Lockheed wins $180M to keep HIMARS running for its global customers

More than a dozen countries are now waiting in line to buy the rocket artillery system that rewrote the rules of the war in Ukraine, and the U.S. Army just signed a contract to make sure all of them can keep it running. A $180 million award announced May 28 will put Lockheed Martin in charge of maintaining, repairing, and supporting HIMARS and MLRS systems for every foreign military customer that has bought into the program, covering a global support network that spans multiple continents and shows no sign of shrinking.

The contract, structured as an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity arrangement running through May 30, 2031, covers international contractor logistics support services for Foreign Military Sales customers and cooperative agreement partners operating the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System and the Multiple Launch Rocket System. The $180 million represents a ceiling on total spending rather than a guaranteed commitment, with individual task orders placed as specific countries require specific services. Work locations will be determined with each order, reflecting the genuinely global distribution of the customer base that Lockheed Martin is now responsible for supporting.

The HIMARS, formally the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, is a truck-mounted precision rocket artillery platform that fires guided rockets or tactical ballistic missiles at targets up to 300 kilometers (186 miles) away depending on the munition selected. Lockheed Martin developed it as a lighter, wheeled alternative to the tracked M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System, which fires the same ammunition from a heavier armored carrier. HIMARS mounts a single six-round rocket pod or one Army Tactical Missile System ballistic missile, is operated by a crew of three, and fits inside a C-130 Hercules tactical airlifter, making it deployable by air to forward locations that heavier artillery platforms cannot reach. Its defining tactical characteristic is shoot-and-scoot: the crew fires, and the vehicle relocates before enemy counter-battery radar can calculate the launch point and direct return fire.

Ukraine’s use of HIMARS beginning in June 2022 transformed the system’s global market position in ways that no marketing campaign could have achieved. Ukrainian forces used the precision rocket system to strike Russian ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics nodes far behind the front lines, forcing Moscow to relocate critical supplies and degrading its ability to sustain offensive operations. The footage of those strikes, circulated widely on social media, turned HIMARS into a symbol of how precision long-range fires had changed the calculus of modern ground warfare. Countries that had been casually evaluating the system began placing urgent orders. Lockheed Martin’s production rate in 2022 was approximately 60 launchers annually. By late 2024 the company had reached 96 per year, a 60 percent increase driven almost entirely by foreign demand. In 2025 alone, the State Department approved new or additional HIMARS orders for Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and Sweden. Estonia took delivery of its first six launchers at Ämari Air Base in April 2025.

The scale of that proliferation is exactly what makes the May 28 logistics support contract necessary. A country that buys a HIMARS battery is making a 20 to 30 year commitment to a platform that requires ongoing maintenance, regular component replacement, software updates, and crew training refreshers across its operational life. Delivering that sustainment through an American government contractor, rather than leaving each nation to manage it independently, creates a lasting operational relationship between Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Army, and each customer country’s military. Countries operating HIMARS now include Poland, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Taiwan, Australia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and Morocco, alongside Ukraine and the United States, with additional sales approved and pending delivery. Each of those operators represents a separate logistics chain, a separate language of technical documentation, a separate set of operator-identified issues requiring engineering resolution, and a separate stream of spare parts demand that the new contract centralizes under a single support framework.

The indefinite-delivery structure of the contract is well suited to the irregular, geography-dependent nature of international logistics support. Some customer nations will need intensive depot-level maintenance support for systems approaching scheduled overhaul intervals. Others will need rapid parts supply to address unexpected failures during exercises or operations. Still others will require technical assistance from Lockheed Martin engineers traveling to in-country facilities to resolve problems that remote troubleshooting cannot diagnose. The task order mechanism allows the Army to direct precisely the support that each situation demands, without committing to a fixed scope of work across five years for a customer base whose needs will change as fleets age, as new munitions enter service, and as operators accumulate operational experience.

North Korea’s visible effort to develop a domestic HIMARS-equivalent, confirmed in testing this week, is the most striking recent indicator of how thoroughly the system has defined the global standard for mobile precision fires. When a country as isolated as Pyongyang invests in replicating the HIMARS architecture, it is acknowledging that this class of weapon now sets the baseline expectation for what effective ground-based rocket artillery looks like.