L-3 Awarded Contract for UK Project LISTENER
Oct 23, 2007: British
MOD has launched the Assessment Phase of Project LISTENER, a
program aimed at integrating various sensor to provide actionable
intelligence against selected targets. LISTENER will be interoperability
with British ISTAR assets and other Coalition information and
intelligence systems. Under this assessment phase, the British
MoD awarded L3 Communications
(NYSE: LLL) a £1 million contract for the 10 months
engineering effort which will focus on risk reduction and solution
definition. The next milestone in this program is Main Gate
approval, expected in 2009 for follow-on demonstration and manufacturing
through 2015. The LISTENER capability is expected to remain
in service until approximately 2035.
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According
to Bob Drewes, President of L-3’s Integrated Systems Group
L-3 has already been involved with a similar project, the Network
Centric Collaborative Targeting (NCCT) program, which networks
Command and Control (C2) and Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance (ISR) assets to dramatically improve target location
accuracy, timeliness and combat identification for the war fighter.
“[LISTENER] takes advantage of our success in fielding
the Network Centric Collaborative Targeting capability, modified
for U.K. collection, processing, dissemination, and security
context.” Said Drewes.
To pursue the LISTENER program the company assembled an industry
team known as the KAIROS Consortium. According to Ron Cook,
Vice President of L-3’s London Operations, “L-3
has assembled a top-flight team with QinetiQ and LogicaCMG,
two of the U.K.’s leading firms in Intelligence, Surveillance,
Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR). The L-3 solution
combines proven performance and a sovereign solution.”
L-3 will be prime contractor for the effort, providing program
management, airborne platform integration, and systems engineering
for requirements development and test and evaluation., a team
which includes U.K. partner companies QinetiQ (land and sea
platform integration, system architecture, technology development,
training and human factors) and LogicaCMG (integrated logistics
support, security and communications). L-3 has committed to
perform at least 60 percent of the LISTENER effort in the U.K.,
and has set up a LISTENER project office in Tewkesbury, near
the MOD customer.
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