Lockheed Martin to buy Ultra Maritime for $3.45 billion, expands undersea warfare push

Lockheed Martin agreed to buy Ultra Maritime for $3.45 billion, a move that puts one of the defense industry’s most specialized undersea warfare suppliers inside a much larger naval systems business. The business will fold into Rotary and Mission Systems after the deal closes, giving the Bethesda, Maryland, contractor a deeper position in anti-submarine warfare at a time when sea-based detection and countermeasure systems are drawing renewed attention from navies and Pentagon buyers.

Rotary and Mission Systems generated $17.3 billion in revenue in 2025 and employed 35,000 people worldwide, giving Lockheed a broad platform for integrating Ultra Maritime’s sonar and acoustic sensing capabilities into larger shipboard and maritime systems. The acquisition reinforces Lockheed's commitment to domain expertise in anti-submarine warfare. Advent International, which has owned Ultra Maritime since 2022, worked with management to turn the business into a unified, mission-focused enterprise and called Ultra Maritime a worldwide leader in next-generation undersea warfare solutions.

Ultra Maritime brings a narrow but highly consequential set of products. The company says it is the only maker offering all of the new U.S. specification sonobuoy variants, and the only manufacturer of Canadian and UK specification buoys exported worldwide. It says it produces about 250,000 buoys a year. Ultra Maritime's heritage traces back to 1920, and it began manufacturing sonobuoys in 1961.

Ultra Maritime introduced Sea Tracker in December 2025, a modular, containerized submarine detection capability that delivers frigate-grade ASW performance in a standardized 20-foot ISO container for uncrewed and non-traditionally crewed platforms. In February 2026 it won a potential five-year, $479.9 million contract to support the AN/SQQ-89A(V)15 anti-submarine warfare combat system.

Guggenheim and JPMorgan were advising on the sell side. The transaction was signed on July 6, 2026. No closing date was disclosed.