Raytheon: Business Abroad Is Not All Plain-Sailing

Memories were briefly re-opened Saturday of one of the bitterest European defense contract bids of recent times. During a Raytheon briefing on current European business plans, talk turned to the UK's BVRAAM competition-the hard-fought battle to provide a next-generation BVR missile for the RAF's Eurofighters.

In May 2000 Raytheon's FMRAAM design finally lost out to the European MBDA consortium (then Matra-BAe Dynamics), and its rival Meteor proposal. Peter McKee, now managing director, Raytheon Systems Limited, was one of the principal Raytheon figures involved in the BVRAAM competition. In a comment on the political pressures that were bought to bear at the time, he commented wryly, "There are times when it's impossible to win a competition against a local prime."

Andy Head, who now leads business development for Raytheon Systems Limited, added, "we had a solution that was incredible-and we didn't win." He went on to say that one of the advances achieved by Raytheon through BVRAAM was its success in securing the transfer of source code from the U.S. to the UK, and the establishment of that precedent. He noted that approval to transfer the source codes needed by the FMRAAM missile had been received, and that as a result approval would be secured by Raytheon for software codes in the British Army's Bowman tactical radio system.