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McDonnell Douglas. This St. Louis-based aerospace manufacturer is now the second largest defense contractor, but it is likely to be the biggest winner from the new program. McDonnell Douglas currently supplies the Air Force with the F-15 Eagle fighter. The company has already delivered 600 F-15s to the Air Force for $7.2 billion and expects orders for 200 more at a cost of $2.4 billion. In partnership with Northrop, the firm has started production of the F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter. It expects to sell 1,377 of them to the Navy and Marine Corps at a total cost of $24 billion. McDonnell Douglas is also cooperating with British Aerospace to produce for the Marines a vertical short-takeoff and -landing fighter known as the AV-8B. Orders could reach 336 for a total cost of $3.4 billion. In addition, the Reagan budget provided $482 million to buy eight KC-10 military cargo planes, the military version of the company's DC-10. Carter's defense spending program for 1982 had wiped out those sales.
General Dynamics. Currently the Pentagon's largest supplier, General Dynamics expects to sell 1,388 new F-16 fighter planes to the Air Force over the next ten years. Known as the Fighting Falcon, this is a versatile, lightweight fighter, which is also capable of launching land and sea attacks; the F-15 is designed primarily for air-to-air combat. General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division in Groton, Conn., makes the SSN 688 nuclear-fueled attack submarines as well as the trouble-plagued Trident missile-launching subs. The Navy has ordered eight Tridents, and cost overruns have now pushed the price to more than $1.2 billion each. The company also has contracts for 48 sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at a total cost of about $96 million.
Tenneco. Plans to increase the Navy's fleet of major combat vessels from 450 to 600 by the end of the decade have pumped new life into Tenneco's shipyard in Newport News, Va. The labor force has swelled by 3,000, to nearly 25,000, over the past two years, and $100 million has been invested to expand the capacity of the 95-year-old facility. Tenneco has a $1.2 billion contract to build a fourth 1,092-ft.-long nuclear carrier for delivery in 1987. A fifth carrier may also be built as part of the Reagan program. Last month the Navy awarded a $1 billion contract to Tenneco for the construction of three SSN 688 nuclear submarines, after a bitter dispute with General Dynamics over the quality of workmanship and cost overruns at the Groton plant.
Beyond the flashy big-ticket items, defense dollars will be trickling down to lesser-known contractors. For example, Raymond Tower, the president of Chicago's FMC Corp., told defense industry analysts last week that he expects his company's military sales to double in the next two years to about $1.2 billion. FMC last month won a $102.5 million order for 1,002 armored personnel carriers equipped with single 50-cal. machine guns. Money for the vehicles had been in Carter's defense budgets, but the company is now planning a more expensive second generation of troop carriers, known as infantry-fighting vehicles, that carry antitank missiles and are capable of nighttime fighting. Total value of the contract: $400 million.