The U.S. Air Force has included 18 additional companies as awardees on a potential five-year, $950M contract to develop, test, integrate and demonstrate elements of the Advanced Battle Management System, the service reported Wednesday.
“ABMS will help create internet-like data sharing across our joint force to fight at internet speeds. Rapid development and testing cycles are critical to fail, learn, and leap ahead of advancing threats,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner.
The service initially selected 27 firms in late May to compete for task orders under the indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to develop systems across ground, air, maritime, space, electromagnetic spectrum and cyber domains in support of the Joint All Domain Command and Control program.
The Air Force conducts “on-ramp” exercises as part of the acquisition strategy for ABMS to experiment and evaluate technologies in order to see their capabilities in addressing current operational needs.
An ABMS on-ramp exercise in support of U.S. Northern Command was carried out in December. The service is slated to hold another on-ramp with U.S. Space Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Northern Command by the end of August and another one involving Spacecom and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command by September.
The additional companies are:
- Accenture’s (NYSE: ACN) federal services business
- Ball Aerospace
- Black River Systems
- Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH)
- CAE’s (NYSE: CAE) USA Mission Solutions business
- Cubic’s (NYSE: CUB) GATR Technologies subsidiary
- Global Air Logistics and Training
- Leidos (NYSE: LDOS)
- Mercury Defense Systems
- Metron
- NetScout Systems (Nasdaq: NTCT)
- Octo Consulting Group
- Omni Fed
- Rincon Research
- Rise8
- Science Applications International Corp. (NYSE: SAIC)
- Strategic Mission Elements
- Wind River Systems
