NGC Becomes Full Member of UK's Niteworks Partnership

(London, January 27, 2010) -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has been formally confirmed as a full partner in Niteworks, the Ministry of Defence (MoD)-UK defence industry partnership providing MoD with a broad range of decision support, from in-depth experimentation to rapid consultation and analysis.

"Northrop Grumman very much welcomes the opportunity to be part of this important MoD-industry collaboration," said Sir Nigel Essenhigh, chairman Northrop Grumman UK. "We have considerable capabilities to bring to the Niteworks partnership, and we look forward to sharing our knowledge, skills and experience to support its continued success in providing an effective decision support environment for the enhancement of current and future military capabilities."

"We are delighted to welcome Northrop Grumman into the Niteworks Partnership, bringing the total number of industry partners to twelve," said Niteworks' managing director, Bob Barton. "This will allow Niteworks to draw on an even broader pool of expertise from across industry, helping the MoD to make even better, faster and more informed decisions to support current and future operations."

Niteworks was established by the MoD in 2003 to examine the challenges of implementing effective Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Since then it has evolved to become a highly flexible decision support capability for the MoD and examines defence options ranging from current operational issues through to high level strategic needs. It achieves this through its reach-back to industry - uniquely linking the problem and solution domains.

Niteworks is an innovative and agile enterprise for military capability-based acquisition and evidence-based decision support, in which the MoD and leading providers in the UK defence industry work in partnership to address and resolve MoD's high-priority issues. It is an integral part of MoD's capability management process and provides a multi-disciplinary environment to explore novel and practical solutions to capability challenges, as well as providing impartial enterprise advice to the MoD. Through its experimentation activities Niteworks aims to verify and accelerate the insertion of new solutions and help inform MoD decision-making.

The Niteworks industry partners are drawn from the major UK defence providers ensuring that the full breadth of domain knowledge and the best UK defence capability is available to deliver vital contributions to current frontline operations, future acquisition decisions and major capability programmes.

The partnership consists of twelve UK defence industry partners: BAE Systems, EADS, EDS, Finmeccanica, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin UK, Logica, MBDA, QinetiQ, Raytheon, Thales and Northrop Grumman together with the MoD, the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (dstl) and 50 industry associate partners.

The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory is an agency of the MoD and exists to supply the very best, impartial, scientific and technical research and advice to the MoD and other government departments.

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