Lockheed Martin plans to produce and deliver 48 F16 fighter jets annually to other countries by 2025. Orlando Sanchez, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Joint Fighter Group, made the announcement in an interview with Defense One.
“This year we will go through the first phase of increasing production and then further increase this to four monthly deliveries by the end of 2025,” he said. This year, the company plans to deliver just six to eight new F16s to various customers, Sanchez said.
According to US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Logistics Bill LaPlante, quoted by the portal, the Pentagon has not purchased fighter jets of this model for a long time.
Defense One writes that Lockheed Martin’s lack of production capacity is one of the main reasons it prevented the delivery of 66 F16s to Taiwan, approved by the State Department in 2019. They were originally scheduled to begin in 2023 and be completed in 2026, but so far the island has not received a single fighter.
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