Army unveils first draft for $4B in R&D services recompetes
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By
Ross Wilkers
Small businesses are the intended audience for this draft solicitation but the Army is working on a second contract for a full-and-open competition next year.
The Army has unveiled the draft solicitation for one domain in the next iteration of a contract the service branch uses to acquire broad research-and-development services from industry.
The new Design, Development, Demonstration and Integration II contract will have an overall ceiling of approximately $4.06 billion over up to 10 years. That duration includes an initial five-year base period and a single option to extend for five more years.
Friday’s draft request for proposals release pertains to the D3I2’s second domain that focuses on information integration, data exploitation and other enhanced warfighter capabilities. It is reserved for small businesses and will have a $2.05 billion ceiling for them to compete for.
Responses to the domain two draft RFP are due Oct. 25. The Army currently expects to unveil the final solicitation on Jan. 11, 2024, with proposals due on Feb. 27 and an award in February 2025.
D3I2 supports the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command in efforts to develop and deliver new capabilities in global space, missile defense and high-altitude missions of the service branch and its partners.
The original D3I contract was awarded in 2017 across three domains to dozens of large contractors and small businesses. For that competition, the Army reserved domains two and three for small businesses.
For the recompete, the Army is consolidating that pair of domains into a single pool for small businesses.
But like with the original: domain one of D3I2 will be a full-and-open competition and more tightly concentrated on space, missile defense and high-altitude platforms.
The Army’s projected timeline there has a draft solicitation release pegged for April 2, 2024, for domain one. The final RFP would follow on Sept. 24 with a proposal due date of Oct. 31. Awards would then follow in November.
Incumbents for domain one are:
- BAE Systems
- Leidos (through its Dynetics acquisition in 2019)
- Northrop Grumman
- QWK Integrated Solutions
- RTX
- Science Applications International Corp.
- Teledyne Brown Engineering
The small business incumbents for domains two and three are:
- Aegis Technologies
- Colsa Corp.
- CybEx
- Decisive Analytics
- MEI Technologies
- Quantum Research
- Radiance Technologies
- Team SdA (Sentar, Decibel Research and ASRC Federal)