Mil-Tech

Lockheed Martin lands $69M deal

The Department of Defense has awarded a $69 million contract to Lockheed Martin Missions Systems and Sensors.

Rep. John Adler, D-N.J., said the two-year contract would support 250 engineering jobs in the region.

“The contract will strengthen Lockheed Martin’s operations in Burlington County, and sustain private sector jobs in our area,” he said in a statement.

Under the contract, Lockheed will be the Aegis Ashore engineering agent for the AA Missile Defense Test Complex, along with other military operations.

Lockheed Martin employs approximately 2,300 people from the 3rd Congressional district, according to Adler’s office, and about 5,000 people statewide.

Concurrent Technologies Corporation Awarded Competitively Bid Task Order Worth Up to $39 Million

Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) has been awarded another competitively bid task order under its SeaPort-e contract to provide operations research, logistics, and program support to the Indian Head Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (IHD/NSWC). The cost reimbursable task order contract allows CTC to support client needs across the Department of Defense (DoD) and Federal Government Agencies. The contract is worth up to $39 million over a five year period, consisting of one base year and four option years. The initial ceiling for the base year is $7.4 million.

CTC will provide technical, programmatic, and management support services to the IHD/NSWC in energetic operational research, logistics, education and training, sustainability, and acquisition program support services to multiple agencies. As a DoD Energetics Center, the IHD/NSWC is a leader in the Navy’s Energetics Enterprise. Their principal mission is to conduct research and provide energetics and energetic systems for our fighting forces around the globe.

“Other government agencies and allied nations look to the IHD/NSWC for energetic systems solutions, and CTC is appreciative of the opportunity to work alongside this crucial center to support U.S. warfighters,” said Edward J. Sheehan, Jr., CTC’s President & Chief Executive Officer.

Energetics is a core military competency. Energetic materials, systems, safe weapons, and ordnance are critical to countless warfighting capabilities. “Energetic systems” refers to explosives, propellants, pyrotechnics, reactive materials, related chemicals and fuels, and their related components. This includes bombs, warheads, mines, gun projectiles, and unguided rockets.

General Dynamics wins $48M Army contract for armor

General Dynamics Corp. said Wednesday it won a $48 million U.S. Army contract to supply armor tiles for the sides of Bradley fighting vehicles.

The company said deliveries will begin next February and be completed in September 2011.

The armor system is made of tiles that fasten to the outside of military vehicles to provide better protection from direct hits by anti-armor weapons.

Work on the tiles will be done at a General Dynamics facility in McHenry, Miss. A partner, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., will complete some of the production in Israel.

General Dynamics shares fell 86 cents to $57.01 in afternoon trading, earlier hitting a 52-week low of $56.26.

BAE Systems to Provide Engineering and Technical Services Under $16 Billion U.S. Army Contract

BAE Systems has been approved to provide engineering and technical services to the U.S. Army and other federal customers under a $16.4 billion government-wide contract called Rapid Response — 3rd Generation (R2-3G). The company is eligible to bid on a range of task orders during the 10-year life of the contract. Services offered will include systems engineering and integration, research and development, studies and analysis, test and evaluation, and logistics support.

The selection of BAE Systems to compete for this work demonstrates how the company’s customer support and service capabilities are effectively meeting the current and future requirements of the military.

“The R2-3G contract is a valuable tool for agencies with urgent needs for services,” said Chuck Thomas, vice president and general manager of systems engineering solutions at BAE Systems. “We have a strong record of performance, and we provide a diverse set of capabilities, anywhere in the product life cycle and anywhere in the world.”

R2-3G is an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract awarded by the Army’s Communications-Electronics Life Cycle Management Command. The office specializes in Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance support — known as C4ISR.

BAE Systems will provide R2-3G services at multiple government sites and manage the work at facilities in Monmouth, New Jersey; Huntsville, Alabama; and Aberdeen and Rockville, Maryland.

$20M Order from NAVSEA Keeps iRobot Corp Thriving

Following better-than-expected results for the second quarter of 2010, leading robotics company iRobot Corp. continues its strong performance for this year, this time by winning a $20.3 million contract for battle-tested robots from the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). The order, a standalone contract, is for 125 PackBot Man Transportable Robotic System (MTRS) robots. The deal also includes spare parts and repair services if needed.

The PackBot MTRS robot’s predecessor, the highly-succesful iRobot 510 PackBot, is one of the most popular battlefield robots in the world today. They are deployed in war-ravaged areas including Iraq and Afghanistan, and are used in hazardous missions primarily to search for and neutralize hidden explosives. These robots have proven their reliability in deactivating car bombs, roadside bombs, and improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

Robots, said iRobot President for Government and Industrial Robots Division Joe Dryer, have long shown their worth on the battlefield. With roadside bombs and similar devices continuing to pose danger in Iraq and Afghanistan, he emphasizes the need for “outfitting our troops with tools to ensure they stay as safe as possible.”

“The iRobot PackBot is saving lives, and we are honored to be providing this technology to the military“, Dryer adds.

It can be recalled that just last month, iRobot also received an order for 94 units of Small Unmanned Ground Vehicles or SUGVs as part of a $14.6 million contract with the US Army.

To date, iRobot Corp has filled orders for more than 3,500 unmanned ground vehicles from both the military and public safety organizations.

Air Force Awards Rockwell Collins $140 Million Contract for Next-Generation Military Test Range Infrastructure

The U.S. Air Force has selected Rockwell Collins as the prime contractor to develop, integrate and deliver the Common Range Integrated Instrumentation System (CRIIS), a next-generation military test range system. The initial contract is valued at $140 million. With options, the contract is valued at more than $300 million.

The CRIIS program will replace the Advanced Range Data System currently in use at major U.S. military test ranges. The program fulfills a critical Department of Defense (DoD) requirement to provide Time, Space, and Position Information (TSPI) and system test data to support weapon system testing for a variety of platforms, including advanced aircraft, ships, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles, ground vehicles and dismounted soldiers.

“Rockwell Collins’ proven technology, coupled with our open systems approach, enables the Air Force to deliver a low-risk solution for military test ranges today and for the coming decades,” said Ron Hornish, vice president and general manager of Precision Strike Solutions for Rockwell Collins. “Ultimately, this approach gives the military the ability to more effectively test and evaluate system performance, so that those next generation systems can be deployed to the field more rapidly and with a high degree of confidence.”

Rockwell Collins was one of two companies awarded phase I risk reduction contracts in 2008. Phase I — which was completed in June 2010 — required contractors to demonstrate technology that delivers enhanced TSPI, data links and encryption technology. The Rockwell Collins team includes Cubic Defense Applications, Honeywell and ArgonST.

This press release contains statements that are forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to U.S. Air Force spending and budgetary policies; potential cancellation or amendments of awards or orders by the U.S. Air Force; challenges in the design, development and production of advanced technologies; and competitive product and pricing pressures; as well as other risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those detailed from time to time in the Rockwell Collins Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including without limitation the Rockwell Collins Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 2010 and its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended June 30, 2010 and September 30, 2010. These forward-looking statements are made only as of the date hereof.

DoD Publicly Cites Chinese Cyberespionage Against U.S.

The Defense Department this week called out China for waging cyberattacks on U.S. companies and government agencies.

The “Annual Report To Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2010″ report this week marks the Pentagon’s most public statements yet about China’s alleged cyberespionage efforts. The DoD report says in 2009, “numerous computer systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, continued to be the target of intrusions that appear to have originated within” China, according to an Associated Press article on the DoD’s report.

DoD maintains that China was “focused on exfiltrating information, some of which could be of strategic or military utility” in those attacks. It stopped short of confirming that the People’s Liberation Army in China either executed or endorsed the attacks, but noted that “developing capabilities for cyberwarfare is consistent with PLA military writings.”

The report also says the PLA has set up “information warfare units” that include civilian computer experts to create viruses that attack “enemy” computers and networks, the report says. “These units include elements of the militia, creating a linkage between PLA network operators and China’s civilian information technology professionals,” the report says.

Chinese officials this week disputed the DoD’s claims, saying the U.S. was trying to “blacken China’s image,” according to reports from the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. “The U.S. purpose (of releasing such a report) is to tarnish China’s image and exaggerate the threat China poses,” China’s Internet Society president reportedly said in response to the DoD report.

Meanwhile, the DoD report also cited the discovery by Canadian researchers in March 2009 of GhostNet, an electronic spy network “apparently based mainly in China.” The gang broke into government offices around the world.

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Entereza won a $56,089.63 federal contract from the U.S. Air Force

Entereza, Albuquerque, N.M., won a $56,089.63 federal contract from the U.S. Air Force Materiel Command, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., for information technology services, including telecommunications services.

Private contractors pose problems of cost, control

In June, a stone carver from Manassas, Va., chiseled another perfect star into a marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the global war initiated by the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

It is also a system in which contractors are playing an ever more important role. The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of the government’s dependency on them than at the CIA, the one place in government that exists to do things overseas that no other U.S. agency is allowed to do.

Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley, Va., headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency’s training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American spies.

Through the federal budget process, the George W. Bush administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other agencies involved in counterterrorism to hire more contractors than civil servants. They did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought — wrongly, it turned out — that contractors would be less expensive.

Nine years later, well into the Obama administration, the idea that contractors cost less has been repudiated, and the administration has made some progress toward its goal of reducing the number of hired hands by 7 percent over two years. Still, close to 30 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies is contractors.

“For too long, we’ve depended on contractors to do the operational work that ought to be done” by CIA employees, Panetta said. But replacing them “doesn’t happen overnight. When you’ve been dependent on contractors for so long, you have to build that expertise over time.”

A second concern of Panetta’s: contracting with corporations, whose responsibility “is to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict.”

Or as Gates, who has been in and out of government his entire life, puts it: “You want somebody who’s really in it for a career because they’re passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money.”

Contractors can offer more money — often twice as much — to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.

The idea that the government would save money on a contract workforce “is a false economy,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official and now president of his own intelligence training academy.

As companies raid federal agencies of talent, the government has been left with the youngest intelligence staffs ever while more experienced employees move into the private sector. This is true at the CIA, where employees from 114 firms account for roughly a third of the workforce, or about 10,000 positions. Many of them are temporary hires, often former military or intelligence agency employees who left government service usually to work less and earn more while drawing a federal pension.

Across the government, such workers are used in every conceivable way.

Contractors kill enemy fighters. They spy on foreign governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks. They help craft war plans. They gather information on local factions in war zones. They are the historians, the architects, the recruiters in the nation’s most secretive agencies. They staff watch centers across the Washington area. They are among the most trusted advisers to the four-star generals leading the nation’s wars.

So great is the government’s appetite for private contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300 companies, often nicknamed “body shops,” that specialize in finding candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person, according to those in the business.

Making it more difficult to replace contractors with federal employees: The government doesn’t know how many are on the federal payroll. Gates said he wants to reduce the number of defense contractors by about 13 percent, to pre-9/11 levels, but he’s having a hard time even getting a basic head count.

“This is a terrible confession,” he said. “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” referring to the department’s civilian leadership.

The Post estimate of 265,000 contractors doing top-secret work was vetted by several high-ranking intelligence officials who approved of The Post’s methodology. The newspaper’s Top Secret America database includes 1,931 companies that perform work at the top-secret level. More than a quarter of them — 533 — came into being after 2001, and others that already existed have expanded greatly. Most are thriving even as the rest of the United States struggles with bankruptcies, unemployment and foreclosures.

The privatization of national security work has been made possible by a nine-year “gusher” of money, as Gates recently described national security spending since the 9/11 attacks.

With so much money to spend, managers do not always worry about whether they are spending it effectively.

“Someone says, `Let’s do another study,’ and because no one shares information, everyone does their own study,” said Elena Mastors, who headed a team studying the al-Qaida leadership for the Defense Department. “It’s about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many people you can fly all over the place. Everybody’s just on a spending spree. We don’t need all these people doing all this stuff.”

Most of these contractors do work that is fundamental to an agency’s core mission. As a result, the government has become dependent on them in a way few could have foreseen: wartime temps who have become a permanent cadre.

Just last week, typing “top secret” into the search engine of a major jobs website showed 19,759 unfilled positions nationwide.

“We could not perform our mission without them. They serve as our `reserves,’ providing flexibility and expertise we can’t acquire,” said Ronald Sanders, who was chief of human capital for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence before retiring in February. “Once they are on board, we treat them as if they’re a part of the total force.”

The Post’s investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking websites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.

The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track. A searchable database of government organizations and private companies, which can be found at topsecretamerica.com, was built entirely on public records.

The national security industry sells the military and intelligence agencies more than just airplanes, ships and tanks. It sells contractors’ brain power. They advise, brief and work everywhere, including 25 feet under the Pentagon in a bunker where they can be found alongside military personnel in battle fatigues monitoring potential crises worldwide.
Late at night, when the wide corridors of the Pentagon are all but empty, the National Military Command Center hums with purpose. There’s real-time access to the location of U.S. forces anywhere in the world, to granular satellite images or to the White House Situation Room.

The purpose of all this is to be able to answer any question the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might have. To be ready 24 hours a day, every day, takes five brigadier generals, a staff of colonels and senior noncommissioned officers — and a man wearing a pink contractor badge and a bright purple shirt and tie.

“Knowledge engineer” Erik Saar is the only person in the room who knows how to bring data from far afield, fast. Saar and four teammates from a private company, SRA International, teach these top-ranked staff officers to think in Web 2.0. They are trying to push a tradition-bound culture to act differently, digitally.

That sometimes means exchanging ideas on shared Web pages outside the military computer networks dubbed .mil — things much resisted within the Pentagon’s self-sufficient culture. “Our job is to change the perception of leaders who might drive change,” Saar said.

Since 9/11, contractors have made extraordinary contributions — and extraordinary blunders — that have changed history and clouded the public’s view of the distinction between the actions of officers sworn on behalf of the United States and corporate employees with little more than a security badge and a gun.

Contractor misdeeds in Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt U.S. credibility in those countries as well as in the Middle East. Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, some of it done by contractors, helped ignite a call for vengeance against the United States that continues today. Security guards working for Blackwater added fuel to the five-year violent chaos in Iraq and became the symbol of an America run amok.

Contractors in war zones, especially those who can fire weapons, blur “the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force, which is just what our enemies want,” Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College and the author of “One Nation Under Contract,” told the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting at a hearing in June.

Full story > www.courier-journal.com

Military To Tighten Vendor Cybersecurity Policies

The Department of Defense has signaled its intention to develop new policies requiring its vendors to meet increased standards for cybersecurity for unclassified military information residing on or being carried over private sector systems and networks.

In a memo issued in late January, Department of Defense chief information officer Cheryl Roby laid out a number of leadership responsibilities and strategic guidance on the development of stronger cybersecurity plans.

The Sprint to Business Continuity “It is DoD policy to establish a comprehensive approach for protecting unclassified DoD information transiting or residing on unclassified [Defense industrial base] systems and networks and create a timely, coordinated, and effective partnership with the [Defense industrial base],” Roby informed.

Hackers have increasingly been targeting and probing the Defense industrial base, sometimes successfully. For example, last year, it was revealed that hackers infiltrated the networks of government contractors and stole sensitive specs on the Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project. This poses a significant challenge, as a wide variety of military information resides on external systems, and a wide variety of defense IT work is outsourced.

The Department of Defense has in recent years been increasing the amount of work it does to secure its cyber supply chain, including taking such extreme measures as procuring chips for sensitive systems only from a limited number of “trusted foundries” in the United States. This effort may put a bit more DoD-wide rigor into similar exercises.

The memo lays out a number of responsibilities for top staff. For example, the DoD CIO will chair a Defense industrial board cybersecurity executive committee and coordinate oversight of industry cybersecurity activities with the DoD’s inspector general. The directors of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency will provide support and cyber intrusion damage assessment analysis in the case of attack.

Other roles include the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, who’s tasked with developing and injecting new cybersecurity policies into DoD’s acquisition processes; the DoD’s CFO, who will be necessary to monitor budgets related to these activities to make sure they’re adequately resourced; and the director of the DoD’s Cyber Crime Center, who will “serve as the focal point for threat information sharing.”