Lockheed Martin and GM Defense announced today that the companies have entered into a memorandum of understanding to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base.

The partnership will focus on strengthening the supply chain, advancing manufacturing and design capabilities as well as expanding production capacity through commercial manufacturing, according to a joint announcement from the two companies.

Lockheed has already been working with DOD to scale manufacturing across the DIB over the past year, including framework agreements with the Pentagon that were announced in January to dramatically boost Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor and PAC-3 missile production. And Lockheed plans to invest $9 billion through 2030 to modernize facilities and expand production capacity, Chief Operating Officer Frank St. John told reporters during a call today.

“Through those conversations with the department, [we] began to uncover some non-traditional ways that we could scale manufacturing, and the introduction and the work with GM Defense was a natural outgrowth of those conversations. Our teams have been working together on various projects over the years on the R&D side, and so there was already a pre-existing relationship, and this collaboration just was a natural follow on to that,” he said.

The $9 billion Lockheed is investing includes 20 different projects, but it’s too early to say which ones GM Defense will be involved in, St. John added.

With DOD asking industry to triple or quadruple the rate it produces munitions, GM Defense’s experience will be key in reducing risk as it scales and produces at higher rates, St. John said.

“And then as we do subsequent design work, how do you do the designs in a way that are aimed at a factory that is running at those higher rates?” he said.

Bruce Brown, the vice president of strategy for GM Defense, said during the call that the agreement was “facilitated” by DOD, and the next steps will be to finalize and define the “specific areas of cooperation” for the two companies.

“Lockheed Martin has a lot of specialized capabilities in terms of materials and processes, and certainly making those available to GM for their use and their projects with the government would be something that would be a part of this agreement,” he said.

Brown pointed to the Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle program as an example of the type of growth GM Defense aims to achieve -- taking a commercial-off-the-shelf technology like the Chevy Colorado and using it to shape the design of the ISV.

“If you think about growth, you know we started with just about 1,000 vehicles here, was the initial ask, and then in a few short years we're expanding to that over 10,000. So, we've got a framework here on how to ramp and how to scale, and those are the kind of conversations here that we look to continue to further,” he said.