The initiative is intended to address the technical obsolescence of the missile's aging seeker section while expanding the supplier base beyond traditional prime contractors, Army Recognition reported.
Development and initial production will take place at Kratos' Advanced Manufacturing Center. The new seeker is intended to replace an aging microelectronics architecture to support a planned production increase to 3,960 Javelin missiles annually while maintaining target-acquisition performance against armored forces.
The contract also changes the Javelin supply structure. Overall development, production and support of the weapon will remain under the Lockheed Martin-RTX Javelin joint venture, while Kratos will develop the next-generation seeker. The U.S. Army is seeking to keep the missile, which entered service in 1996, operational until at least 2050 while replenishing stocks depleted by a high-intensity war.
The upgrades come as the United States rebuilds stocks significantly reduced by the war in Ukraine. By January 2025, Kyiv had received more than 10,000 Javelin missiles, compared with estimates of prewar U.S. stocks of 20,000 to 25,000. At the same time, Lockheed Martin is increasing annual Javelin production capacity from about 2,100 missiles to 3,960 by the end of 2026.
The current Javelin seeker relies on an infrared detector and processing components based on an electronic architecture developed decades ago. That creates a familiar problem as semiconductor families, detector hardware and manufacturing processes become obsolete even while the missile itself remains militarily useful. Kratos' task is therefore to replace those technological dependencies with new hardware suitable for continued production rather than simply extending the missile's range by installing a more powerful sensor.
The FGM-148 Javelin entered U.S. Army service in 1996 as a replacement for the wire-guided M47 Dragon, although full-rate production of the Javelin had begun in 1994. The complete weapon weighs about 20 kilograms (44 pounds), with the legacy Command Launch Unit weighing about 6.2 kilograms (13.7 pounds) and the missile round about 16.6 kilograms (36.6 pounds), allowing a small infantry team to carry it without a vehicle-mounted launcher.
When fired, the Javelin is soft-launched from its tube before its main motor ignites, reducing the immediate exhaust effects at the firing position and allowing it to be used from buildings, bunkers and other locations where the backblast from a conventional missile would impose greater restrictions.
In early February 2022, Ukrainian forces had about 150 Javelin launchers and only 1,000 to 1,200 missiles, equivalent to about 6.7 to eight missiles per launcher. An estimated 300 Javelin launches during the initial phase of the war resulted in the neutralization of 280 Russian armored vehicles, a nominal success rate of 93.3%. Those 300 missiles alone would have represented 25% to 30% of Ukraine's pre-invasion Javelin stockpile, demonstrating how quickly a tactically successful weapon can deplete a relatively small missile inventory.
Destroying or disabling several hundred armored vehicles between February and April 2022 had greater operational consequences than achieving the same number of kills spread evenly over four years of positional warfare because Russian formations in the early stages were attempting to advance rapidly toward critical objectives rather than fight for incremental territorial gains.
At the same time, Javelins never operated alone. Ukraine began the invasion with roughly twice as many NLAW missiles as Javelins, widely deployed its domestically produced Stugna-P anti-tank missile systems and later received or produced large stocks of other anti-tank guided weapons.
A key challenge for future U.S. procurement is the cost of rebuilding the stockpile. At a stated price of $200,348 per Javelin missile, replacing 10,000 missiles at the same benchmark would cost $2.00348 billion for the missiles alone, excluding Command Launch Units, batteries, training equipment, spare parts, transportation, storage and support.
A $500 FPV drone costs about 1/401 as much as a Javelin missile, meaning the nominal procurement cost of one Javelin is equivalent to about 400 such drones. Even using a $5,000 FPV drone as the benchmark, one Javelin is financially equivalent to about 40 drones. Five Javelins cost about $1.002 million, roughly equivalent to 200 FPV drones.
The Javelin has a maximum range of about 4 to 4.75 kilometers (2.5 to 3 miles), while Ukrainian FPV drones can fly more than 16 kilometers (10 miles). That means a drone can now have more than three times the range of a Javelin and can search behind hills, buildings or tree lines even when the operator cannot initially see the target. However, the comparison is not straightforward.
Javelins remain relevant when infantry units need an immediate, autonomous way to engage armored vehicles, when electronic warfare makes radio-controlled drones unreliable, when a target must be attacked within seconds rather than searched for over several minutes, or when a tandem shaped-charge warhead is needed to defeat Russian tanks.
The U.S. Army can also introduce a new sight without discarding older batches of missiles or maintaining complex launcher-to-missile compatibility tables. Raytheon has invested $22 million in its Lightweight Command Launch Unit, or LWCLU, facility in Tucson, Arizona, to increase production capacity and speed. Countries operating or procuring the lighter launcher include Australia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The modernization is therefore taking place at both ends of the engagement chain. The LWCLU increases the range at which an operator can detect and identify a potential target, while the Kratos seeker is intended to keep the Javelin's fire-and-forget capability viable as its existing guidance components become obsolete.
NV Tech previously reported that in 2025, the U.S. State Department approved a possible sale to Poland of Javelin missile systems and related logistics and program support worth about $780 million.
Poland requested 2,506 FGM-148F Javelin missiles and 253 Javelin Lightweight Command Launch Units. According to the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the proposed sale would "support the foreign policy and national security of the United States" and improve Poland's security and ability to counter current and future threats.