Valley firm wins Navy contract for missile guidance. (Media & Technology).

A Woodland Hills company developing a missile guidance system received a $222.6 million contract this month aimed at transforming the Navy's decades-old stock of anti-radiation. missiles into precision-guided "smart" air munitions.

ATK Missile Systems Co. won the system design and development contract for its Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM) seeker, a guidance system that will be retrofitted onto missiles already on Navy jets.

If the system works, the Navy will have its first missile that can destroy surface-to-air missile stations even after the enemy radar system -- which the existing missiles track -- is shut down.

The existing stock of high-speed anti-radiation missiles contain a so-called "passive" seeker that can only find targets by tracking the signals emitted from enemy radars in use.

What separates the new version is the global positioning system technology and a small computer that calculates the position of the enemy target.

"This process would start before the missile is launched," said Philip Coyle, senior advisor with the Center for Defense Information, a Washington policy and research group. "This (technology) leaves them no place to hide unless they don't turn their radars on at all, and obviously that's not going to be very effective for the enemy."

The older missiles had problems during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq during the early 1990s, as well as more recent conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan, where the enemy would track an allied aircraft on radar, fire an anti-aircraft missile at the target and then quickly shut the radar down.

ATK will not take possession of missile warheads. It will take the rear part of the missile to its Woodland Hills plant and attach the new components.

Testing of the complete AARGM missile will be conducted at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, using the Navy's F/A-18 Super Hornet jet fighter.

Preliminary plans call for low-rate initial production to begin in the spring 2007 with full-rate production to follow that winter. Amounts haven't been determined, said Sandra Schroeder, a Navy spokeswoman. She said the number of missiles in the Navy's current inventory is classified.

With the contract, ATK, which took over the project when it acquired the assets of Science and Applied Technology in October, becomes the region's first prime manufacturer in recent memory, said Bruce Ackerman, president of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley.

"They appear to be the only prime contractor in L.A. County that's doing lead development on missile systems," Ackerman said.

The region is still without a primary contractor making missile systems from scratch.

The five-year agreement could ultimately double the staff of 60 engineers who have been working with 30 to 40 support staff since initial development began in 1995.

The missiles were originally made by Texas Instruments Defense Systems & Electronics Group, which was later bought and consolidated into the Raytheon Systems Co.