Company to Lead Homeland Missile Defence Programme

Northrop Grumman has announced it has been awarded an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract to lead the US Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) Weapon System, or GWS, programme.

The contract is worth a maximum of $3.3 billion and covers “design, development, verification, deployment and sustainment support of new capabilities for GWS,” the company says. The work will leverage the company’s extant land- and sea-based missile defence systems work, and incorporate current missile-warning and -tracking satellites, but with extensive new work taking place on the digital infrastructures that surround and enable them.

The company states the programme will “transform the current ground system component of the GMD system by utilizing a DevSecOps approach leveraging proven digital transformation processes to update and modernize legacy code, … capabilities, and incorporate the Next Generation Interceptor fleet into the overall GMD system.” DevSecOps is an approach to technology development which integrates security at every stage and layer of development and deployment.