- Lockheed Martin received an $879 million Navy order for F-35 Lots 18-19 armament equipment including missile launchers, bomb racks, and pylons.
- Work will be performed in Fort Worth, Texas, with completion expected by February 2030, serving U.S. and foreign military customers.
Lockheed Martin walked away from May 18 with an $879 million weapons contract, and this one has nothing to do with building new jets. The Naval Air Systems Command handed the Fort Worth defense giant a production order covering the missile launchers, bomb racks, gun systems, wing pylons, and adapter hardware that physically attach weapons to F-35 fighters across the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and more than a dozen partner and foreign buyer nations.
Without this equipment, the most expensive warplane ever built cannot drop a single bomb or fire a single missile, no matter how advanced its sensors happen to be.
The order covers production Lots 18 and 19, two major batches of F-35 Lightning II jets currently moving through Lockheed’s assembly line in Fort Worth, with the last deliveries expected in February 2030. Lockheed finalized the main production contract for those two lots in September 2025, committing to build up to 296 F-35s for a combined value of roughly $24.3 billion, and the weapons hardware now ordered is what makes those aircraft combat-ready the moment they roll off the line. Deliveries from Lots 18 and 19 began in 2026, Lockheed confirmed.
Foreign governments are carrying more than half the financial weight of this particular order. International orders embedded in the contract total approximately $472.8 million, spread across partner nations and countries purchasing the jet through U.S. government foreign military sales channels. That share of the bill reflects two decades of deliberate program design: from the beginning, the F-35 was built as a multinational enterprise, with allied nations buying in early in exchange for workshare, technology access, and a place in the supply chain that now stretches across continents.
To understand what this contract actually covers, it helps to think of the F-35 as a platform and this hardware as the skeleton that holds its arsenal together. The jet carries weapons two ways: tucked inside hidden internal weapons bays that keep its radar-evading stealth profile intact, and on pylons bolted under the wings for heavier external loads. The armament equipment category includes underwing pylons, missile launchers, and weapons bay adapters, with Marvin Engineering Co. serving as the managing partner overseeing this equipment for the F-35 program since 2003. Launchers lock missiles in place, communicate with their guidance systems electronically, and release them cleanly at the right moment, while bomb racks handle the same functions for guided munitions. Pull that hardware out and you have a sophisticated aircraft that simply cannot fight.
Under the F-35’s production workshare arrangements, three international partners are responsible for building 90 percent of the aircraft armament equipment associated with the program, with that supply chain assembled over more than two decades and woven directly into Lockheed’s production architecture in ways that leave no room for a rival supplier to step in on short notice.
The jets rolling out of Lots 18 and 19 are also becoming meaningfully more dangerous than earlier production aircraft. Block 4, a modernization effort spanning more than 80 classified and unclassified upgrades, is being rolled out incrementally across production lots, and one of the headline additions is Lockheed’s internally developed Sidekick rack, which lets the F-35 carry six air-to-air missiles internally instead of four, adding firepower without sacrificing the stealth profile. Every piece of armament hardware in this order has to interface cleanly with those new configurations from day one.
Keeping that hardware pipeline moving is increasingly urgent given where production stands. Lockheed delivered a record 191 F-35s in 2025, nearly doubling the 110 jets handed over in 2024 after the company cleared a delivery backlog tied to software upgrade problems. More jets arriving faster means weapons stations must be ready on the same schedule, and any gap between airframe delivery and armament equipment availability translates directly into aircraft sitting on the ramp unable to fly a combat mission.
F-35s were among the first aircraft to penetrate Iranian airspace during recent operations, using stealth, onboard radar, and targeting systems to find and destroy surface-to-air missile sites in a mission that validated everything the program’s architects promised when they launched it a quarter century ago. Keeping that capability fully armed across three U.S. services and allied air forces around the world is exactly the unglamorous, expensive, and entirely unavoidable work this contract represents.