The Last Supper

On 21 July 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin and his deputy William Perry invited the bosses of America’s defence industry to dinner at the Pentagon. The menu was not the point. The message was that the Cold War was over, budgets were shrinking, and Washington could not keep all of them alive. Norman Augustine, head of Martin Marietta, left the room and gave the evening the name that stuck: the Last Supper. Within four years the number of major American defence contractors fell from 51 to five. The biggest of the survivors was a company that did not yet exist.

Two giants, one name

Augustine was an unusual chief executive: an engineer with a wicked pen, whose 1984 book of management aphorisms predicted that by 2054 the entire defence budget would buy a single tactical aircraft. His Martin Marietta, formed in 1961 from the Glenn L. Martin Company and American-Marietta, had already swallowed GE Aerospace for 3 billion dollars in 1993. On 30 August 1994 it agreed a 10 billion dollar merger with the Lockheed Corporation of Burbank. On 15 March 1995 Lockheed Martin was born, with Lockheed’s Daniel Tellep as first chief executive and Augustine succeeding him in 1996.

The fighter monopoly

The new giant kept eating. It bought Loral’s defence electronics for 9.1 billion dollars in April 1996 and in 1997 announced a takeover of Northrop Grumman that would have put a quarter of the Pentagon’s procurement budget under one roof; regulators blocked it in 1998. Lockheed Martin still inherited a remarkable stable. From Lockheed came the F-22 Raptor, which had won the Advanced Tactical Fighter contest in April 1991 and first flew in production form in 1997, and the C-130. From General Dynamics’ old Fort Worth plant, bought by Lockheed in 1993, came the F-16, still the most common military fixed-wing aircraft in service anywhere.

One programme to rule them all

Then came the contract of the century. On 26 October 2001 Lockheed Martin’s X-35 beat Boeing for the Joint Strike Fighter, one design meant to replace the F-16, the A-10, the Harrier and the Navy’s Hornets. The F-35A first flew on 15 December 2006. It has since become the most expensive weapons programme in history, with lifetime costs estimated at about 2 trillion dollars through 2088, roughly half of it inflation. It has also become the default Western fighter: more than 1,345 had been delivered by August 2026, and the F-35 alone produced 26 percent of company revenue in 2024.

Helicopters, spacecraft and a quiet boom

Fighters are only part of it. In November 2015 Lockheed Martin paid 9 billion dollars for Sikorsky, maker of the Black Hawk, and with it the CH-53K heavy-lift helicopter. Its Orion capsule, named Integrity by its crew, carried four astronauts around the Moon in April 2026 on Artemis II, flying further from Earth than any humans before. And at Palmdale, the Skunk Works that Lockheed founded in 1943 flew the X-59 on 28 October 2025, a needle-nosed NASA research jet designed to turn the sonic boom into a thump no louder than a car door.

Record backlog, lost fighter

The company has not escaped controversy. Watchdogs counted 88 instances of misconduct and 676.8 million dollars in settlements since 1995, and the Pentagon catalogued more than 800 F-35 software defects in January 2020. In March 2025 it lost the US Air Force’s sixth-generation fighter, the F-47, to Boeing. Yet 2025 still closed with 75 billion dollars in sales, 191 F-35s delivered and a record 194 billion dollar backlog — proof that the survivor of the Last Supper remains the heaviest name at the table.

Factories

• Fort Worth plant (Air Force Plant 4) · Fort Worth, Texas — Main F-35 production line; former General Dynamics F-16 works
• Marietta plant · Marietta, Georgia — C-130J production and F-22 final assembly
• Skunk Works (Advanced Development Programs) · Palmdale, California — Built the X-59; engineering work on the F-22
• Greenville F-16 line · Greenville, South Carolina — F-16 Block 70/72 production moved here from Fort Worth
• Sikorsky headquarters · Stratford, Connecticut — Helicopter design and production since the 2015 acquisition

People

• Norman R. Augustine · Martin Marietta CEO; Lockheed Martin CEO 1996–1997 — Named the 1993 Pentagon dinner the Last Supper and steered the 1995 merger
• Daniel M. Tellep · first CEO, 1995–1996 — Lockheed chairman who led its side of the merger
• Vance Coffman · CEO 1997–2004 — Led the company through the Joint Strike Fighter win of 2001
• Marillyn Hewson · CEO 2013–2020 — Oversaw the 9 billion dollar Sikorsky acquisition of 2015
• James D. Taiclet · CEO since 2020, chairman since 2021 — Presided over the record 194 billion dollar backlog of 2025

Records and firsts

• Largest US federal government contractor since at least 2008
• F-35: the costliest weapons programme in history, about 2 trillion dollars lifetime through 2088
• F-22: first air-to-air kill over US territory since the Second World War, 4 February 2023, possibly the highest-altitude air-to-air kill recorded
• Orion Integrity carried the Artemis II crew 252,756 miles from Earth in April 2026, beating Apollo 13’s distance record
• Record backlog of 194 billion dollars at the end of 2025