Thank you, everybody, for for joining us. We're very excited to have the CEO and CFO of Lockheed Martin. Jim, Evan, thank you for joining us today. Truly appreciate it.
Thank you.
I know you guys wanted to talk or mention the safe harbor, and then maybe make some prepared remarks, and then we'll jump into the questions.
Great. Thank you for that. So briefly, statements made today that are not historical fact are considered forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Please see Lockheed Martin's SEC filings for a description of some of the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.
Jim, please take it away. We'd love-
All right.
We'd love any remarks.
Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks, John. We're making great progress and getting really great traction on all three of our major strategic initiatives that we've had in place over the last 5 years. The first one is strengthening the resilience and the scalability of the defense production system, leading the way on that, and we've made some real milestones recently worth mentioning. One is we launched the first instance in one of our businesses of a new ERP system that is gonna take us into the, literally the electronic age, everywhere from design to engineering to production to sustainment on a digital thread. That's being implemented right now. We started this about 3 or 4 years ago with a $6 billion effort over 8 years, and we're, you know, probably 60% of the way through that now. So that is in place.
That's gonna allow us to be faster, more efficient, and with less quality concerns along the way. Another example is that we've entered into, with the U.S. government, two framework agreements, as we call them, to bring more commercial practices to major defense programs. And I think these are actually very much groundbreaking initiatives here with the government in place today. Got to get those programs through congressional approval, but we're all confident that that's gonna happen.
What this does is it takes the defense production system from one- or two-year at a time contracts that make it really tough to drive our supply chain, to, in these cases, seven-year contracts with commitments and protections for industry along the way, that will allow all of us and our suppliers and our cohorts as the major primes, to act more like commercial businesses, make more upfront investments with high confidence, make investments early in improvements on, again, production and sustainment and other ways that we can actually scale our profitability as well.
And so we're basically cutting off the constraints of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the way it's been applied to these kind of programs, and moving into a, an era of commercial level agreements for the industry, which will actually, I think, make us more effective for our government customer and make us more profitable and scalable and resilient as companies for our shareholders. So that's one area where I think we've made really great progress recently. The second one is driving digital technology into defense missions, and when it comes to that kind of initiative, it's important to be able to have to have and contribute decisive military advantage at a theater or high scale level to really make a difference in national security missions.
So for example, we're driving autonomy and AI into real defense missions like air superiority, where we showed that we can actually today, and have today, taken an F-22 production aircraft, integrated some new technology into it with AI and autonomy controls that we've developed internally on our own R&D, and controlled an actual working drone and create a drone wingman out of that today. We can do that now, and if we can scale it on F-22s and F-35s, which is our plans, and whether it's existing or new collaborative combat aircraft, like we demonstrated already, then we will be able to bring major improvements to the air superiority mission for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Mm.
Another, I think, great example of this is we have a fully autonomous Black Hawk helicopter, actually more than one, which we can do missions such as wildfire fighting, search and rescue, contested logistics to the front line, and air evacuation of wounded soldiers without putting crews at risk, without having to worry about crew rest or downtime, and actually doing it safer than if you had crews. So we're bringing autonomy and AI to real scalable missions, and the way you have to do that is to have the range, payload, and survivability to operate in a really heavily contested environment, to be able to prevent and deter those situations from happening. The third area is we focused on is growing our international business, and we've done that on two dimensions. One is our international sales are indeed growing faster than our domestic sales.
We have a deployed force around the world that's trying to bring the best of our technology to our allies. We're getting good support from the U.S. government in doing that. And also, we've scaled up our co-production and teaming on an industrial basis with some of our most important allies. We've set up in Australia a guided weapons installation with our Australian partners and industry. I just visited in Weeze, Germany, a production facility for center bodies of F-35s at Rheinmetall, and we just keep doing these co-production and co-sustainment arrangements that actually feed back into international sales. So on all three of these big strategic dimensions, I think we're making excellent progress, and I'm very optimistic about the future for this company and really for our industry.
That's, that's fantastic. There's a lot to dig into there. And it's also on the back of a very strong quarter. Evan, do you mind kind of recapping some of the momentum in the quarter?
Absolutely. Yeah, the performance last year, the deliveries, everything we've done, and the investments have set us up for a very strong year. So our total year guide continues to look strong and right in line with what we guided to in the earnings call. There are a few peculiarities in the first quarter this year that I just wanted to highlight that make it unusual compared to last year. Last year, 1Q, we had some big non-recurring events that drove up margins and revenue. And then this year there's less weeks. So compare year-over-year, it's a bit of a tough compare on sales and margins. And then on cash flow, to Jim's point about our digital transformation, we're onboarding a new billing system at one of our units.
And as any of these billing transformations that we've seen, that usually drives some timing. Typically, our sales this quarter might get collected in the quarters to follow, all contained within the year. The full year cash guide continues to look right on, but we might have a negative free cash flow in the first quarter as a result.
Okay, got it. Thank you for clarifying that. Maybe we could get back to some of the bullish, big picture themes. Jim, we've had this moniker of mega trends, all of these, like missile defense, space, all of these themes that are, that are really driving a tremendous amount of growth, across defense. I'd love to just kick it off and get your reaction to that, and maybe you could talk us through, Lockheed's exposure to some of these big picture themes and the ones you're most excited about.
Sure. So we look at the world in terms of missions. I mean, I came from a technology and telecom background over the last 20 years or so before I joined the management team here at Lockheed Martin. And what we try to do in that industry is improve the service level of our offering, whether it's telecommunications or remote mapping, you know, et cetera, throughput of data through data centers. You're always trying to use hardware, firmware, and software on a continuing basis to improve the level of service. Our services, if you will, in the aerospace and defense industry, are things like air superiority.
Mm-hmm.
You know, the mission at the end of the day is to shoot down other aircraft while not being shot down yourself.
Sure.
And so that's where some of these notions of how do we drive digital technology into the air superiority mission, while producing the best products in the world, the best hardware in the world, and then augmenting that hardware every 3-6 months with better firmware, like TR-3. Took a little while to get it out there, but it's better firmware. It enables that hardware to do more in connecting to software, apps, and networks outside the jet.
Mm-hmm.
And then that enables those software, apps, and networks, they have their own improvements that continue to roll on top of the better hardware, the better firmware, the better software. Then, when you get a new aircraft, like a Block 4 version of an F-35 out into the fleet, it's actually starting from a higher position as far as its ability to contribute to that mission. Same with surface warfare, for example, right? Control of the sea lanes is very important. We've experienced that in, you know, the Red Sea, for example, where the Aegis Combat System is sort of tried and true radar, command and control for, you know, ship defense.
We encountered, as a U.S. Navy and as merchant shippers, that the Red Sea was being basically constrained by Houthi cruise missiles and slow-flying drones that the Aegis originally was not designed to detect. So what we did was we used our AI center in the United States, did overnight downloads of tracking data every night, ran it through the AI and data fusion engine that we had, and then over the air, using Starlink actually, got updates to the software overnight, which helped enable the Navy to stay in and defend the Red Sea sea lane. So that, that's the kind of example in that mission.
Mm-hmm.
And then another one, which you kind of touched on, there was about 12 of these. I won't do all 12, but-
Sure.
But let's just pick integrated air and missile defense, which is Golden Dome.
Yeah.
That is integrated air and missile defense. And the portions there that we are actually, you know, quite involved in and will be quite involved in it under Golden Dome, is the space-based sensing and tracking with satellites and geosynchronous mid and then low orbits. We're involved in all those areas. Integrating that then with ground-based radars, like LRDR, it's a Long Range Discrimination Radar . It's not as big as a house, it's as big as a stadium. There's one up in Alaska right now that we turned on. That will improve the ground-up radar to improve the air missile defense mission.
Mm-hmm.
Great piece of hardware, but integrated then with the satellite data, and then a fusion engine into something called C2BMC, which is the command and control system for missile defense that the United States uses, and then that integrates with aircraft and other radars, et cetera. And at the end of the day, if you really have to exercise this mission and, and, and a missile is coming at the United States or it's coming at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. That's when the PAC-3 missile, the THAAD missile, the Next Generation Interceptor for long-range ballistic missiles, where we're all involved in those systems, will come into effect.
And so we are essentially in every element of Golden Dome, which at the end of the day, again, is the air and missile defense mission, and we're gonna continue to use hardware improvements, firmware improvements, and then the connectivity through the network, through apps and software, to get better and better at that mission. I think that will really be constructive to the notion of Golden Dome, where you're rolling it out over a period of years to defend the United States. And by the way, that applicability would be for Western Europe as well. It would be for Japan as well. This will be a scalable, repeatable mission set that we have. As our company, it turns out, most of the major ingredients, if you will.
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot to follow up there, and, you know, definitely wanna spend some time talking about how those flow through the different segments.
Mm-hmm.
But before we do, we've been asking one question of all of the primes, which is just a reaction to Trump's executive order and the performance reviews. What do you expect to come from those reviews?
So we welcome the focus on performance of the industry, accountability for us, but also what's come with that is, again, flexibility and an understanding, if we have an escalating threat, which we have, very rapid technology development in digital and physical technology in the 21st century, which is the fastest rate in human history, and a not unlimited defense resource budget, that the only way to actually solve that engineering equation is for the government to also change how it does business. And so both of these things are happening now, and industry, it's our responsibility to step up to that higher demand, faster timelines, quicker technology insertion, the inclusion of digital technology into these missions. That's our job, and we need to get better at it as an industry.
And so we're welcoming, you know, that opportunity and that challenge in a way. I think our company's as professional as any, as capable and as skilled as any, and so we should be able to take advantage of this situation to improve ourselves and improve our performance for shareholders, too.
Got it. Maybe we can step through some of the segments. Aeronautics, just to kick it off, we can't talk about aeronautics without talking about the F-35. I'd love just an update on the F-35.
Yeah. So very strong deliveries last year, record deliveries for us. We see production continuing on at the traditional rate we've seen, about 156 a year, and deliveries to likely mirror that. Low single-digit growth on production, and some of that is due to Lot 20 being awarded next year. If you look at our results historically, when we sign contract, it typically comes with revenue, as some of the costs that we're building doesn't turn to revenue until the contract's signed. So that is why you see maybe a little lower growth on F-35 production. F-35 sustainment is pacing the growth for aeronautics. We could even see approaching double-digit growth on F-35 sustainment.
That, of course, continues not only as we're delivering planes, but we've seen some budget uplift on the sustainment mission, and we're looking to pre-fund that with some investment we've committed to, as we and our customer are very well aligned on F-35 readiness.
Mm-hmm.
We see growth in aeronautics classified. That, of course, is dilutive in the near term, and that is one of the top drivers there as well, as we see some missions building on that side.
From a kind of a strategic arc of the F-35, you know, we're about 1,200, 1,300 aircraft built and deployed out of about 3,500 program of record, so about a third of the way through the program.
Mm-hmm.
F-35, as a contributor to the air dominance, and then this, the air strike mission, meaning, you know, air-to-ground attack mission, that it has both of those. We are going to do a couple of things in the strategic arc of the aircraft itself within that mission set. The first is, we're modernizing, based on the Block, the TR-3 firmware, what's called Block 4, hardware upgrade, so component upgrade. So this could be, inclusive of, engine upgrade or, or replacement. It could include, you know, sensors like radars and distributed apertures. It will include, communications, beyond line of sight, et cetera. So all of those components is called, it's the Block 4 hardware enhancement.
At the same time, we've already got the firmware enhancement in place and the compute capability that we needed to do all of those improvements in sensors and systems on the jet now being produced. The next phase is gonna be a commitment that I made to the U.S. government leadership, which was: we think we can take a lot of our sixth-generation Skunk Works R&D, and port it into the F-35, right, subsequent or alongside of this Block 4 improvement of subsystems. And so what we're talking about now is coatings for the aircraft, the geometry, and the coatings of the air inlets and the exhaust of the engine. The notion of sensors that we developed for NGAD, that we can then port over into the F-35.
During the next, again, 20-30 years of production of F-35, there will be continuous improvements, like we talked about for the air dominance mission, which will be delivered through that vehicle. At the end of the day, we will have highly capable aircraft that are getting improved all along the life cycle. And, as Evan said, to have better, essentially for an airline, be on-time takeoff rate, we call it a mission capable rate, while we do that. That will increase. The way I describe it to our senior government customers is, we wanna maximize the air combat power of the United States over, call it, a 20-30-year arc of time in the most resource-efficient way.
To do that, we have this pathway for F-35 that will basically be the linchpin of this strategy. It's also complemented by F-22, which we're upgrading kind of quietly with the Air Force, but it's gonna be upgrading along the way, just the same. NGAD will kind of join it in a few years, which is the Boeing production. We'll have fifth gen fourth-generation planes that are enabled, like F-15s, and F-16s, and F-18s, to do their missions because of the capabilities of the F-35 and the F-22 to clear the airspace. The F-35, as a reminder, is the only production fifth-generation stealth aircraft in the free world.
Mm.
This is a critical program for the United States and its allies. And again, there could be some innovative contracting methodologies that we could come to agreement with the U.S. government and our allied customers to actually make the program perform even better.
Yeah, and you mentioned it's a pivotal program for many of our allies as well. Can you talk a little bit about international demand for F-35 from here?
Yeah. So there's significant international participation, so there's 19 other countries that fly the F-35 or have ordered it. One of the biggest benefits of F-35, especially in Europe and everywhere, is the interoperability of the data system. So the sensor data across F-35s, seamlessly and without any pilot input, is shared with other F-35s in the formation or even beyond line of sight, and we're integrating satellite connections and others into this so that the F-35 is not only the most capable fighter plane, it's also the most capable aerial command, and control, and data networking node on essentially a 5G Internet of Things system.
Mm-hmm.
And so that allows the U.S. and its allies to interface data and bring mission planning down to the command center, integrating all of those aircraft data in a seamless way. And we're actually then taking those sensor data, set of sensor data sets, and some of those targets will be assigned to the F-35, and maybe in the formation you're in with four or eight planes, some could be assigned to another formation, and some could be sent to the command post and connected to a HIMARS launcher to hit a certain target that the F-35 sees with a ground-based missile.
And so what we're trying to do with all of this is to create a deterrent effect to any potential adversary to say, "We don't know how good the U.S. and its allies are gonna be at defending themselves, so we're gonna wait another day and see if we think we can have enough confidence to act.
Mm-hmm.
Our goal is to move those goalposts out every 3-6 months on every mission set, using all that technology, so that we can... You know, we're in the aerospace and defense industry, I'll say, but we're in the business of deterrence. So we want to advance deterrence using these mission capability roadmaps with the best hardware, the best firmware, the best software, the best network that anyone has in the world, and the U.S. will be the one that has it, along with our allies.
Yeah. Fantastic. Maybe we could switch gears a little bit to MFC. On the last earnings call, you talked about unprecedented demand for munitions, for critical munitions. We saw a year-over-year growth rate in MFC of high teens, 18%. In the earlier remarks, you mentioned how there's multiyear visibility on some of these programs now. Can we connect the dots and just talk about what the multiyear revenue growth profile might look like for MFC?
Absolutely. So even before we considered these new framework deals, we were in a growth trajectory in MFC, growing double digits here, as we're still scaling several of our munitions ongoing. With the framework agreement signed, positioning us for multiyear procurement signatures, we could see double-digit growth for the next through the end of the decade and likely beyond, potentially as high as the mid-teens in some years. So it is giving us long-term visibility to growth, highly, you know, potentially profitable accretive growth for us through the end of the decade.
Got it. Very, very helpful. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about the Framework Agreements.
Sure.
You've talked about how they need to be definitized. Maybe, maybe help us understand what the outlook looks like from here for converting them to actual sales.
Now that we have the Framework Agreement in place, the good news is that we can utilize these same agreements with some of our key suppliers-
Okay
... in partnership with the Department of War. So that's the process we're in today, talking with our suppliers to get that aligned, so that they also can have that seven-year visibility and make their corresponding investments to see the capacity across the industry. So we're working through that process now. We'd like to have both PAC-3 and THAAD signed in the first half of the year-
Mm
... which will allow us to start incurring some revenue this year and seeding the growth long term. The good news with this agreement, I think, the framework is very fair for us. It creates incredible opportunity for us to invest and to really transform these production lines into something very different at the end of these seven years.... and we're very proud of the production capability we have today, but what we're gonna have through the course of this contract, by what it enables, is gonna be something that takes it to the next level.
Yeah. Well, one of the questions that I get a lot is the margin profile of MFC as all of this is happening. And I think you guys flagged that there might be a little bit of dilution out of the gate, 20-30 basis points, if I remember correctly, and then MFC margins could make new highs. Do you mind just digging into that a little bit, elaborating on what's going on there?
Sure. So the way that we do our profit recognition is we typically increase our profit rate over time through the life of a contract.
Okay.
As we make progress on risk burn downs, make deliveries, we'll increase that profit rate. So on the front end of the contract, we're booking it at slightly less profit, and since this is a seven-year contract, you can see why it might take a few years for it to reach the expected end margins on the actual reported margins. So that's why we signaled maybe a 20-30 basis point dilution at the MFC level. Of course, at the Lockheed Martin level, it's still accretive when you look at Lockheed Martin margins.
Mm.
And then long term, there's an opportunity to drive margins higher than traditional MFC margins. The way these contracts are established are to give us every opportunity to be successful, because we're aligned with the Department of War, that both of us want to be able to invest capabilities, to take cost out, transform, and as rapidly as possible, give capability to the war fighter. So all the elements are there for us to increase margins and be successful here.
Yeah. Definitely aligned with the Department of Defense. We've also seen other structures to try to enhance alignment with the Department of Defense. What LHX is doing with missile solutions is a good example. I'm just kind of curious, you know, you arrived at a different approach. Maybe you could just help us understand what alternatives you looked at. Did you consider a structure like LHX's pros and cons? Any color you're willing to offer.
I would say we did not consider any kind of structure like L3Harris went through with, with their, they basically sold rocket motor business, which was Aerojet, Aerojet Rocketdyne, which we actually publicly made a bid to, to purchase ourselves about 5, 5 or 6 years ago now-
Mm
... when I got to the company. That wasn't approved by antitrust. It was approved for LHX, and they didn't have, I guess, apparently, the resource to manage the scaling themselves. We do, and if we would've had AJRD inside of our company, we would just be doing it. We have the scale and scope and the financial wherewithal to do exactly what we're talking about, to deliver that growth path with internal investment and our own balance sheet, our own cash flow, and so we're committing to do that without having to joint venture, spin-off, sell off part of the company.
Yeah. Okay, great. Maybe we can change gears a little bit to RMS. You know, when I talk to investors by comparison, RMS is viewed as a little less exciting than everything that's going on in MFC and space. But people might be getting it wrong. Maybe you can just kind of give us a sense of the outlook for RMS from here.
Yeah, there's a lot in RMS that we're excited about. We're currently in a growth trajectory for Sikorsky as we ramp up production on the CH-53K helicopter and continue to see some growth on the Black Hawk helicopter as well. And then, some of the elements that Jim mentioned, I think are very important when you look in terms of autonomy, C2, and the Golden Dome mission, which could very likely have components of ground-based radars, potentially even directed energy laser capabilities for defense in smaller scales. So we're excited about the autonomy investment and where RMS can go, in a lot of cases, be the glue of those platforms, which is part of the value of Lockheed Martin. We have the ability to tie our platforms together in a cross-domain manner, and RMS is the center point of that.
Yeah, and part of the autonomy push and the AI push is taking a legacy platform that has the range, payload, and survivability in many cases, to actually do real-world missions at scale, in a battlefield environment. Well, the Black Hawk can live forever, in a way, because even though it's a legacy design, if the operation or the mission can be done by the US Army, for example, without having to to commit the human resource of all the pilots and all the crew rest and all the life support systems and all the search and rescue that you have to have if you've got human pilots doing missions, some of them, you're gonna want human pilots when it has to do with lethal force or, you know, really highly sensitive missions, like in Venezuela.
You're gonna want to have human pilots involved in that, and human crews. But if you're doing something like an air evacuation from a hot landing zone, and you don't want to put the crew at risk, but you really want to go rescue that person that got injured, one of your soldiers, and get them back to the field hospital, you're gonna be able to use that legacy Black Hawk to do something at lower cost and risk that you can do with even any new platform necessarily that you could build. So the part of the goal of our autonomy and digital push is to make our legacy platforms as long-lived and as important and as valuable from a, you know, perspective of capability versus cost as we can.
So Black Hawk, F-35, we put pods on F-16s that enable a lot of this capability. You know, data networking and sensors that we, you know, invented many years after the F-16 was launched, or even the latest version, the Block 70. We've put on a pod underneath it, and now that pod can connect to the F-35 data link system. And therefore, now your, your fourth-generation plane that was designed in the 1970s, I actually tried to get one out of pilot training in 1986, but didn't get it. But I got an F-4. But, you know, that, that age of an aircraft design can be on the modern battlefield and be effective.
And so that's the push for digital technology and for AI, for autonomy in our company, is in large part to make our big platform hardware more long-lived and more effective and more valuable.
Yeah. Before we move on to space, just on RMS, I wanted to take the temperature on performance trends in general. There have been a couple charges and just whatever you're willing to update.
Yeah. So on our two international helicopter programs, first, on the Turkey helicopter program, we've made great progress there with our partner TAI, and restructuring that agreement to something that is—that works for both parties, which is excellent. TAI has been a very long-term partner and customer for us, so this gives us a strong framework to continue to partner with them since Turkey is a key part of the European security solution. On Canada Helicopter, we continue to work that with the customer. We've delivered all the aircraft and now are in the process of just looking at ways to restructure that contract going forward. Across the business, I'd say generally pleased with the performance on the 53K.
We didn't quite reach the ramp rates we'd like in 2025, so 2026, that will be a big focus for us to drive the ramp on 53K and get the performance that we expect out of that aircraft.
Okay, great. Jim, I wanted to go back to Golden Dome and space. You're obviously so excited about it. You mentioned it in the earlier remarks. Can we just double-click on that?
Sure. So there's some classified space that will—we expect to be a big part of Golden Dome, based on, you know, the government's public statements. Secondly, you know, this, this PAC-3 and THAAD, and I expect again, there, there will be more systems rolling out from, from Lockheed Martin and, and the Department of War in this vein. Part of the ramp to 2,000 PAC-3s a year may include Golden Dome. It may be on top of it. We don't know yet.
But our ability with under these framework agreements, to scale up production faster than we could under the old, you know, cost-based Federal Acquisition Regulation System, is gonna benefit Golden Dome in its deployment, and I think bring much of that business to the suppliers, not just Lockheed Martin, but those of us that have proven we can do this kind of hard science in space or from ground to air, or ground to space, or have resilient radars that can take out, you know, the jamming and the clutter and the electromagnetic battlefield that you have, and still see the target. And if we can act like a commercial company, 'cause we can now, we will be able to compete with all of that legacy, intellectual property, and manufacturability.
These things are not easy to make, and the testing that goes into them. You know, there are explosive warheads on these devices, and just and just alone managing that, using systems, safety systems, et cetera, there's art and science to those kinds of capabilities. So we are getting, you know, kind of our handcuffs taken off a bit to act like commercial companies. I think this is a real breakthrough for our industry. Our cohorts are signing up as well. Our suppliers are signing up as well. I think it's gonna be constructive to them as also. And if Golden Dome is gonna be rolled out, it's gonna have to—the industry is gonna have to work differently, and we're set up now to do that.
Yeah.
So coincidentally, this particular administration has put out some big targets for munitions production, for a homeland defense, integrated air and missile defense system that's never been considered before, but they're also doing enabling steps that makes industry more capable of delivering. And there'll be new entrants, and there'll be commercial tech companies that are involved, and that'll be really great. But again, you have to have the hardware, the scale hardware, the firmware and the software, and the networking capability to do these kinds of missions. And they are no-fail missions. These devices have to work when they're called upon. We wanna send out our soldiers and sailors and marines and guardians with a high, high, high probability of getting them back safely after conducting these dangerous missions.
We want a big tent of, of all of, you know, marshaling kind of all of U.S. industry. But these large companies that have been in this business for decades, they have to, I think, have to be part of the solution if you wanna have, again, decisive military advantage at a theater scale that deters a major power from taking an aggressive action.
Yeah.
That's what it's gonna take. It's gonna take the start-up, it's gonna take the new entrant, it's gonna take the big tech companies, and I know there's always some, you know, controversy about who's in and who's out on the big tech companies, but we're working with a number of them, like NVIDIA and Verizon and IBM, you know, you know, together, to pipeline some of their tech and some start-ups' tech into the missions that we wanna do. And I'll give you one really quick example 'cause I think it's kind of cool and interesting. There's this relatively small company called Saildrone... and what Saildrone does is build autonomous ships. And the ships are not, you know, 400 feet long, they're like 100 feet long, but they don't need any people on them. The issue was they didn't have any weapons on them either. So they're interesting.
You could put sensors, and they could float around, and maybe you could have some kind of self-destruct mechanisms and things like that on there. But we teamed up with Saildrone and said, "Look, if you really want to make an effective ship that can have a decisive military advantage at a cheaper cost than, you know, a DDG, some kind of destroyer or cruiser or something that's going to have 800 people on it, and all the systems that you need for 800 people in a smaller form factor that's harder to see, you need to put a Mark 41 missile launcher on it." And then you could put missiles into this ship, send it out.
You have to have a reliable command and control system that can't be cyber-hacked, because you don't want that missile being shot with no people on the ship in the wrong direction or the opposite direction. And if you can put that system together with, we don't, we don't make autonomous ships of this size, but this company does. They don't make and can't ever probably get to a Mark 41 launcher equivalent, which has been tested over decades with the U.S. government and found to be safe for a whole range of weapons. We got married on this issue, and now we're going to deploy a really effective drone ship together that can make, if it's bought in large enough numbers, a decisive military advantage in, like, the Pacific Theater.
Yeah.
That's how industry should start working together better.
Yeah. I think I have time for one more question. I'll wrap a couple into one, but I wanted to make sure we had a chance to talk about the CapEx outlook versus capital returns to investors. And obviously, there's some complexity there, but maybe you could just talk about funding all the organic growth versus returning capital. How do you think about it?
The same way we have, certainly since I've been here and probably before that, which is a discipline and dynamic capital allocation program, depending on the circumstances at that time, right? We have a lot of growth, opportunity, and request and demand in front of us that will underwrite on a risk-adjusted return basis, more capital expense investment. It'll justify more R&D expenditure. It'll justify, you know, accelerating this digital transformation because we'll get better benefits quicker with more demand. And so there are more investment opportunities than we've had in years that can be underwritten on a risk-adjusted ROI basis to benefit the shareholder. That's our first priority, and it always has been, actually. And of course, we're going to then allocate remaining capital in ways that are most appropriate for that time.
So you haven't seen us change anything material yet in that regard. And we do things like share a purchase on an opportunistic manner, and we always have. Right now, we've got a lot more opportunity on accretive growth, as you know, Evan was outlining, than we have in a long, long time. So we'll keep every quarter making those capital allocation decisions based on the circumstances and the contracts we win, and what gets definitized and what the schedules are.
Mm-hmm.
That's what you can expect from us, is kind of more of the same.
Yeah. Sounds like the dividend is intact, though.
We're going to, every quarter, we're going to assess all the, all the inputs, and we'll make, you know, our capital allocation decision between us, yes.
Okay, excellent. Well, we've run out of time here. This was great conversation.
Yeah.
Thank you for joining us, Jim, Evan, really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you for the time. Glad to do it, John.