Monday, October 20, 2008

Army targets BAE systems for $66M weapons sight order

By Mass High Tech Staff

The Lexington unit of BAE Systems Inc. has received $66 million in orders from the U.S. Army for thermal weapon sights. TWS mounted on rifles and machine guns enable vision and target tracking in darkness, fog and obscured environments.

To date, the defense firm has total orders for the thermal sights worth $400 million, contracted through a five-year agreement with the U.S Army’s Research and Development Command Acquisition Center at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

The goal of BAE’s development of TWS is to make them more cost effective, as well as lighter and smaller, officials at BAE Systems of Lexington said.

Last month, the National Security Solutions unit of BAE announced a $7.16 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a tool to rapidly search through video archives based on content. BAE Systems National Security Solutions said it will do the bulk of the work in its Burlington headquarters, as well as in facilities in Cambridge and Los Angeles.

BAE Systems Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of United Kingdom-based BAE Systems PLC, and is headquartered in Rockville, Md. BAE Systems PLC reported 2007 annual sales of $31.4 billion. The defense company opened the new 33,000-square-foot design center for military night-vision applications in Lexington on Jan. 23.