Lockheed Martin’s Targets and Countermeasures Program provides unarmed targets designed to represent adversary missiles to permit realistic testing of the weapon systems and other elements of the Ballistic Missile Defense System.
Lockheed Martin has achieved more than 50 successful target missions since 1996. Lockheed Martin’s unmatched 98-percent reliability rate has included unitary and separating targets, spanning land, sea and air launches.
Lockheed Martin performs Targets and Countermeasures program management, design and systems engineering in Huntsville, Alabama, and production in Courtland, Alabama, and Ampthill, England, U.K.
Target Practice: 50 Times We Successfully Imitated Our Adversaries
Over the last two decades, the Lockheed Martin Targets team has taken their role in Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) target practice very seriously. The team receives high-fidelity threat system ballistic missile performance requirements from the government and builds ballistic missile targets to meet those requirements and represent real-world threats.
The Targets team then fields and launches these threat-representative missiles to test the ability of the BMDS to detect, track classify, discriminate, and, in the case of lethality intercept tests, negate the targets.