Defense Procurement News

Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGIA) to provide training to its employees and other intelligence analysts across DoD. See a press release here. The contract has a value of $32 M and is an option on an existing contract. Lockheed Martin is responsible for running the in-house training for the agency. NGIA is what used to be called the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) and provides maps, charts and other information to the US defense services and other agencies.

Australia has awarded a contract to Chandler Macleod for support of recruiting efforts. See an article here. While overall recruiting for the Australian Armed Forces is going well they are having a hard time attracting the highly sought after technical recruits they need. This 5 year, $400 Australian, contract will help in that effort. Interestingly since the Australians have been fighting since 2001 they have actuall

Bearingpoint was awarded a contract by the US Navy to provide management tools for the Recruiting Command. See a press release here. The contract is worth over $12 M and is a continuation of Bearingpoint’s work over the last few years. As with many other types of corporations the military spends a great deal of money on custom software and database applications. This is actually a large business and is often subsumed within the SETA support contracts.

Bump - Further details on the contract the UK signed with Ascent, the joint venture of Lockheed and VT, to conduct aviation training have come out. See this article for some of the new details. It is a 25 year contract with the contractor that will be implemented incrementally as the current training program completes.

According to this short report, the UK is ready to transition all of its pilot training to a private contractor. This is for the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and Army rotary wing pilots. If this is true it represents a major change in how training has been done in the past. One would have to assume that there are major cost savings in this transition away from maintaining their own aircraft and training staff. Beyond saying that Lockheed Martina and VT will carry out the contract no details were given as to how it would be done.

A contract awarded to buy training for Indian Navy simulators was put on hold due to allegations of improprieties with Indian Naval officers. See an article here. It turns out that the scandal started with an investigation into Indian companies related to the Iraqi Oil for Food bribery scheme. Now the contract is one of many that the Indian legislature is supposed to investigate. For previous articles about this kind of issue see this and this. In the last few years corruption has been a major issue in the awarding of defense contracts, both to foreign and Indian firms.

This little announcement in The Washington Post, I believe means that Reed Incorporated won a contract for the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, since the US doesn’t have one. See the link here. The full announcement is “Reed Inc. of Leesburg won a $2.9 million contract from the Army for Ministry of Information security and training.”

L-3 Link announced that the US Air Force had awarded them a contract to upgrade the Predator training system. See this story here. The contract will upgrade the software and add current capabilities to the training system. As systems are modified to include new capabilities the training system as well need to be modified. This is so the operators will be able to learn and practice with these new capabilities.