Lockheed Martin successfully demos Navy combat system on hardware destined for ICS

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin, in conjunction with roughly a dozen industry partners and the US Navy, successfully demonstrated it could run a virtualized version of a key combat system on hardware anticipated for use in the service’s forthcoming Integrated Combat System, according to a company executive.

The demo, which took place in late September at the Navy’s Maryland-based software factory known as The Forge, focused on running the Ship Self-Defense System (SSDS), the multi-functional combat system used by aircraft carriers and certain Navy amphibious ships that lack the Aegis Combat System, Shireen Melvin, integrated combat management systems director at Lockheed Martin, told Breaking Defense.

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It was a necessary show of agility since the stated purpose of the Navy’s Integrated Combat System is to outfit its ships with hardware and software capable of running independently from one another. Among other benefits, the service hopes this will lead to the sorts of rapid, over-the-air software updates for its warships similar to those routinely done by America’s technology behemoths.

Operating a key piece of software for aircraft carriers and amphibs, the SSDS, on the latest developmental hardware being designed for ICS is another major step towards that goal of software and hardware independence.

“The team was able to do that successfully and virtualize a recent software build of SSDS, and then have it run on the new hardware that’s been selected for the ICS,” Melvin said. “We’re going to keep adding to these demonstrations that we’re doing … as we continue to develop the ICS and as we move along and showing the progression of it.”

Given the sprawling nature of the ICS’s mission, the Navy is working with numerous companies to bring all the necessary technologies together. In October 2023, the service awarded Lockheed Martin a $1 billion contract for the systems engineering and software integration of ICS — in other words, to take point on the engineering lift required to bring it to fruition.

Breaking Defense exclusively reported this February an in-depth view of the other key Navy facility developing the ICS, which the service has dubbed “The Foundry.” Whereas “The Forge” is focused specifically on software development, the otherwise incognito Navy building in Dahlgren, Va., has been tasked with producing the hardware destined for the ICS. Notably, most of that hardware is coming directly from products already being mass produced by industry, Navy officials told Breaking Defense at the time.

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“The technology that we’re taking is really technology that’s coming from the industry side, that has been out there and we’re now applying it to warfighting,” said Capt. Brian Phillips, an officer overseeing the Foundry.

“The world has become much more dynamic,” he continued. “It changes much more quickly. We’ve really had to put a lot of thought into how do we incentivize industry … and empower them to sort of unleash their power to give us the technology we need, rather than dictating everything to them?”