Joe McCarthy, general manager of Heavy Brigade Combat Team Systems at BAE, said the company expects to receive construction proposals within the next couple of weeks and to move quickly to begin construction, with groundbreaking in August or September.

Mark Signorelli, vice president of Army programs at BAE's Armament Systems division, said the company expects the Paladin Integrated Management program, a major upgrade of the Army's 155 mm howitzers, to be the first production at the facility, with the first units rolling out in 2011.

Plans for the Elgin plant have taken a couple of sharp turns this year. Defense Secretary Robert Gates in April recommended that the manned ground vehicles portion of the Future Combat Systems program be canceled and the entire FCS project be redesigned.

BAE had planned to assemble a non-line-of-sight cannon, a component of the FCS, at Elgin, along with the Paladin upgrade.

"We've moving forward," said Signorelli, who was at Fort Sill for the annual Fire Support Seminar. Still to be decided is the exact size of the facility, now that it doesn't need immediate space for the cannon. McCarthy said plans are to make the facility easily expandable so it can grow to meet demand for other projects should they be added.

The second change is that the Lawton Industrial Foundation is no longer involved in construction. The original plan was for the foundation to build the facility

"I think we've agreed it's probably better for everyone involved for us to do the financing," Signorelli said.

Work continues on the Elgin site, where BAE already has an interim building. The city of Elgin is scheduled to open bids June 18 for street improvements in the industrial park.

Signorelli said he was surprised by Gates' decision to scrap a portion of the Future Combat Systems and restart the entire process.

"I think we all expected some changes to the program, but we didn't expect what we ended up with," he said.

He's also hopeful that work done on the cannon will find its way into a successor system, though no one yet knows what will replace the FCS program.

"I'm pretty confident they'll find a way to harvest that investment and bring it into the future," he said.