Navy adds more time to $900M systems support contract

The Navy needs to extend the time on a $900 million contract for high-end systems engineering services on classified systems.

The multiple-award contract is known as the Battlespace Awareness Support Portfolio and was awarded to seven companies in 2012.

Since then, the winners have competed for task orders for services such as modeling and simulation, planning, quality assurance, engineering support and training. All of the work is on systems that support intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and information operations systems.

The extension doesn’t add to the $900 million ceiling but adds another year to the contract’s life. The contract is now set to end in December 2018 instead of November 2017.

The Navy plans to have another contract in place by that time, according to contract documents.

The seven contractors receiving extensions are:

• Booz Allen Hamilton
• CACI International
• Centurum
• Engility
• Leidos
• Lockheed Martin
• Scientific Research Corp.

The Navy found itself in a bind because it couldn’t issue task orders that extended work beyond the expiration date of the contract, which would have given it some cushion to continue getting support from the contractors.

Without the support, work on critical systems would have halted, according to the documents. Many of the systems operate at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level.

A wide range of Navy and other Defense Department commands rely on the systems to serve warfighter needs for information, data and intelligence.

Because of the sensitive nature of the systems, the Navy says it “does not have any other option.” It doesn’t have the time to compete another contract and get it in place to continue the support that is needed, according to the contract document.

With no extension, systems used for things such as fleet support, software maintenance, system upgrades, and logistics engineering would not be supported.

Overall readiness would be negatively impacted, the Navy said.

With the extensions, task orders can now cover work through December 2019 and will help the Navy bridge the gap until the new contract is in place.

The Navy said it doesn’t expect to issue another extension beyond 2018.

According to Deltek, Scientific Research Corp. has done the most work with $62.9 million in task orders. SRC is followed by Leidos with $44.7 million.

The Navy said it has $577.8 million left of the $900 million ceiling. That is why it didn’t need to increase the ceiling, just the period of performance.