ManTech keeps up fight for $745M Army CECOM contract

ManTech International isn’t giving up its fight for a $745 million contract to support the Army’s Communications and Electronics Command with a variety of technical and logistics services.

The huge contract, known as the Army Logistics and Readiness Center Field Support Directorate contract, was awarded to CSRA through the GSA OASIS vehicle. It consolidates work that was taking place under other contracts, and both CSRA and ManTech were incumbents under some of those other contracts, according to sources.

ManTech filed its protest with the Government Accountability this week. A decision is expected Dec. 21.

Winning the protest may be an uphill battle for ManTech given the high success rate GSA’s FEDSIM office has in defending itself in protests.

But a corrective action, which happens before a GAO makes a formal ruling, is always a possibility. Generally, a corrective action is driven by the agency and is when the agency decides to pull back an award and take a second a second look at its decision. Usually, some issue raised by the protester causes the agency to take a corrective.

A corrective action, however, doesn’t mean the protester is going to end up with the contract. Often, we see agencies pick the same winner after making adjustments.

In this case, ManTech is arguing that GSA and the Army didn’t properly evaluate proposals. A proper evaluation would have resulted in a win for ManTech.

That’s a pretty broad argument, but typical at this stage of a protest. GSA and the Army will have 30 days to respond to the protest, and it is in that 30 day window that most corrective actions are taken.

Besides its high dollar value, the work on this task order is attractive given the customer and the range of requirements.

The contract will be used to support a wide variety of CECOM systems used for command and control, surveillance, cyber, biometric and other operations. A request for information includes a grid listing 50 different systems that the contract will support.

According to a description of the contract award on the FPDS.gov site, the winning contract will be the “provider of choices for support of the world’s best C4ISR systems, including equipment, training, technical assistance and forward sustainment services to the warfighter.”

The first year of the contract is expected to be worth $121 million, according to FPDS. With options, the value rises to $745 million over five years. The contract runs through Sept. 12, 2021.