Northrop’s Stealth Missile Won’t Be Built in Hawthorne

Northrop Chairman Kent Kresa disclosed Tuesday that the company will manufacture its tri-service standoff missile in Georgia, meaning that an estimated 2,000 jobs in Hawthorne, where the weapon is being developed, will eventually be eliminated.

The announcement was another setback to the California aerospace industry, although the decision was apparently made years before anybody even knew that the jobs were at stake.

Kresa said at the company’s annual shareholders meeting that Northrop had planned to manufacture the missile in Perry, Ga., ever “since we built that facility.” But Northrop had never disclosed those plans, and was apparently prevented from doing so by the tight secrecy imposed on the program by the Air Force.

A Northrop spokesman said he could not disclose the number of employees currently assigned to the program or the number that would eventually be hired in Perry.

The Pentagon plans to buy more than 7,000 of the missiles for all the services at a cost of about $13 billion, making it the largest tactical missile program in history. The existence of the program was disclosed in June, 1991, about five years after Northrop started the effort.

The Stealth missile would be fired both from aircraft and ground-based missile launchers and attack targets with non-nuclear warheads. Last year, Northrop took a $152-million charge against earnings after it encountered development problems on the missile. Kresa said Tuesday that the problems had been “corralled” and that he did not anticipate further charges based on current test data.