CAMDEN — Long guns aren’t allowed in the Super 1 Foods store in Camden.
And cleats aren’t allowed in the administration building at Southern Arkansas University Tech.
At least that’s what the signs say.
“They don’t take their cleats off,” Chancellor Jerry Thomas said of the baseball team. “There’s a lot of clack clack.”
The baseball field is in front of the administration building, where the nearest bathrooms are located.
Until recently, the team mascot was the Varmits.
Now they’re the Rockets.
The name change came in recognition of the aerospace and defense contractors at Highland Industrial Park in East Camden, the only city in Arkansas built by the U.S. Navy. The two-year university is located at the industrial park.
“Our location is ideal because we’re able to work closely with the industry, understand what their training needs are, the skills they need, and really train students for those opportunities, and they can stay, live and work right here in Camden,” Thomas said.
More than 18,000 people in Arkansas work in aerospace and defense. As of the first quarter of this year, 3,849 of those aerospace and defense employees were in Ouachita and Calhoun counties, said Tyler Hale, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Commerce.
Business is booming. Employment is increasing. The Trump administration has urged defense contractors to ramp up production of missiles to replace stockpiles that are dwindling, in part at least, because of the war against Iran.
But there’s no shortage of munitions, according to the Pentagon.
“Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false” and embolden enemies to provoke or attack American troops, a Pentagon spokesman said recently.
The U.S. has plenty of conventional and precision weapons like Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which are essentially guided bombs that can be dropped from warplanes. That requires flying near the target, which could put American planes and pilots at risk of being shot down.
The U.S. military appears to be running short, in particular, on two types of defensive weapons — Patriot missiles and Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile interceptors — and one offensive weapon, Precision Strike Missiles. All three are manufactured, to some degree, at Lockheed Martin’s facility in East Camden, among other places.
It costs about $1.7 million to build a Precision Strike Missile, $4 million to build the newest version of a Patriot missile (PAC-3 MSE) and about $13 million to produce a THAAD interceptor, based on the Defense Department’s fiscal 2027 budget request. THAAD interceptors have a range beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Michael Horowitz, one of the country’s leading experts on how technology is remaking warfare, said these “exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce” weapons were never meant to be produced in large numbers.
“The U.S. and its allies have been forced to expend valuable PAC-3 and THAAD rounds to shoot down low-cost, precise mass systems like the Shahed-136,” he said of an Iranian-designed, one-way attack drone that costs about $50,000 to produce. “It is an unsustainable cost ratio, and one reason why there is so much interest now in producing lower-cost defenses.”
More than 1,500 Patriot air-defense interceptors have been fired so far in Operation Epic Fury, with fewer than 830 interceptors remaining in the entire U.S. inventory, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. About 40% of the 452 THAAD ballistic missile interceptors available at the war’s start have been fired, leaving fewer than 280 in the arsenal.
The New York Times reported the U.S. military has exhausted much of its supply of Precision Strike Missiles because of the war in Iran.
The Defense Department is requesting 1,134 Precision Strike Missiles, 3,203 Patriot missiles and 857 THAAD interceptors for fiscal 2027, which begins Thursday.
It takes six weeks to assemble a Patriot missile, but about two years to manufacture the 4,000 parts that go into it, CBS News reported Sept. 13 from East Camden.
“Producing a Patriot missile is not just about the final assembly, but about getting the thousands of parts that go into the interceptor,” said Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania professor and senior fellow for technology and innovation and director of the Defense and National Security program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It can take years to manufacture those parts, and there are not large stockpiles of spares.”
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The privately owned Highland Industrial Park encompasses about 19,000 acres and features more than 1,000 buildings and facilities. More than 20 national companies have facilities there.
“What you build right here in Camden is absolutely essential to the 21st century arsenal of freedom,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said when he toured L3Harris’ East Camden facility Feb. 27 — about 13 hours before the U.S. and Israel fired missiles on Iran, starting a war that’s now in its seventh month.
East Camden was the last stop in the first phase of Hegseth’s “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, which began Jan. 5 in Newport News, Va., and included Texas, California, Rhode Island, Maine, Missouri, Florida and Colorado.
Lockheed Martin Corp. plans to triple its production capacity of Patriot PAC-3 MSE missiles at East Camden from 600 to about 2,000 by 2030. The company expects to increase the workforce there from about 1,200 to 1,850.
In March, the company said it would quadruple production of Precision Strike Missiles, noting that it had 400 employees in East Camden who work on that program.
Lockheed Martin’s facility in East Camden covers more than 2.2 million square feet on a 2,427-acre plot with room for expansion. The plant opened in 1979 and has produced more than 700,000 missiles and rockets. (Missiles have their own guidance systems, whereas traditional rockets do not.)
East Camden is also home to an L3Harris factory that makes about 115,000 solid rocket motors a year.
Solid refers to the propulsion fuel — solid rather than liquid. A mixture of fuel and oxidizer is poured into a case and cured. It’s baked to the consistency of a pencil eraser.
At Highland Industrial Park, L3Harris makes small motors that could fit in the palm of a hand and larger ones the size of an SUV.
“The solid rocket motors we produce support a range of tactical, air and missile defense systems,” said an L3Harris spokeswoman. “As an example, our PAC‑3 MSE solid rocket motors are integrated into missiles manufactured by Lockheed Martin in Camden.”
PAC-3 MSE stands for the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement, with “enhancement” referring to a two-pulse solid rocket motor that increases altitude and range compared to the previous model.
“Over the past few years, we’ve nearly doubled propulsion production for PAC-3,” said the spokeswoman. “We expect to nearly triple production for a range of propulsion products supporting the PAC-3 MSE interceptor.”
L3Harris Technologies employs about 1,600 people in East Camden.
“We have grown our workforce 60% over the past five years at Camden and are continuing to hire for a range of high-paying, high-skilled careers,” according to a company spokeswoman.
The average wage for an L3Harris job in Arkansas is $78,700. Eighty-seven job openings in the Camden area were listed on L3Harris’ website last week, ranging from assembler to senior specialist in cyber intelligence.
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PAC-3 and THAAD interceptors hit to kill, meaning they strike incoming missiles in the air, destroying them with kinetic energy.
The U.S. government is paying Lockheed Martin about $58 billion to produce PAC-3 missiles. The work will be done at 16 different locations, including East Camden, according to the Defense Department’s public contract summaries. The contract’s estimated completion date is March 31, 2035.
East Camden is home to Lockheed Martin’s “final all-up round production” of PAC-3 MSE interceptors, meaning that’s where the final assembly of missiles is done.
In January, Lockheed Martin said the company had signed a framework agreement with the Defense Department to quadruple the production of THAAD interceptors from 96 to 400 a year over a seven-year span.
That same month, Lockheed Martin announced it had broken ground on a new Munitions Acceleration Center in East Camden.
On June 24, Lockheed Martin announced it had signed a seven-year, $35 billion contract with the U.S. government to produce THAAD missiles. The work will be performed in Dallas, Sunnyvale, Calif., Troy, Ala., and Camden, according to a June 24 post on the Defense Department’s contracts website. The performance period is from March 2026 through June 2032, according to the website.
L3Harris is investing billions of dollars across production sites in Arkansas, Alabama and Virginia to modernize and expand solid rocket motor production, a spokeswoman said. The company is building roughly 60 new facilities.
“In Arkansas alone, we are investing more than $1 billion in ongoing expansion efforts,” she said in an email.
Last year, L3Harris broke ground on two projects in East Camden: a new 60,000‑square‑foot “factory of the future” that is scheduled to be completed later this year, accelerating the production of motors for guided launch rocket systems, and the Arkansas Advanced Propulsion Facilities, a 110‑acre campus with more than 20 buildings that will increase large, solid rocket motor capacity sixfold when it comes online in late 2027.
This year, L3Harris broke ground on two new facilities to support increased PAC‑3 MSE propulsion production in Camden: a 75,000-square-foot cast, cure and final assembly facility and a 70,000-square-foot case preparation facility.
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Many of those who work at the industrial park live in Camden proper, said James Lee Silliman, executive director of the Ouachita Partnership for Economic Development Inc. Others commute from as far as 70 miles away.
Silliman said there’s a housing shortage in Camden and East Camden.
“With the ramp-up in production, several hundred new jobs are being created,” he said. “The administration’s wanting more munitions produced faster, if you will. So they’re ramping up in employment. … We’re working on housing.”
Camden Mayor Charlotte Young said workers also commute from Hot Springs and Texarkana. She said a developer plans to build apartments in Camden. Hopefully, that will encourage other developers to do the same, she said.
“There are lots of jobs available out there,” Young said. “And we would love to have (the workers living) here.”
For 73 years, Camden was a paper-mill town. International Paper closed in 2001, throwing about 600 people out of work. The city’s population dropped from 13,154 at the turn of the century to 10,127 last year, according to the latest census estimate.
“Camden’s economy has never fully recovered from the loss of that paper mill,” said Silliman. “So, thank God we’ve got aerospace and defense going right across the county line because I don’t know what we’d be doing if we didn’t have the jobs that are being created with aerospace and defense contracts.”
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Camden was known as the “Queen City” of the Ouachita River during the steamboat era because it was at the head of practical navigation for boats heading south, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Steamboats provided a direct link to the cotton and commercial markets in New Orleans.
Murals on downtown buildings embrace that antebellum history — and the modern defense industry. Missiles whiz by the head of a lion in a mural by the artist known as Kiptoe. Standing on the lion’s nose, a man in a cowboy hat thrusts a pole toward an unseen enemy. On the end of the pole is the golden head of an eagle.
Miguel Mendoza, co-owner of Allen’s Restaurant, said things have improved “little by little” since the paper mill closed just a few months after he and Allen Dawson opened the restaurant.
But it’s been a rough year because of rising food costs, said Mendoza, who is originally from Acapulco, Mexico.
He said the restaurant couldn’t have stayed open for the past 26 years if not for the nearby industrial park in East Camden.
Mendoza said people from all over the country come to his restaurant. Some visitors come from Israel.
R2S opened a new manufacturing facility in the industrial park last November. R2S is a joint venture between Raytheon, an RTX company, and the Israel-based Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to build Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor system and the U.S. variant of SkyHunter Interceptors.
“The R2S facility represents an investment of approximately $63 million and will create up to 60 new jobs in the region,” a news release said. “This facility will build on RTX’s existing production capacity at the Highland Industrial Park.”
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the new R2S facility in October 2023 after meeting with company executives at the Paris Air Show. The project grew from an initial $33 million investment and planned 30 jobs. R2S broke ground on the facility in February 2024.
Ten months later, President Donald Trump nominated Sanders’ father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, as U.S. ambassador to Israel. The Senate confirmed Huckabee in April 2025.
This article made possible in part through donations to the ADG Community Journalism Project. Philanthropic support from the community allows us to expand our local coverage and invest in the stories that shape our state. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette news staff operates independently of donors and maintains full editorial control over content produced with fund resources.