The U.S. Air Force Armament Directorate (EB) and the Defense Innovation Unit selected Leidos, a leader in the national security and health industries, to prototype an enterprise test vehicle (ETV) meant to show off modularity for subsystem upgrade testing and an integrated solution that can act as a basis for reasonably priced mass production.
“We think the air vehicle system developed by Leidos Dynetics offers a strong proposition for the ETV endeavour. Mark Miller, senior vice president for missile and aviation systems at Leidos, stated, “Our strike systems expertise, demonstrated by the modular, affordable, and network-enabled GBU-69 Small Glide Munition, is the marriage of our recent experience developing the air-launched, air-recovered, X-61 Gremlins UAS, with ETV technology.”
“The system’s current digital design will make it easier to conduct in-depth engineering studies as required by this contract. Furthermore, we will be able to reliably handle platform integration challenges because to our vast experience integrating weapons on C-130 aircraft, which dates back to the GBU-43 MOAB program.”
Leidos is one of four businesses chosen from a very competitive field of over 100 candidates. It will use a capability under development since 2022 to fulfill the production, schedule, and cost targets set by clients and desired by warfighters in order to successfully complete missions.
“The Armament Directorate is still dedicated to our extremely capable legacy products, but we are now persuaded that expanding the scope to include atypical aerospace firms would give us the best opportunity to meet our cost-per-unit targets and achieve project timeline and production quantity goals,” said Cassie Johnson, EB’s enterprise test vehicle program manager. “We eagerly anticipate bringing respectable capability to our warfighters.”
