Hi. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kristine Liwag, Morgan Stanley's Head of Aerospace and Defense Equity Research. I'm very excited to host our next panel with Lockheed Martin. Before we get started, I'll have to read this. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley representative. For our next panel, definitely very excited to welcome Jim Taiclet, CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Evan Scott, CFO. Welcome, Jim and Scott. Jim and Evan.
Morning.
Great. Maybe just to kick off, Jim, this has been a question from a lot of investors, which is about the technology insertion in the battlefield, right? We've seen sovereign customers needing more equipment sooner. We've seen the proliferation of low-cost autonomous systems being pretty effective in the battlefield. At the same time, you also see, and maybe this is the part where investors don't see as much, there's also more need for high-end types of solutions. Can you talk about where Lockheed's role is in this environment? How do you counter some of these lower-cost autonomous systems, and how do we keep prepared, and what is the environment for these high-end threat environments too, and where does your company fit?
Sure. Well, I'm glad you started off, Kristine, this morning with technology. Good morning to all of you here. Thanks for coming today. I'm, first of all, going to be, as an ex-Air Force pilot, very proud to say that U.S. government and us, speaking of technology, just announced this morning the long-term multi-year agreement for the Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, which is an air-to-air missile that's more advanced, next generation, if you will change the deterrent posture that we can provide.
The JATM, as it's called, AIM-260, is going to be produced, but it's not even in full rate production yet, and the U.S. government's already agreed with us to a long-term, multi-year contract to deliver it. That's how good this technology is. Our role in this entire changing ecosystem, I believe, is to take the Lockheed Martin systems integration heritage.
We make the most advanced systems like the JATM I just described, F-35, Trident Missile, Patriot PAC-3 MSE. These are highly complex, very high capability devices and products and platforms. We've got a history of almost 100 years of being able to do that. We have the DNA, we have the muscle, and with the way that warfare is evolving, we're taking that muscle, we've been working on this for about three or four years, and going from the systems integration lead to the mission integration lead. What's the mission?
Well, let's talk about products first, and then we can evolve to a mission. The product is air-to-air combat, air superiority. That's one of the 12 missions that we design to. With JATM, for example, what we've done is we've integrated the most advanced next generation air-to-air missile with the most advanced fighter aircraft, F-35 and F-22.
We did that mission integration because now our app, if you will, or the Air Force's app or the Marines and Navy, their app is not like Google Maps to just have navigation show you where to go next and how to turn your car. Their apps are shooting down other airplanes and protecting yourself. We can do the systems integration, JATM into F-35, for example, seamlessly. That's in our muscle memory. What we can do as a mission systems integrator is match those two complex systems together and then match them with digital technologies that allow the mission, through a mission technology roadmap, to keep advancing capability.
If there's a new missile, that's great, it's a step function up. If there's a new airplane, it's great, it's a step function up. But every three to six months, we're also using digital technologies to create more capability. The real centerpiece for Lockheed Martin is to be able to do systems integration into a mission integration package with new technologies and new entrant products and those from Northrop Grumman or Boeing Defense. That's our sweet spot, is full mission integration, and we've been practicing that for, call it four years, with these mission technology roadmaps.
Our goal is to work with our customers, the users, to create decisive military advantage at a theater level scale. That is really the core mission of Lockheed Martin, and that's what we do. The key thing on the high-end platforms and systems and the low-cost counter-UAS systems, for example, is that you've got to have, for certain mission subsets, the high-end system.
Just to talk about air and missile defense for a moment, the PAC-3 MSE and the THAAD, expensive, high-end, super capable missiles, they can hit long-range ballistic missiles. They can also target hypersonic missiles and everything below that. The trade-off of using a PAC-3 missile for a Shahed drone is not a good one economically, and so we know that there's other ways we should be able to deal with drones. The drone solutions we've come up with, the newer technologies, using some startups as suppliers, actually, some of our venture investments as suppliers are solutions to the mission roadmap. We've come up with two or three systems now that we can integrate into that air defense missile defense. That will create deterrence, which is really what our product is. Our product is deterrence. It's not a PAC-3 missile. It's not simply an F-35.
It's creating deterrence against great power conflict, which is a very valuable service. That's our role, is to be the mission integrator using our systems integration capabilities and the high-end products that we actually do make.
Jim, maybe taking a step back, I think right now in the U.S., we have the lowest number of veterans in the population. Can you just provide a little bit more color regarding what people see on the media, for example, you look at Ukraine, it's effectively drone trench warfare, which I think is not what people thought what warfare could in 2026 look like. But also in what you just mentioned right now, you talked about decisive capabilities in a theater level. That's very different from a drone trench warfare. Can you just expand on the difference a little bit? Because I do think that on the high-end capability of Lockheed, maybe investors are underappreciating what that means to be relevant in a great power type event.
I think the starting place for the Ukraine stalemate, essentially trench warfare, is that neither side has been able to create air superiority in a level that we just described. If either side, Russia or Ukraine, had complete command of the air, this drone trench warfare may not have developed. It wouldn't have had time to develop, and we would be in a different situation. But you do have to have both. You have to have the high-end control of the air, and also you have to be able to counter these new autonomous, relatively low-cost attack weapons, is what they are. That may not necessarily be what we will emphasize. What we will emphasize is the much more complex mission of counter-UAS. Almost anyone can build with Chinese parts generally, and that's how the Russians and Ukrainians are doing it.
With Chinese parts, you can build a drone that can drop a hand grenade in a trench. Almost anyone could do that in their garage. But when it comes to seeking out that drone, identifying it, and destroying it in mass, hundreds or thousands, that is a much tougher mission set. Again, the offensive drone warfare is an easier technical problem, frankly, than counter-UAS. What we've been doing, building this muscle of mission technology roadmap, assessing evolving kind of threats or new weapons that are put into play, like in Ukraine and actually also in Iran now, we're able to quickly motivate our engineers to design to the mission, not design to an RFP only. That's where the two systems, the counter-UAS systems that we're scaling now came from. They came not from a lengthy RFP from the U.S. government.
They came from us with our experts, many of them ex-military and ex-intelligence community veterans, coming in, building those technology roadmaps and saying, "We have to be able to do this." There's no RFP from the government. They haven't really thought through the technical solutions yet, or maybe they're going a different direction. What we do with our mission technology roadmap say, "What do we have right now?" Like on the shelf and deployed, by the way, because if it's deployed, it can be used quickly. Some of the things that we have on the shelf are, and actually the Army does, Hellfire missiles. We build tens of thousands of those a year. There are more tens of thousands of those in the stockpiles across all our allies in the United States. We kind of unleashed our engineers with these mission technology roadmaps.
These are day job, which is respond to RFPs, then design to those. But a lot of their time now is built on figuring out what the next thing is going to be, maybe even before the U.S. government puts the request for information out about it, and offer them solutions. That's the new Lockheed Martin. We're not just waiting for RFPs. We are, but that's not all we do. Right now, we're looking at our own mission technology roadmaps and saying, "What's the next thing that's going to be needed, and how can we scale it to a theater level?" When I say theater, I don't mean like a movie theater. I'm talking about the Pacific Ocean, okay?
Big theater.
Europe. Yes. That's right. The Middle East. How do you scale something that is a-- If it's a really cool science project and you can't scale it and you can't teach in 15 minutes a high school graduate Marine to use it's interesting, but it's not effective. What we're doing is effective at that level. What did we take? We took the Hellfire missile, which is a helicopter-carried missile that goes from air to ground. It was designed to hit tanks and things in the Cold War. Our people used digital technology, new software, a new integration package into an existing launcher architecture and an existing missile. We changed it from an air-to-ground missile off a helicopter to a ground-to-air missile to hit these drones. We've been testing that out at Yuma and other places with the military, and it works.
Of course, it works because the pieces already exist. We just repurpose them. A mission technology roadmap says, "I got Hellfires. I've got a launcher architecture. It's already deployed with the U.S. Army and many others. How can I repurpose this for this new threat that came out?" That's an example of it. I'll give you the other example because it's actually more esoteric. The GRIZZLY, which is this ground-to-air missile technology that we developed, has to be tied into a command and control system, which is, again, another strong point of Lockheed Martin. The command and control system has to identify the many, it could be hundreds of drones, as I said. It has to make sure that they're enemy, it has to make sure that they're nefarious, and then it has to do what's called target weapons matching.
I got 100 weapons, I got 200 targets. What are the best combinations to eliminate that large threat? That system has to then cue a weapon. Now, these things are not toys. They are explosive devices with rocket motors in them to go ahead and be launched, track, and hit a couple hundred drones. That, again, is a differentiable technology capability that we have, and others have in our space, if you will. I'm sure Boeing Defense has a similar version. We know Northrop does and others. But we have a pretty advanced one ourselves, and we tied that Hellfire missile in a new mission into that command and control system that we evolved for counter-UAS. Then we added another device, which our folks invented, which at our request. Like, okay, we've got a missile solution.
We need a directed energy solution, too, to match with that, to accomplish the mission and take it another step forward. Our engineering team developed our own UAS, which is probably about as big as a large dining room table, weighs a few hundred pounds, and it's got the four rotors. It takes off vertically. On top of this is LIDAR, Radar, infrared, a bunch of sensors, and a box. In that box is a high-power microwave that this device will tie into the same Sanctum command and control system. Now I've got 200 targets, 100 are going to get hit by the Hellfire missiles I have at my disposal. There's still another 100. That Sanctum system will parse out which of those targets goes to the kinetic solution, which is the missile, and which goes to the electromagnetic solution, which is microwave.
It will then assign this drone to go to those other additional threats, fly beside them, make sure with all of its sensors it identifies it as an enemy drone, zap it with the high-power microwave. That zap fries the electronics inside the drone, the drone just fails. It can do that 50 times on one battery charge, then it goes back for a battery charge. So if you have 10 of these and you have 20 GRIZZLY launchers, you can deal with 200 drones coming at you much more effectively than anybody can today. Now you've also got the solutions of F-16s firing air-to-air missiles, other solutions. The layered defense that we are creating with our mission technology roadmap will be, I think, will be the force protection solution for the U.S. government for bases, for THAAD missile batteries, and things like that.
But one little product or one little piece of this from a startup can't do this alone. Someone's got to mission integrate it. This example that I just gave you of Sanctum uses a Radar not made by the great Lockheed Martin that does Aegis and all the TPY radars. It was from a startup we invested in called Fortem. We use Fortem radars because they are very transportable, light, and resilient. So you can get a couple of pickup trucks, put a Fortem radar on it, put a GRIZZLY in the back of the other truck, and you can go out and protect a forward operating base, a stadium, something like that. That's the way we're thinking now as a company. It literally took three or four years to drive the Z-axis through big old Lockheed Martin into four business areas.
That's how we think now, that's how we operate, that's how we plan, and that's how we allocate our R&D. You might have noticed our R&D budget has gone up significantly and has our CapEx budget because we are now investing our cash flows, part of our cash flows, into all these opportunities that no one is thinking like this, but I'd like to think we are. That's how all this technology does come together. The real match is, again, as an ex-Air Force pilot, I know that you need the big platforms for three things, range, payload, and survivability. That's the F-35, that's the F-47 coming down from Boeing, that's the F-16, the F-15. You've got to have those big platforms because they have the range to get to the target. Now we're talking high-end again. Range to get to the target.
The payload, like the B-2, could carry a 2,000 lbs weapon, put it down an air shaft, and blow up a nuclear facility in Iran. It took us 32 hours to get there and back for the airplane. That's the kind of platform you need to do the high-end missions, but it should be heavily complemented with networking, with lower cost systems, and with new entrance systems that not necessarily coming from the big prime contractors. Our goal is to welcome the venture firms in. We have our own venture fund, actually, to help them. We welcome in new entrants like Fortem. Another example I'll give you, because changing this company to be more of a commercial technology company, at least think that way, is another alliance we have with a company called Saildrone. Saildrone's, again, startup, but it's been around a few years.
They can actually build autonomous ships that, guess what? They're really interesting because they work, but what they need is they need payload. They need something to put on the ship to make a theater-level effect or deterrent against armed conflict. What are those things? They are weapons. We teamed up with Saildrone, their autonomous ocean vehicle, and one they have, one they're developing. On the first one, guess what we're going to put? The GRIZZLY system. We're going to put the GRIZZLY system and the Sanctum command and control arrangement on these autonomy ships that we don't make, and that General Dynamics doesn't make, or BAE. This is a company that came out of literally nowhere that we can now use to improve the deterrent posture in the Pacific Ocean or elsewhere. They couldn't have done it on their own.
We didn't have a ready now product, so we married up with them, and we are deploying and testing the GRIZZLYs now with them. Then we're going to put something called a Mark 70 launcher, which can take much bigger missiles, and put it on a Saildrone ship. That's what we have. That's how we have to act now. That's why Lockheed Martin, I think, will differentiate itself over some period of time. These long-term agreements that we're putting in place, starting with munitions, including the one I just described this morning, could go to any other system that we make where the government agrees there's long-term demand. We want to change the whole industry, which will allow for more creativity, more advanced development by us, and hopefully by everybody in our sector, and also, over time, expanded margins.
Because these framework agreements are designed to allow industry, if it successfully gets its cost down, to have expanded margins. The system we live in today, for the most part, the annual budgeting and recontracting system, something when I came from commercial telecom back to this arena, I was reminded that if we take cost out of a program, next year our revenue and margins are going to go down. So why would you invest $10 million in a new robotic system to make your Patriot missile cheaper if you're just going to have to renegotiate your revenue margin down? With the framework agreements, that doesn't happen.
What we agreed to do, by the way, with them is if we get above a certain margin expansion, which we keep all of it, then there's a profit-sharing algorithm or formula that some of it will get back to the government and reinvested in the program. This is much more of a commercial technology approach flywheel, if you will, to actually make our industry better and stronger and higher margin, which allows us to invest more and the government to invest more, and we'll have more effective national defense with that. I think this country and this company will demonstrate that is a better way to run the national defense enterprise and the relationship between industry and government. Guess what it'll do? It'll open the doors for a lot of other companies to come in, whether they're startups or new entrants or high-tech companies.
We have partnerships with Verizon for 5G, which we're developing a really cool project, which I don't have time to talk about now, but it's really cool with them and their 5G network. We have alignment with NVIDIA since, I think, 2017, on AI. Same with IBM. We're doing quantum. We just opened another out lab together in Switzerland to work on quantum. So we're working with all kinds of companies across many industries now. We want to bring that big tent to our national defense, so we have more effective national defense, and we can have higher margins. So that's what this really is all about.
Oh, that's very helpful, Jim. That's a very comprehensive view, and I think that's an underappreciated view of your role because sometimes I think investors think, oh, you're just old Lockheed, and it seems like there's a lot of invigoration happening with the company.
Yeah. I'll give you one other little story about this. This is how we're different. We, I said, took the straightjackets off our engineers for some of their time and energy. Evan and I, and Frank St. John, the COO, we go to factories almost every week, I think one of us are there, or all of us are there. We do our executive team meetings at factories every month. When I go up to one of the plants, there's a lot of them, but I go, "Well, show us something we haven't seen before that's not in the LRP," or a long-range plan, or not on contract yet. "What are you guys working on here?" We went to Orlando, Florida. We have a Missiles and Fire Control plant there.
Very proud-looking, mostly young people were at the end, and this was the show me something we don't know about yet. That's where we first saw, this is about nine months ago, six months ago, saw GRIZZLY. It was there with the missiles in it, and we saw the Sanctum mean-looking kind of microwave killing machine. I just looked at both of them. I go, "Have these tested positively yet in the field with the customer?" They said yes to both. These things actually work.
I said, "Build 1,000 of each of them right now, and we'll figure out how to either sell them to the U.S. government or somebody else, or lease them out. This is the right technology solution. This is scalable, and we're going to have a couple of hundred of these GRIZZLYs ready to deploy by the end of the year." That's not the old Lockheed Martin, I think.
Wow. Well, Jim, I think that kind of dovetails into my next question. It seems like, look, the U.S. government, the Department of War wants speed, scale, agility, commercial terms on some of these technology. For these examples that you've highlighted, it's really clear that you're moving in the same direction with them. Can you share with us how do you think about further alignment and where you are on your journey for Lockheed to be fully aligned to this type of new business model?
I'll let Evan speak to the financial outcomes that we were hoping, expecting to come from all this. There's leadership now in the Pentagon, at the very top even, that has true commercial investing and operating experience. That team, and we, have complete alignment on how to change this relationship between government and industry. You can go back to 2020 when I came off the board at my colleague's invitation. I was on the board of directors and came in to manage the amazing management team we have. In 2020, I did an interview with CSIS, with Dr. Hamre, and I talked about all of this stuff. Out in the world, Deputy Secretary Feinberg was running his hedge fund. They have and had for years investments in defense space, probably looking at the same issue the same way.
The fact that both of us now are somehow here allowed us to negotiate that first PAC-3 MSE multi-year agreement. That was his team and mine, with us there for much of it, figuring out these, they call them Heads of Agreement. It's basically a framework or major term sheet on how to do commercial type contracting between the U.S. government and the aerospace and defense industry. The leadership is there to seize the moment, so to speak. We've been practicing for this for five or six years now, and we're really welcoming it. The prior administration did get some multi-year munitions contracts through with us, which was great.
With this kind of new breed coming into the Pentagon leadership, and the need, frankly, to really scale up given the situation in Europe and also now in the Middle East, the moment was right, the people were right, and the energy was there to do it. We do need Congress to come in for the full funding of the whole seven years, if you will. They've already been doing two or three years so far on some of the programs we have under these long-term agreements. I do think Congress will see the value of this and the protections that we put in for the government and the upside they put in for industry, and I think they will get there. The budget process is going on now, but that isn't that as important as the theme.
The theme is to have a more effective defense industry, if you will, and a more effective national defense. Using the old cost base yearly system, especially for programs that you know are going to go on for years, is suboptimal. Heavily suboptimal. Now I think that the universe of people that care about these issues are starting to say, "Okay, this is a better way to do this, and let's get on with it." They are getting on with it. We announced yet another of these agreements this morning on something that's not even public yet. It's been developed with us and the Air Force for years, but it's not even full rate production. I think this is the tide, where it's going. We're going to continue to lead it because we have very big programs with very long cycles.
Many multi-year programs of record, whether it's F-35 or Trident Missile or other things like that. We can make this industry government arrangement much more efficient, much more effective, especially given the threat environment. Last thing I'll say, because I'm a lapsed engineer, too, so I'm not flying planes anymore, and I never really was an engineer, but I have a degree. Not to get you in trouble, but this is a big engineering problem that the country has. They got escalating threat. We have an escalating threat in, you pick your spot, China, North Korea, Iran, Russia. Very dedicated to competing with us, I'll say.
Then we have technology moving faster than it ever has in human history, both in physical and digital worlds. Then you got more or less a fixed resource defense budget, so to speak. I know there's, is it a $1.15 billion? Is it $1.05 billion? It can't get infinite. It's not going to double or triple. So the threat's doubling and tripling. The speed of technology development is doubling or tripling, but the resource is the same. The only way to close that engineering equation is to change the system that you operate under. That's what we've been trying to do for the last four or five years.
Yeah, on the financial side. So now, with the announcement this morning, we can disclose that we have signed four HOAs with the Department of War, PAC-3 and THAAD, which both have UCaaS. In 2Q, we reported the full backlog of seven years for THAAD. We'll do the same in 3Q for PAC-3. PrSM, we've talked about an award next year, and we'll let the customer pace the timing of the JATM HOA. But clearly, as Jim mentioned, we're very excited about partnering here. But the upside of this business model is just very clear for every party. Certainly from the Pentagon, the war fighter, they're now getting guaranteed of delivery in a lot of cases at a much higher volume so they can have a surety of their long-term mission planning.
From a taxpayer perspective, now you've got stable prices for a very long-term basis, when in the past we've seen impacts of inflation. For us, it really allows for long-term production planning and resource allocation. We've talked about 20 new facilities that are either new or significant additions. You can only make that kind of commitment to long-term facility planning with these long-term agreements that we partner with the customer. So really, it's a win all the way around. Of course, for our shareholders, now you've got that true clarity in our long-term revenue while we're seeing the fastest growing part of our business, also the highest margin part of our business. So very positive.
So maybe, Evan, just following up on maybe for 2026. Revenue for the first half of the year looked good. Free cash flow was also good, and even raised them at the 2Q earnings call. But you had some margin pressure in the first half of the year. How should we think about the second half of the year margins?
Yeah. So margins for 2026, we expect to be in line with our guide. Q3 may not have the same number of risk retirements that Q2 or Q4 had. So you may see some lumpiness as we get to our guided margins. If you look at our margins, it is sort of a mix of some of the headwinds from some of those programs that we talked about that create a dilutive effect across our business areas. But underlying, there is very strong performance in our core programs. As we trace through the roll-off of those dilutive programs, we see long-term margin opportunity, like Jim mentioned, because the core performance of our programs have been very strong. Almost very quietly, F-35 production is one of the highest performing programs in our whole portfolio, and that is going to create real long-term opportunity.
Space, just very strong performance, and they are doing without the benefit of ULA equity earnings, and so as we see that return to flight, we will have some margin uplift. MFC, we talked about a little bit of dilutive pressure as we scale up, but long-term, very long margin opportunity. In Aeronautics, as we deliver out the current lots of F-16 and C-130, that core performance is really strong. Then RMS, as we build out the current lots of Sikorsky, get into the multi-lots of CH-53K, we see a lot of margin opportunity because the core RMS is performing very strongly when you look at the ground Radar business and the C2 business that Jim talked about earlier.
Great. Now, maybe diving a little bit deeper to some of the things you said, Jim. The threat environment is not abating. In fact, it is getting worse. We have finite resources. On the finite resources part, we are operating in a continuing resolution environment. The fiscal year 2027 budget is still uncertain. How do you operate a business where speed, agility is paramount to national security, but there is a disconnect in terms of this threatening environment and the visibility into the budget, as some of these have not really fully translated into definitive agreements or funding. How do you think about that?
The timing of when a budget gets approved or a CR gets released or those kind of legislative calendar type things do not affect our overall business that much because of our backlog, almost all of 2017 revenue is already funded. In other words, the money's in quote the bank or in the treasury for essentially almost all of our 2017 expected revenue. What it does slow you down on is deploying innovation. When I say you, I don't mean Lockheed Martin, I mean the entire enterprise. Our government official counterparts in the administration and in the Pentagon, they are working that problem hard because they want innovation faster, and they're trying to convince, we agree, our legislators and senators that the cost of delays in the budget process slow them down from getting better and introducing innovation faster.
At the same time, our existing programs, they're already funded. Those funds will be applied to the backlog in 2017 and into 2018 in some cases, and beyond that. Our base business is in pretty good shape, I would say. Even if the CR is pick how many months you think it's going to go. We will continue to innovate and be ready, and when the funds get released for the new start program, because new starts and additive elements to existing programs, those are the things that actually do get delayed. We'll be ready to go and scale. Like I said, I know we could probably build 5,000 of these GRIZZLY launchers, and they're all going to sell. They might not sell in the next quarter, but in the next three years, again, we can make thousands of these things.
They work, they're effective, the threat is rising. There's no efficient way to do it. This is the most efficient way to do it from a kinetic standpoint. Those are going to sell. We are not afraid to. By the way, when you talk about low cost, these systems I'm telling you about, they're in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the tens of billions of dollars per item. We can manage the cash flows on those kind of innovative programs because their basic cost is not that much, and the development cost isn't even that much. This is something I think we can manage, the timing of budget releases and such.
Super helpful. You guys have called out $8 billion-$9 billion of capital investment through 2030 to support increased munitions production. When you think about the puts and takes here, how should we think about the financial impact where you've got this CapEx investment or some of them, not necessarily CapEx, but other parts of investment. How do we think about this translating into accelerated revenue growth multi-year? How do we think about margin trajectory for the enterprise and also ultimately free cash flow?
Yeah. If you think about the $8 billion- $9 billion, the largest piece of it will go where you would probably expect the capacity, the new facilities, the new tooling to really ramp up capacity. There are two other key elements to that, though, that are important. One is the obsolescence planning to ensure that we do not have any obsolescence items that pop up maybe into year five that would slow us down. Then building additional capacity and second sources at that mid-tier level.
The true resiliency in a production line that prevents any kind of stops because once we are on, we are on with a set schedule and a set price and we are off to the races. This upfront investment ensures not only a production scaling, but production resiliency. The nice thing about the $8 billion- $9 billion, that is just at the Lockheed Martin level.
That cascades down to our next tier suppliers, and this is unlocking true investment into the true scale of production across the whole industry. From a financial standpoint, the nice thing is we have the cash neutrality treatment as part of these HOAs, so we are able to protect the cash flow out in the near term as we convert to deliveries and start seeing cash flow accretive, and it is turning into revenue right away because we are off to the races. Despite them being UCaaS, we have the full authorization for the seven years on PAC-3 and THAAD, so we have begun as fast as we can to scale. So you will see the revenue side of that immediately in our business.
Yeah, that is right. Just going back to first principles on these agreements. The ones that were cited a minute ago by Evan, we are tripling the volume of annual PAC-3 production, tripling it. We are quadrupling the THAAD production. So those are just two examples of, wow, these are major business increases. They are not like, 20% more than last year. We are saying by the end of 2017, we will have built 2,000 next year. That is the rise here. When it also comes to PAC-3, there is significant international demand, and right now the U.S. government is parsing out, as they always do for Foreign Military Sales, who gets what. Well, if we have got them coming out the end of the factory, that whole demand is going to be there to absorb it.
So we are actually targeting more than 2,000 a year because the 2,000 does not count the Navy putting PAC-3 MSEs on ships using our Aegis system, which is happening, starting to happen for real now. It does not count all that latent external international demand either. So we expect more than tripling per year, and we have just got to get there operationally and it does take time. But this munitions will ramp up, as we call it, will change basically the apportionment of revenue of the entire company of Lockheed Martin, so to the good.
Other things are going to continue to grow too, but this munitions ramp up is significant. The other thing that I want to reference that Evan alluded to is our supply chain. It is almost always the constricting issue. It is not Lockheed Martin labor, it is not Lockheed Martin process or factory space or anything like that.
We could put together anything at almost any volume if we have all the parts. And those middle-tier suppliers, they are almost always, no offense, the problem. Some of our competimates are sometimes the problem too. We won't identify those, but our supply chain is our biggest risk factor in production scaling. What I try to remind my government colleagues is, remember, you've got Northrop and General Dynamics, et cetera, et cetera, Lockheed Martin.
Major portions of our business, 50%, 75%, 80%, 90% are defense, and through you, the Pentagon leadership. All of our suppliers, maybe it's 5%, 10% if you're lucky. They're making capital allocation decisions and employment decisions, and when they get a seven-year subcontract from us, like the scales fall from their eyes. They go, "Okay. I got seven years of triple production of my part that's going to go into those Patriot missiles.
I'm going to invest in that right now because I got the best credit in the world backed up by investment grade OEM. I now am comfortable putting that $10 million into some automation that I was never going to do before. Small part of my business, annual contracts. I wasn't going to do it. Now we'll do it." I think this flywheel effect here is going to be very good.
So maybe with the interest of time, Jim, one last question for you. What big problem are you spending most of your time on right now?
Making sure that we can drive autonomy and AI appropriately and effectively into all those mission technology roadmaps. I'm in the factory a lot with the gang, but I'm also out at technology conferences. I have a lot of relationships from my prior company, and they all want to contribute. Literally, the CEOs want to contribute to what we're doing. We have the access to some of the best technology in the world that's completely outside the A&D space, and us optimizing that and making bets like our Vectis.
We're designing and building a CCA that's as big as an F-35. Remember, range, payload, survivability. It's got stealth. It can carry significant amounts of weapons. It can go quite far. Smaller ones are interesting, but if you want to go penetrate the PRC, you need to have F-22s, F-35s, B-2s and 21s, and these things, something like the Vectis. By using the best AI that we can get a hold of, the best autonomy software that we can partner or write ourselves, which we are doing and integrating into the F-35, that Vectis, as we speak, I think we can really be the leader here.
Well, great. Thank you very much, Jim. Thank you very much, Evan. This concludes the presentation on Lockheed Martin.
Thank you.
Thanks, everybody.