Lockheed Martin has restarted its Tactical Missile System (TACMS) production line at the company’s facility in Camden, Arkansas.

For more than 20 years, TACMS (formerly ATACMS) was assembled on-budget and on- or ahead-of-schedule at the company’s facility in Horizon City near El Paso, Texas. In order to consolidate all of Lockheed Martin’s Precision Fires missile and rocket production at its Camden Operations, TACMS production was temporarily suspended in 2014 and relocated to Camden.

“Restarting the TACMS production is excellent news for our customers seeking deep precision fire support. This production re-start will yield greater flexibility and significant cost-savings on a program with a rich history of reliability, affordability and mission success,” said Ken Musculus, Vice President - Tactical Missiles at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.

TACMS is a combat-proven precision deep-strike system with readiness rates exceeding 98 percent since the program’s initial fielding in 1990. Providing quick-reaction firepower with ranges up to 300 kilometers, the TACMS missiles can be fired from the entire family of MLRS launchers, including the lightweight High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).

Each TACMS missile is packaged in an MLRS launch pod and is fired from the MLRS family of launchers. TACMS is the only long-range tactical surface-to-surface missile ever fired in combat by the U.S. Army. Almost 600 TACMS have been employed to date, with the system demonstrating extremely high rates of combat accuracy and reliability.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that – with the addition of Sikorsky – employs approximately 126,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.