Raytheon in Tucson was awarded a seven-year contract worth up to nearly $2 billion to supply its ship-based Standard Missile-3 Block IIA ballistic missile interceptor to the U.S. Navy and Japan.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency awarded the $1.94 billion contract to supply an undisclosed number of complete SM-3s to the Navy and Japan's Ministry of Defense under the Foreign Military Sales program.
The work is to be performed in Tucson and Huntsville, Alabama, through February 2031.
The MDA has obligated about $922 million in procurement funding at the time of the award and Japan obligated about $308 million, according to a Pentagon contract notice. Each Sm-3 IIA costs about $27 million, according to MDA budget documents.
Co-developed with Japan, the SM-3 IIA is the newest, longest-range and fastest of Raytheon's SM-3 series of interceptors and is designed to defeat intermediate-range ballistic missiles, though it is said to have some capability against intercontinental missiles.
First deployed on U.S. ships some 20 years ago and significantly upgraded since, the SM-3 saw its first use in combat in April 2024, when two U.S. Navy destroyers fired six or seven interceptors, including unspecified types of SM-3s, to down six Iranian-made medium-range range ballistic missiles fired from Yemen in an attack on Israel.
U.S. Navy officials have said that its ships in the Red Sea also have used SM-2 missiles, an earlier but also upgraded ship-defense missile, and the related, multipurpose SM-6 to defend against missiles and drones launched by Houthi militants in Yemen.
SM-3 interceptors have no explosive warheads and instead destroy their targets by sheer high-speed impact near the top of the target missile's arced, or ballistic, trajectory.
Tucson defense contractor Raytheon's Coyote 2 drone-killer destroys targets in a 2021 test at the Yuma Proving Ground.
