KeyW falls short in bid for $785M Army training contract
By
Nick Wakeman
The Government Accountability Office has rejected KeyW's bid to be re-instated in the competition for a $785 million Army intelligence training support contract.
KeyW Corp. unit Sotera Defense won’t get its shot at a $785 million Army contract now that the Government Accountability Office has denied the protest.
Sotera -- acquired by KeyW last year -- filed the protest after the Army eliminated it from the competition. The company claimed that the solicitation was not clear but GAO disagreed. The agency hasn't released its full decision yet.
The Army is now free to proceed on awarding the contract for training and mission support services at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Raytheon performs the work as an incumbent under the current Warfighter Focus contract first won in 2008 and set to expire in October 2019.
Warfighter Focus is being broken up into three recompetes with the Fort Huachuca contract being one of them.
The Fort Huachuca contract will cover instruction and training, training development and training support for the Army Training Doctrine and Command’s Army Intelligence Center of Excellence.
The center is based at Fort Huachuca but the contract also will be used at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas, Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, and Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida.
The Army has a need for a variety of training in areas such as all source intelligence, imagery, signals intelligence, open source intelligence, counter intelligence, advanced analytics and intelligence oversight.
While KeyW executives never mentioned this contract by name, it falls under the umbrella of work they wanted to pursue through the Sotera acquisition.
In an August interview, KeyW CEO Bill Weber told Washington Technology that the acquisition of Sotera opened up more opportunities to bid on a broader range of intelligence-related work. He said the company had $1.7 billion in bids awaiting awards. This contract was in the mix at the time.
KeyW is actively hunting contracts that represent work neither Sotera nor KeyW would have bid on their own prior to their combination, Weber said then.
In this instance, they fell short. But we don’t expect them to give up on that larger hunt.