BAE Systems has received a nearly $652 million fixed-price level of effort contract modification from the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Hill AFB, Utah to support the Boeing [BA] Minuteman III ICBM and the future
Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel.
Work under the contract is “to ensure the integration of current and future hardware, software, testing and modifications” with the two ICBM systems, DoD said on Jan. 31. Work is to be completed by Jan. 31, 2025, per the contract announcement.
Last June, the Air Force awarded BAE an up to $12 billion Integration Support Contract 2.0 (ISC 2.0) for ICBM support through 2040 (Defense Daily, June 24, 2022). BAE was the incumbent and won the approximately $534 million ISC 1.0 contract in July 2013.
At the time of the ISC 2.0 award, the Air Force said that under the cost-plus-award-fee contract, BAE would serve as the lead systems integrator and would complement government personnel in providing ICBM systems engineering, integration, and professional services.
In winning ISC 2.0, BAE beat out four other offers, which included one from Virginia-based Guidehouse LLP, one from Tullahoma, Tenn.’s Jacobs Technology, Inc.–a unit of Jacobs Solutions [J], and another from Integrated ICBM Support Services, LLC—a joint venture among Amentum, Apex Systems and Leidos [LDOS] (Defense Daily, Feb. 10, 2021).
After last June’s ISC 2.0 award, Guidehouse and Jacobs submitted bid protests to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
In October, GAO sustained the two protests. Edda Emmanuelli Perez, GAO general counsel, wrote that the Air Force’s “evaluation of professional employee compensation and cost realism” in the ISC 2.0 offers was “unreasonable in certain regards.”
BAE’s offer came in at $3.3 billion, Jacobs’ at nearly $3.8 billion, and Guidehouse’s at $4.1 billion, per GAO.
“We recommend that the Air Force reevaluate proposals, consistent with this decision, ensuring that the evaluation is performed on a common and consistent basis for all offerors,” Perez wrote in the October GAO decision. “We also recommend that the Air Force perform a new best-value tradeoff and make a new source selection decision. In the event the reevaluation results in the selection of an offeror other than BAE, we recommend that the agency terminate the contract awarded to BAE for the convenience of the government and award the contract to the offeror found to represent the best value,”