Raytheon

Raytheon traces its history to 1922, when Vannevar Bush, Laurence K. Marshall and Charles G. Smith founded the American Appliance Company in Massachusetts, renamed Raytheon soon after. Today it is a business unit of RTX Corporation, the Arlington, Virginia conglomerate created in 2020 by a merger of the old Raytheon Company with United Technologies and renamed from Raytheon Technologies to RTX in July 2023. RTX, led by chairman and chief executive Christopher T. Calio, reported $88.6 billion of revenue and 180,000 employees for 2025, placing Raytheon alongside Collins Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney as one of three operating businesses under the parent.

Raytheon’s catalogue is weighted toward missiles, air and missile defence, and the radars that cue them. The Patriot surface-to-air system, the Standard Missile family for the US Navy, the AIM-120 AMRAAM used by Western fighters and the ground-based NASAMS launcher, the AIM-9X Sidewinder, the Stinger shoulder-fired missile, the Phalanx close-in weapon system and the AN/TPY-2 radar used in Terminal High Altitude Area Defense are all Raytheon products. The company also fields the Coyote family of small interceptors and the Ku-band radio-frequency sensor at the core of the US Army’s Low, slow, small, unmanned aircraft Integrated Defeat System.

The pace of recent orders reflects stockpiles depleted by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. In late September Reuters and OSINT monitors reported a preliminary multi-year contract worth up to $20.7 billion for AMRAAM production, which the company says would nearly double output to at least 1,900 missiles a year. The US Navy followed in October with a contract valued at up to $24.4 billion for Standard Missile-6 production, and a separate five-year, $6.3 billion award for Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptors. A $729 million deal in mid-October bundles Ku-band sensors and Coyote effectors for the US Army, Qatar and Jordan.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has made Raytheon’s air-defence catalogue a running procurement story. Ukrainian channels report that the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces, Robert Brovdy, has acknowledged that no full counter yet exists to Russia’s jet-powered Geran-5 loitering munitions, and Russian sources say the Pentagon is preparing a Raytheon contract for Patriot maintenance for Ukraine covering spares, training and a five-year stock. Analysts cited by Russian-language channels also note that AMRAAMs now go into NASAMS batteries defending Ukrainian cities as well as onto Western fighters.

Further out, Raytheon is the prime contractor for the US Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, a scramjet-powered weapon developed with Northrop Grumman on a 2022 contract worth $985 million. The first flight test took place on 5 October 2026 when an Australian F/A-18F Super Hornet dropped a prototype over a range in Australia; the Air Force has released little on the trajectory. The Government Accountability Office has flagged a cut from seven planned flight tests to five, with the schedule tight for a procurement decision in fiscal 2027.

Within the US defence industrial base, Raytheon’s position is unusual for its breadth across the kill chain — radars, interceptors, air-to-air and cruise missiles, and the counter-drone systems that have become one of the war’s defining capability gaps.