – the FIM-92 Stinger – some 20 years after it had shuttered that assembly line. The man-portable anti-aircraft heat-seeking missile was developed for the US Army, which concluded orders in 2002.
When demand for air-defence missiles surged in 2022 after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Raytheon struggled to resume production of Stingers, which were designed with a number of obsolete 1980s-era components no longer commercially available.
