If you listen closely, you can hear Dick Cheney's heart rate spiking to obscene levels… 

After decades of milking the Patriot radar like a cow, the Army finally tossed the udder and gave Raytheon’s rebranded corpse (read: RTX) a $1.7B contract for LTAMDS… a 360-degree Gallium Nitride death frisbee that makes Patriot look mid. 

RTX to Lockheed be like: 

(Source: Giphy) 

The check covers the first batch of about 10 radars. Poland, of course, has already slapped cash on the table for 12 of their own, officially making them the world’s first international customer and the loudest “please don’t leave us alone with Russia” country in NATO. Toss in the Pentagon’s order book, and RTX’s tab is already at $3.8B… and that’s before every other NATO country starts panic-buying the ish out of it. 

(Source: Defense News) 

Which, to be fair, has been a long time coming. The service has spent over 15 years screwing around with Patriot replacement ideas, even tried a full-system competition before scrapping it. But now, RTX has stolen the show, finally locking in LTAMDS as the official “program of record.” 

As for production time, reports are saying around forty months per radar. But the Army swears it can get that down to 36 months with “supply chain consultants”. Translation: Deloitte gets $50M to write ORDER SHT FASTER in Comic Sans. And honestly, maybe they should, because the thing friggin’ works. For instance, LTAMDS has eaten 10,000 hours of testing, eight missile flight trials, and more soldier abuse than what goes on at Fort Bragg. Rain, dust, Guam humidity… they tried everything short of throwing it in a Waffle House kitchen fight, and it still locked targets without remorse.  

(Source: The Independent) 

For this reason, the Army is already deploying units downrange to Guam for live evaluation. Operational testing is planned for 2026. Full-rate production by 2028 with a total of 94 of these babies in their arsenal. Naturally, investors are foaming at the mouth because of it. Every think-tank op-ed about “hypersonic saturation raids” doubles as RTX marketing copy. And analysts are already gushing that “LTAMDS could redefine layered defense doctrine” (Translation: Daddy RTX just guaranteed my bonus).

So yes, LTAMDS is officially RTX’s golden goose. A radar so over-engineered it’s basically retiring the Patriot. And unless the Aztec calendar hits a reboot and torches the Earth tomorrow, RTX is about to eat off this government teat for quite some time. And investors, the Pentagon, and even Poland are 100% here for it. Which means keep your eyes on RTX and place your bets accordingly, friends. Oh, and pour one out for Lockheed. They’ll need it. Until next time…

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.