Protests surround Army training contract

No sooner had the Army cleared one protest hurdle involving a main large training and support program than another protest popped up.

Raytheon has held the Warfighter FOCUS contract for several years. It had a ceiling of over $10 billion. But when it came time to recompete all the work, the Army broke into different lots.

Lockheed Martin won the biggest chunk earlier this year in the $3.5 million TADSS Maintenance Program contract to supply training aids, devices and simulation tools to the Army.

Raytheon then filed a protest and that was denied last week by the Government Accountability Office.

As that protest was resolved, General Dynamics filed another protest involving a separate $785 million portion of the Warfighter FOCUS recompete. No award has been made for the portion to provide instruction and training support to the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence at Fort Huachaca. 

General Dynamics is protesting because it has been eliminated from the competitive range.

The company had filed an agency-level protest and received a corrective action but then was eliminated again. GD apparently is arguing that the corrective action was limited and that it shouldn’t have been eliminated from the competition a second time.

So while Lockheed Martin is now free to move forward on a big contract takeaway. GAO hasn’t released its decision on that award yet, so we’ll have to wait to learn more about it.

GD’s protest is just at its beginning. Raytheon will continue to provide the services to the Army under that portion of the contract. A GAO decision is due Oct. 15.

The Army in June awarded the $2.4 billion Enterprise Training Services contract stemming from Warfighter FOCUS to incumbent Raytheon and seven newcomers. Those awards were not protested.