US Navy ‘wasted’ $1.8 billion on cruiser modernization program: Report

On the same subject

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  August 12, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - August 9, 2019

  NAVY Lockheed Martin Corp., Moorestown, New Jersey, is awarded a $176,339,634 firm-fixed-priced, performance-based logistics contract for the repair of 1,672 different head-of-family part numbers in support of the AEGIS SPY-1 Weapon System. The contract is a five-year contract with no option periods. Work will be performed in Moorestown, New Jersey, and is expected to be completed by August 2024. No funds are obligated at the time of award. Working capital funds (Navy) will be obligated as individual task orders are issued and funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. One company was solicited for this sole-source, non-competitive requirement pursuant to the authority set forth in 10 U.S. Code 2304(c)(1) and in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1, with one offer received. Naval Supply Systems Command, Weapon Systems Support, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the contracting activity (N00383-19-D-VM01). Raytheon Co., Goleta, California, is awarded $29,790,677 for modification PZ0001 to a previously awarded firm-fixed-price contract (N00019-18-C-1055). This modification provides for Lot 14 full-rate production of 82 F/A18 CD-108B/ALE-50(V) Control, Dispenser, Decoy, Countermeasures Integrated Multi-platform Launch Controllers. Work will be performed in Forrest, Mississippi (45%); Andover, Massachusetts (25%); Goleta, California (20%); and various locations within the continental U.S. (10%), and is expected to be completed in February 2022. Fiscal 2017 and 2019 aircraft procurement (Navy) funds in the amount of $29,790,677 will be obligated at time of award, $26,850,000 of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland, is the contracting activity. Swift River Versar JV,* Anchorage, Alaska, is awarded a maximum amount $18,000,000 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for mission sustainment and coastal resilience and related environmental planning services. The work to be performed provides for professional services that will support the study and implementation of mission sustainment and coastal readiness measures, including hardened structures and green infrastructure, which will ensure Navy and Marine Corps readiness of installations, ranges and operation areas. This contract will support environmental, asset management and expeditionary support services that will assist Department of Navy and Department of Defense commands in ensuring mission sustainability. All work on this contract will be performed at various Navy and Marine Corps facilities and other government facilities within the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Atlantic area of responsibility including, but not limited to Virginia (28%); North Carolina (22%); South Carolina (22%); Connecticut (7%); Florida (7%); Maine (7%); and Maryland (7%). The term of the contract is not to exceed 60 months with an expected completion date of August 2024. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance (Navy) contract funds in the amount of $5,000 are obligated on this award and will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. No task orders are being issued at this time. Future task orders will be primarily funded by operation and maintenance (Navy). This contract was procured on a sole source basis pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation 19.805-1(b)(2). Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic, Norfolk, Virginia, is the contracting activity (N62470-19-D-4004). General Dynamics Electric Boat Corp., Groton, Connecticut, is awarded $15,200,000 for delivery order N62789-19-F-0019 under previously awarded, multiple award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract N00024-16-D-4300 for the planning, material procurement, and repair work for USS Washington (SSN 787). Work will be performed in Groton, Connecticut, and is expected to be complete by December 2019. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance (Navy) funding in the amount of $7,600,000 will be obligated at time of award and will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. A Fair Opportunity Notice was issued to both multiple award contract indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity holders on July 18, 2019, in accordance with 10 U.S. Code 2304(c)(1). The Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Conversion and Repair, Groton, Connecticut, is the contracting activity. MN&DPI JV LLC, Honolulu, Hawaii, is awarded a $15,000,000 firm-fixed-price modification to increase the maximum dollar value of previously awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract (N62742-18-D-0001) for architect-engineering services for various structural and waterfront projects and other projects under the cognizance of Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) Pacific. The work to be performed provides for design and engineering services for the execution and delivery of engineering studies; plans, specifications, and cost estimates/parametric cost estimates, including preparation of design-build contract documents or design-bid-build contract documents; and post construction award services. After award of this modification, the total cumulative contract value will be $55,000,000. Work will be performed at various Navy and Marine Corps facilities and other government facilities within the NAVFAC Pacific Area of Responsibility, including Guam (69%); and Hawaii (13%). The term of the contract is not to exceed 60 months, with an expected completion date of December 2022. No funds will be obligated at time of award; funds will be obligated on individual task orders and task order modifications as they are issued. Task orders will be primarily funded by military construction (planning and design). Naval Facilities Engineering Command Pacific, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, is the contracting activity. ARMY Federal Contracting Inc., doing business as Bryan Construction Inc., Colorado Springs, Colorado, was awarded a $69,146,753 firm-fixed-price contract for construction of a tactical equipment maintenance facility and ancillary buildings. Bids were solicited via the internet with six received. Work will be performed in Fort Carson, Colorado, with an estimated completion date of April 24, 2021. Fiscal 2019 military construction funds in the amount of $69,146,753 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha, Nebraska, is the contracting activity (W9128F-19-C-0029). TekSynap Corp.,* Reston, Virginia, was awarded a $31,657,006 firm-fixed-price contract for general program management, technical, research, analytical, and administrative support. Bids were solicited via the internet with one received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 8, 2024. U.S. Army Mission Installation Contracting Command, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, is the contracting activity (W9124J-19-D-0015). Digital Management LLC, Bethesda, Maryland, was awarded an $19,141,206 modification (P00007) to contract W52P1J-17-F-4020 for interactive Personnel Electronic Record Management System. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 9, 2022. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois, is the contracting activity. Dumey Contracting Inc.,* Benton, Missouri, was awarded a $14,714,782 firm-fixed-price contract for construction, and degrading an existing levee and levee with berms and ditches. Bids were solicited via the internet with seven received. Work will be performed in Hornersville, Missouri, with an estimated completion date of Dec. 1, 2021. Fiscal 2019 civil works funds in the amount of $14,714,782 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Memphis, Tennessee, is the contracting activity (W912EQ-19-C-0008). Manson Construction, Seattle, Washington, was awarded a $13,655,300 firm-fixed-price contract for unrestricted procurement for Houston Ship Channel hopper dredging. Bids were solicited via the internet with three received. Work will be performed in Galveston, Texas, with an estimated completion date of March 27, 2020. Fiscal 2019 civil operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $13,655,300 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Galveston, Texas, is the contracting activity (W912HY-19-C-0008). RLB Contracting Inc.,* Port Lavaca, Texas, was awarded a $13,584,500 firm-fixed-price contract for maintenance dredging. Bids were solicited via the internet with four received. Work will be performed in Port Arthur, Texas, with an estimated completion date of March 10, 2020. Fiscal 2019 civil operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $13,584,500 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Galveston, Texas, is the contracting activity (W912HY-19-C-0011). Cottrell Contracting Corp.,* Chesapeake, Virginia, was awarded a $10,437,490 firm-fixed-price contract for Norfolk Harbor Channel maintenance dredging. Bids were solicited via the internet with two received. Work will be performed in Norfolk, Virginia, with an estimated completion date of Jan. 11, 2020. Fiscal 2019 civil construction funds in the amount of $10,437,490 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Norfolk, Virginia, is the contracting activity (W91236-19-C-0019). Yaeger Architecture Inc.,* Lenexa, Kansas, was awarded a $10,000,000 firm-fixed-price contract for architect and engineering services. Bids were solicited via the internet with three received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Feb. 8, 2025. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kansas City, Missouri, is the contracting activity (W912DQ-19-D-4011). Morrish-Wallace Construction Inc.,* Cheboygan, Michigan, was awarded an $8,243,527 firm-fixed-price contract for repairs and stone revetment along Lake Erie. Bids were solicited via the internet with two received. Work will be performed in Hamburg, New York, with an estimated completion date of April 30, 2021. Fiscal 2010 civil construction funds in the amount of $8,243,527 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Buffalo, New York, is the contracting activity (W912P4-19-C-0019). AIR FORCE Radiant Geospatial Solutions LLC,* Ypsilanti, Michigan, has been awarded a $14,226,474 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for Red Wing Next Generation Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) Cloud. The objective of this effort is to deliver an automated and efficient workflow for National System of GEOINT analysis by reducing latency for product generation, exploitation and intelligence gathering. This effort will expand the use of Amazon managed services through careful assessment of emerging offerings with the goal of improving resiliency, reducing cost and reducing exposure to cyber threats. Work will be performed at Ypsilanti, Michigan; and Herndon, Virginia, and is expected to be completed by Aug. 7, 2021. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition and two offers were received. Fiscal 2019 research, development, test and evaluation in the amount of $3,713,188 are being obligated at time of award. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, New York, is the contracting activity (FA8750-19-C-1502). Kearney & Co. P.C., Alexandria, Virginia, has been awarded a $13,031,667 firm-fixed-price contract for advisory and assistance services support for the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability missions. This contract will provide for future and concepts analysis, design blueprints, capability development strategic integration, capability development implementation analysis, assessment of opportunities for new capability, workflow management, strategic communication, special access program integration, simulation studies, war gaming support, decision analytics and strategy, planning, programming, budgeting and execution analysis. Work will be performed at Washington, District of Columbia, and is expected to be completed by Aug. 8, 2020. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition and two offers were received. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $8,994,101 are being obligated at the time of award. The Air Force District of Washington Contracting Directorate, Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, is the contracting activity (FA7014-19-F-A162). Kearney & Co. P.C., Alexandria, Virginia, has been awarded a $9,620,685 firm fixed price contract modification (P00005) to previously awarded contract FA7014-18-F-1022 for the exercise of Option Period One for advisory and assistance services to support Total Force analysis. This contract modification includes capability and capacity analysis of Air Force mission areas; linking results to the strategy, planning, and programming process; performing planning, programming, and budgeting study excursions; analytically supporting Total Force initiatives, strategy review and assessment and planning support. Work will be performed at Arlington, Virginia, and is expected to be completed by July 31, 2020. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $9,237,252 are being obligated at the time of award. The Air Force District of Washington Contracting Directorate, Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, is the contracting activity. Midwest Air Traffic Control Service Inc., Overland Park, Kansas, has been awarded an $8,410,622 cost-plus-fixed-fee modification (P00013) to previously awarded contract N65236-14-D-4984 for aviation command and control operations and maintenance services. The contract modification adds five months and 20 days to the current task order. Work will be performed in the Air Force Central Command's area of responsibility and expected to be completed by Feb. 29, 2020. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance funds are being obligated in the amount of $8,410,622 at the time of the award. The Air Combat Command, Acquisition Management and Integration Center, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, is the contracting activity. *Small Business

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  September 22, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

  Pentagon acquisition boss talks industry, mergers and coronavirus

  Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — A longtime industry executive, Ellen Lord was confirmed as the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment in August 2017. In that role, Lord — who is now the longest serving political appointee at the department from the Trump administration — oversees billions of dollars in weapons procurement and sustainment, while also overseeing the health of the defense industrial base, a particularly important role in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Lord was a keynote speaker at this year's Defense News Conference, where she touched on a number of issues affecting the Department of Defense. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. We're about six months after COVID-19 first hit the defense industry. How do you judge the health of the defense industrial base? We use the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Logistics Agency to track about 22,000 key companies that the department works with. And going back over the last six months, we did have hundreds of companies shut down, but now we're down to only about 30. So that's very, very good news. We monitor them on a daily basis; we look at on-time deliveries, deliveries missed and, most importantly, we listen to what the issues are, really leveraging the industry associations to do a lot of listening. What we are looking for is whether or not we're maintaining war-fighter readiness for our production programs, and then relative to modernization, whether we are hitting key milestones relative to development programs. We have seen some slowdowns. We are carefully monitoring, using monthly metrics, where we are. That's something that I'm actually extremely proud of the team over the last few years — we have developed a very data-driven way of doing business. The Pentagon is seeking billions of dollars from Congress to help fund reimbursements for the defense industry's pandemic-related costs. But we've heard criticism of this from a number of sectors, with some saying financial reports last quarter were not so bad. Why is that funding needed, and why now? All the [quarterly] reports that have come out in large part don't reflect the hits that were taken by business. I would contend that most of the effects of COVID-19 haven't yet been seen because most companies gave their employees time off, they stretched out production, paid a lot of people for working 100 percent when perhaps they were only getting 50 percent of the hours in and so forth. So I think the system has absorbed it up to this point in time. Now when we get to the point where we're having payments and incentive fees and award fees earned, and if we haven't done the deliveries, that's where you're going to see the hit. So I believe there's a bit of a delayed response. We want to make sure that we have a one-time accounting for these major COVID hits — very, very well defined in terms of a period of time, March 15-Sept. 15, that we take a very, very data driven approach [saying]: “Send us a proposal showing what the impact was; we will assess them all at once and get back.” However, we can't do that at this point in time because we have an authorization through Section 3610 [of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act] and so forth, but we don't have an appropriation. We believe we need that appropriation to maintain readiness because if we do not get that, what we are going to find is we are not going to get the number of units delivered, we are not going to maintain war-fighter readiness, we're not going to move forward in modernization. We would like to take the one-time hit and then see where we go from there. Assuming you get the appropriation, much money is needed? When will industry see it? We think it's somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion. We think it would take five to six months because once we got an appropriation, we would go out for a request for proposals, and the larger companies are going to have to flow down those RFPs through their supply chain, gather the data — because again, this has to be a very data-driven drill. So we would get all of that back; we think that would take two to three months. Then we want to look at all of the proposals at once. It isn't going to be a first-in, first-out [situation], and we have to rationalize using the rules we've put in place, what would be reimbursable and what's not. So overall we think five to six months, in terms of a process. We're at about the two-year mark from the executive order 13806 study, which assessed the health of the defense industrial base and included some dire warnings about the supply chain. How has work on fixing those issues gone? We had several areas that we pointed out were problematic, that we were concerned that the U.S. had too great of a dependency on non-friendly nations and that we just didn't have the security and resiliency that we were looking for. In fiscal 2019, we actually had 14 presidential determinations, which is the process you go through to actually say: “Yes, these are areas that are worthy of looking at.” Then we go to get the appropriation to be able to use [the Defense Production Act's Title III authorities]. A number of the areas we looked at were small unmanned aerial systems, rare earth [minerals], that type of thing. When COVID-19 hit, it shone a spotlight on the concern we had with this fragility and helped us tell the story. Because of another executive order coming in declaring a federal emergency, we no longer had to go through the presidential determination route, which is a bit time consuming, to identify areas where we needed to invest. Then [with the pandemic] we had new areas bubble up, probably the most significant of which was aviation propulsion, where we have a number of our key suppliers who are extremely dependent on commercial aviation that was grinding almost to a halt for a while — huge impacts there. So what we did was we were now able to move a little bit more quickly, which is always helpful. And we made a number of awards to aviation companies that literally kept those companies in business, which allowed us to continue to support the war fighter. COVID-19 has helped us accelerate some of those areas. Others are perhaps not getting as much attention as they were pre-COVID-19, looking at our defense industrial base for nuclear modernization for instance, also for hypersonics. But overall, the team is working very hard, and we have put out almost a billion dollars in DPA Title III over the last six months. It sounds like the pandemic may have been beneficial in addressing these long-term issues. What it did was allow us to really put speed in the system, peel away all of what I would call the non-value-added bureaucracy. COVID-19 gave us a burning platform to really demonstrate we could be very responsible in terms of taxpayer dollars, very responsible in terms of security of the war fighter, but move at the speed of relevance to get things done. So I don't want to backslide there. And I want to make sure we really take advantage of all of that. Companies are concerned about being in compliance with the Section 889 rules, which prohibit the government from buying a system that might have Chinese equipment in it from the telecommunications supply chain. Are more waivers for companies possible? We are incredibly supportive of making sure that we don't have Chinese technology in a lot of our telecom systems, which has proven to be a problem in terms of exfiltration of data. So what we did is we got a waiver from [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] for noncritical weapon systems. We continue to discuss an extension beyond September of that with them. We are getting waivers on a case-by-case basis, we will look at those. However, we are encouraging industry and we are very, very pleased at how we see industry still stepping up to really get these systems out of their supply chains. So it will be by exception that we will do waivers, and we are looking to really have a clean path through everything. There have been significant mergers and acquisitions during your tenure at the Pentagon. Are you seeing a downside for the department, given the desire for more competition on programs? I actually put a process in place early on, when we are notified of M&A deals, that we go out very formally to all the services and agencies and ask for objective evidence as to whether or not these mergers or acquisitions will constrain competition in any way. We then work very, very closely with either [the Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department] on those deals to make sure there are divestitures if needed. Where I'm really focused, and the team is focused, is really getting the small companies going. That's where the predominance of our innovation comes from. That's what bubbles up to these larger companies. So we are holding all kinds of webinars and meetings connecting not only our traditional defense industrial base, small company partners, but nontraditional [firms] with our DoD efforts. We're partnering with the services to get more of that activity. So we want that diverse group coming in, and I'm really excited about what I see coming up through. That doesn't sound like you have many concerns about what you've seen. We watch very carefully. And at this point, we think we've made some smart divestitures on some of those. And we like competition. It's our friend. https://www.defensenews.com/interviews/2020/09/21/pentagon-acquisition-boss-talks-industry-mergers-and-coronavirus/

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  October 31, 2023 | International, Land

  Defense firm Leidos raises outlook on robust weapons demand | Reuters

  U.S. defense contractor Leidos Holdings on Tuesday raised its full-year profit and revenue forecasts on the back of strong weapons demand amid rising geopolitical tensions.