Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin took its current shape on 15 March 1995, when Lockheed Corporation merged with Martin Marietta to form what is now the largest defence contractor in the world by revenue. The company is headquartered in North Bethesda, Maryland, and has been led since 2020 by chairman and chief executive Jim Taiclet, a former US Air Force pilot who came to the role from American Tower. Its lineage runs back through some of the most storied names in American aerospace — Lockheed’s Skunk Works, founded by Kelly Johnson in 1943, still operates as the company’s advanced development arm and remains the source of most of its work on autonomy and stealth.

The portfolio is broad enough to span every domain the Pentagon buys from. The crewed centrepiece is the F-35 Lightning II, the fifth-generation stealth fighter built in three variants for the US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and exported to more than a dozen partner nations. Around it sits a missile and air-defence business that includes PAC-3 interceptors for the Patriot system, the THAAD ballistic-missile defence battery, the long-range JASSM and LRASM cruise missiles, HIMARS launchers and the GMLRS rockets they fire. The Sikorsky subsidiary, acquired in 2015, builds the Black Hawk and the CH-53K King Stallion. The Space business runs everything from GPS III satellites to the Orion crew capsule for NASA’s Artemis programme.

The autonomy push is more recent and concentrated at Skunk Works. In 2025 the company unveiled Vectis, a Group 5 stealth Collaborative Combat Aircraft designed to fly alongside the F-35 and the future Next Generation Air Dominance fighter. Vectis is pitched at precision strike, electronic warfare, intelligence-gathering and air-to-air missions, with a targeted first flight in 2027. In December 2025 Skunk Works flew a Stalker XE Block 25 demonstration in which an onboard AI replanned the mission in flight when an unexpected obstacle appeared — a small, public step toward the kind of contingency management the company will need to make Vectis credible. A separate joint effort with BAE Systems’ Falconworks, the Adaptable Multi-Effect Unmanned System, covers a modular family of air-, ramp- and sea-launched drones.

The numbers behind all this are the largest in the industry. Lockheed Martin trades on the NYSE as LMT, employs roughly 122,000 people, and reported about $71 billion in revenue in 2023, the bulk of it from the US government. Its top customer is the US Department of Defense, but a significant share of F-35, missile and helicopter work flows to NATO allies, Israel, Japan, South Korea and Australia. The F-35 programme alone, valued over its lifetime at more than $2 trillion including sustainment, gives the company an unusually long planning horizon.

It is also a perennial target of public criticism. The F-35 has drawn sustained scrutiny over cost overruns, software and engine reliability, and a sustainment bill that the US Government Accountability Office has repeatedly flagged as unaffordable. Lockheed-built munitions, sold through US Foreign Military Sales, have surfaced in investigations of strikes in Yemen and Gaza, prompting protests at company sites and shareholder resolutions on human-rights due diligence. The CCA competition, in which Vectis is a late entrant against Anduril ’s Fury and General Atomics’ YFQ-42, will test whether a traditional prime can move at the cadence the Air Force now says it wants from uncrewed wingmen.