Lockheed adds 6,000 jobs to speed up missile production

Lockheed Martin plans to create 6,000 jobs across the United States, including 2,000 in Texas, as it expands munitions production. At the center of the plan is a $300 million expansion of its Grand Prairie missile parts plant, where defense manufacturing startup Hadrian will install an automated machining cell.

The company announced the plan on Oct. 14. The Grand Prairie expansion will grow the site to more than 68,000 square meters (735,000 square feet), including about 9,300 square meters (100,000 square feet) of new space and roughly 7,900 square meters (85,000 square feet) of former offices converted into production floor for automation, digital manufacturing and high-precision machining.

Grand Prairie, between Dallas and Fort Worth, is the headquarters of Lockheed’s Missiles and Fire Control business. It machines components for all of the unit’s programs, including the PAC-3 MSE interceptor fired by Patriot air defense batteries, the THAAD missile defense interceptor, the U.S. Army’s Precision Strike Missile and the Joint Advanced Tactical Missile. Parts made there go to final assembly lines in Camden, Arkansas, and Troy, Alabama.

Nearly 800 production workers at the plant made 250,000 parts in 2025. Over the past few months, Lockheed has installed more than 30 additional high-precision machines in converted office space that now turn out thousands of components a week, and it expects to add nearly 100 new machines across the site by the end of 2026.

Hadrian’s cell will hold 24 machines and is expected to start running in early 2027, staffed by Lockheed’s own production workers. The Los Angeles-area startup builds highly automated factories driven by its own software and sells what it calls a factory-as-a-service model, and the two companies signed a seven-year agreement in 2025 for Hadrian to embed a machining and inspection cell at a Missiles and Fire Control site.

“The warfighter can’t wait on peacetime timelines,” said Chris Power, CEO of Hadrian.

Michael Duffey, under secretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, attended the event in Grand Prairie. Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed’s Missiles and Fire Control business, said in a LinkedIn post the next day that the company had marked the investment together with Hadrian, the plant’s workforce and GM Defense, which Lockheed recently brought in to apply automotive manufacturing methods to defense production.

“This expansion is more than just a new facility; it is a stronger supply chain and a more resilient industrial base,” said Duffey.

The investment is aimed at meeting production targets set under new long-term agreements with the U.S. Department of War. Under a seven-year deal, Lockheed is working to raise PAC-3 MSE output from roughly 600 interceptors in 2025 to about 2,000 a year, backed by a multiyear award now worth $58.62 billion. A separate framework signed in January calls for quadrupling THAAD production from 96 to 400 interceptors a year.

“By combining advanced technology with the expertise of our American workforce, we’re transforming manufacturing to deliver critical munitions at speed and scale,” said Jim Taiclet, chairman, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin.

The Grand Prairie project is one piece of Lockheed’s plan to spend $8 billion to $9 billion through 2030 to expand munitions production and modernize or expand more than 20 facilities nationwide, with the Hadrian cell due to come online at the Texas plant in early 2027.