Lockheed Martin targets three main areas to deliver 21st Century security

After James Taiclet, the president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, took up his post in June 2020, he asked his leadership team how Lockheed Martin should focus and position itself in terms of having an impact on deterrence.

Speaking recently to ESD at the Paris Air Show on 16 June 2025, Michael Williamson, president of Lockheed Martin International and senior vice president for global business development and strategy at Lockheed Martin Corporation, explained that the answer to Taiclet’s question was broken out by the company’s leadership into three main strategic areas of focus under the monicker of 21^st Century security: speed, integrated solutions, and resilience.

“Regardless of where you’re at on the continuum, what we’ve all become acutely aware of is that you can’t take 10 or 12 years to go from here right to delivery, especially at the speed of the conflicts that you’re seeing now,” said Williamson. “So the first thing is you’ve got to speed up the processes. And that’s not just ‘How do I manufacture in the factories?’ There’s a component there, but it’s also the processes associated with what the requirement is that you’re building to, how that manifests itself in directions and contracts and gets us to the point where we’re manufacturing something. You’ve got to work both ends, right? So, what are our own processes within the corporation? But then, how do we work with government? And it’s multiple parts of the government, whether it’s on the budgeting side or whether it’s on the requirements side from operations. How do you how do you engage there to speed up that process?

Regarding Lockheed Martin’s second area of strategic focus, Williamson explained, “When we did our analysis, we found that it was insufficient to just build great capabilities for our customers and partner nations and warfighters in general. They also wanted integrated solutions; they didn’t want to figure out how to make things work after they were built. The analysis that we did was, ‘How do you look at the kill chain and find out for all domains how to make it work more efficiently and more effectively?’

“When you walk your way through the kill chain, having a missile that fires 1,000 miles or 1,000 kilometres is only mildly interesting if you can’t pinpoint the target and maintain target custody while a missile travels 1,000 miles or 1,000 kilometres,” said Williamson. “And so when you look at the entire kill chain, it starts with the ability to detect, to be able to fire on that that target, and then to maintain target custody, so that when it moves you can still engage it. And here’s the piece that people often leave out: if you’re going to expend a munition that in many cases can be very expensive, you’d like to make sure that you destroyed the target so that you don’t waste other rounds or have a wasted mission.

“So we invested probably over a year going through 14 different threads, whether you’re talking about sea surface – how do you attack different ships and how do you defend? How do you do undersea warfare? What does space-based warfare look like? What does long-range precision fires look like? What is air to air? We broke out 14 of those different types of missions and did the analysis from start to finish, to figure out where there were gaps and look at opportunities for us to improve those processes.”

Noting that Lockheed Martin’s customers would already be operating an installed base of platforms and systems, Williamson noted, “No one is going to discard what they already have, so the other thing that we felt was really important is ‘How do you now build systems that can plug and play with existing capabilities?’ Nations have invested a significant amount of their [budget] for their defence, so now, when you’re looking at additional spending, it has to be in the view of ‘How can I make what I have better? How can I augment that or increase the amount with depth of what I have?’

“So what we wanted to do is make sure that everything that we talk about when we talk to our customers isn’t only a Lockheed Martin solution; it’s a Lockheed Martin solution that’s augmenting existing capabilities that our customers have invested in,” said Williamson. “In some cases, when I talk about the efficiencies and the improvements in the threads, it may not only be Lockheed Martin solutions. We may plug in some of our competitors’ capabilities because they have a more efficient communication system and it’s already been connected, and we’re not going to displace that.”

Fundamentally, Williamson said he was talking modularity: standards and plug-and-play capabilities that allow existing capabilities to be augmented.

Recalling his former service career as a senior US Army officer within NATO, Williamson said, “The biggest thing that I thought NATO could bring to the table was standards. And so for us, from an industry standpoint, if we want to be able to move fast, we can’t have an argument about how we plug and play and connect, how ammunition sizes fit cannon sizes. Those standards have to be out there. You shouldn’t have to figure it out after the fact; we should start the day understanding that these are the parameters that we’re going to operate within. And so us having a discussion with our competitor mates about standards makes the second part – the integration, the modularity – go much smoother.”

Regarding Lockheed Martin’s third area of strategic focus – resilience – Williamson noted that firstly the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-23 and subsequent events, such as the need of the US and its allies to support Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion there since 2022, drove home the need to ensure security of supply.

“If I tell you what my job number one is as the president of Lockheed Martin International, it’s the partnership and the relationships that we have across Europe,” he explained. “In some cases, on some of the systems that we build, there’s maybe one or two suppliers of some of the key parts, whether you’re talking about a missile, an airplane or any other platform.

“You have to have a more resilient and more responsive industrial base, and so building up the suppliers and partnering with key companies here in Europe is critical for us going forward,” Williamson continued, “because I would tell you that deterrence comes in a couple of forms, right? It’s not only having a well-trained military with the right equipment – most people kind of stop there – but you also have to have all of the repair parts; you have to have an industrial base that can supply you; you have to have a manufacturing base that can get you ammo when you need it. All of those pieces have to come together to give you real deterrence. It can’t just be ‘I’ve got really good soldiers, a good air force, and then a set of platforms.’ You have to have the rest of that tail. So when we’ve looked at ‘How do we position ourselves?, it’s ‘Yes, we have to continue to build the best equipment in the world, but if we don’t do the rest of this, I don’t think we’re doing our part.’”

Lastly, Williamson noted, “When we talk about partnerships, everyone normally gravitates towards the large companies in Europe – Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, those types of companies. When I talk about making the industrial base much more resilient, it’s the small companies that manufacture very specific components. And here’s what’s interesting today; they may not be doing defence products, but they’ve got great manufacturing talent that we want to leverage and expand our list of suppliers. And so this is not just about a partnership that meant to build a missile as an example; it’s looking across our entire portfolio to find really great providers of capability.”