As part of the list of new agreements published up to September 30, the U.S. Department of Defense announced it had awarded a contract modification to Lockheed Martin Space to move forward with the production of additional Trident II ballistic missiles, mainly to equip the nuclear submarines of the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom. To achieve this, the Pentagon will invest a total of $647,069,302, with future executable options that could raise the value to $745,678,290.
Expanding on the details of this new contract for the U.S. company, the work will be distributed across several sites, with three main locations: 23% at Magna, Utah; 14.2% at Denver, Colorado; and 13.1% at Cape Canaveral, Florida; among others. A completion date was already set for September 30, 2030.
Additionally, it was specified that payments will be made in different stages to ease the burden on the current fiscal year’s budget, initially using funds allocated to the U.S. Navy. The first payment will be $120,442,802, which does not need to be fully executed before the end of FY2025, since the funds will not expire by that date. The contracting activity will be the Strategic Systems Programs office in Washington, D.C.
It is also important to recall that earlier this year the Pentagon had already awarded Lockheed Martin a $383 million contract to advance improvements to the Trident II D5 missile, resulting in the Trident II D5 Life Extension 2 (D5LE2) design. The goal is to extend the service life of these systems until 2084 for both U.S. and British submarines, ensuring the sustainment of a key pillar of nuclear deterrence for both countries.
In line with this, the U.S. Navy has been carrying out several tests with the Trident II D5, both to gather key data for the ongoing upgrades and to demonstrate its current deterrence capabilities. The most recent tests were conducted between September 17 and 21, with four launches from an Ohio-class nuclear submarine off the coast of Florida, bringing the total number of Trident D5 test launches to 197.
The United Kingdom has also carried out its own tests, one of the most notable being in February 2024, when a second consecutive failure of a Trident D5 missile launch was recorded. In that case, HMS Vanguard successfully fired the missile, but a propulsion system failure caused it to fall just seconds later. The previous incident occurred eight years earlier, involving HMS Vengeance during a Demonstration and Shakedown Operation (DASO), in which the tested missile suffered a major navigation system failure—a fact that was initially withheld from the British Parliament.
*Images used for illustrative purposes
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