Lockheed Martin to invest $300 million to expand missile production at Grand Prairie plant

Lockheed Martin said Oct. 14 that it will invest $300 million to expand missile production at its Grand Prairie, Texas, facility, including bringing in an automated machining operation from startup Hadrian, as part of a broader Pentagon-backed push to raise U.S. munitions output.

According to Lockheed Martin’s release, the company’s Missiles & Fire Control site in Grand Prairie will expand to more than 735,000 square feet. The project includes about 100,000 square feet of new space and the conversion of roughly 85,000 square feet of office space into manufacturing space. On the same day, Lockheed and Hadrian announced an expanded partnership that Hadrian described as a first-of-its-kind, seven-year agreement.

Under that arrangement, Hadrian will install a 24-machine automated machining cell inside the Grand Prairie factory. Lockheed said the cell is expected to be operational in early 2027 and will be operated by Lockheed employees. The site supports all of Lockheed’s Missiles & Fire Control programs, and the company said the expansion will help increase output for systems including PAC-3 MSE, THAAD and the Precision Strike Missile.

The announcement adds to a rapid buildup already underway at Grand Prairie. Lockheed said the site now has nearly 800 production employees and manufactured about 250,000 parts in 2025. In recent months, the company has installed more than 30 additional high-precision machines there and expects to have added nearly 100 new advanced machines across the site by the end of 2026.

Lockheed also said the broader program expansion tied to the Grand Prairie investment will create 6,000 jobs across the United States, including about 2,000 in Texas. Those are company figures, and Lockheed did not say all of those jobs would be at the Grand Prairie plant.

The move fits into a wider 2026 shift by the Pentagon toward longer-term buying arrangements meant to give defense companies enough demand visibility to justify major capital spending. Rather than relying only on shorter contract cycles, the Defense Department has increasingly used multiyear or extended procurement frameworks to encourage companies to add factory space, equipment and workers.

That demand signal became clearer in several actions earlier this year. On Jan. 6, Lockheed and the U.S. government announced a framework intended to raise annual PAC-3 MSE production from roughly 600 missiles to about 2,000 over seven years. On June 24, Lockheed announced a seven-year THAAD contract action reported at up to about $35 billion. Then on July 29, the Army converted an earlier action into a seven-year multiyear procurement for PAC-3 MSE with a cumulative ceiling widely reported at about $58.62 billion. Those figures represent long-term procurement vehicles or ceilings, not immediate cash payments.

Hadrian’s role makes the Texas expansion notable beyond a standard factory enlargement. Instead of supplying parts from a separate site, the company is effectively placing a commercial automated machining cell inside one of the country’s biggest missile-production hubs — a factory-inside-a-factory model aimed at speeding output without waiting for a fully separate plant to come online.

“Lockheed Martin has brought together commercial speed and combat-proven performance because America needs both,” Jim Taiclet, Lockheed Martin’s chairman, president and chief executive, said in the company release.

The Grand Prairie project is part of an even larger munitions buildup. Lockheed said it plans to invest $8 billion to $9 billion through 2030 to scale production and modernize or expand more than 20 U.S. facilities, with Grand Prairie now becoming one of the clearest examples of how that money is being put to work.