U.S. Air Force taps small Alabama firm for AIM-120X missile parts deal

Somebody has to build the little wings and fins that steer America’s main air-to-air missile, and this week that job went to a small manufacturer most people have never heard of.

BK Manufacturing, based in the small town of Arab, Alabama, just picked up a U.S. Air Force contract worth up to $28 million to build wing and fin components for the AIM-120X and CATM-120X, both part of the AMRAAM missile family. The Air Force didn’t put this out for competitive bidding. It went straight to BK Manufacturing as a sole-source deal, meaning no other company got a shot at it.

AMRAAM is the missile that’s been doing the heavy lifting for American fighter jets since the early 1990s. The whole point of it is beyond-visual-range combat: a pilot can fire before the enemy aircraft is even visible to the naked eye, and once the missile is away, it flies itself the rest of the way in using its own onboard radar. Pilots call that “fire and forget.” It’s flown in the Gulf War, Kosovo, the fight against ISIS, and more recently it’s shown up in the skies over Ukraine and during the 2025 incident when Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace.

Not every missile covered by this contract will ever be fired for real, though. The CATM-120X piece of the deal is for training rounds, essentially AMRAAMs with no explosive warhead, used so aircrews and ground crews can practice loading and handling procedures without burning through the expensive live weapons.

The contract itself runs all the way out to August 2031, but here’s the interesting part: as of right now, zero dollars have actually been spent. The Air Force set an upper spending limit of $28 million and will hand out individual orders as parts are actually needed, rather than committing to a bulk purchase up front. That’s a fairly standard way the Pentagon buys smaller components like this, spreading orders out over years instead of writing one big check.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia is running the contract. So far, the Air Force hasn’t said how many sets of wings and fins it actually expects to buy under this deal.