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Tag: GovCon

GDIT wins $330M in Army training support contracts

Falls Church federal contractor General Dynamics Information Technology has won two Army contracts totaling $330 million, the General Dynamics subsidiary announced Tuesday.

The Army Contracting Command – Orlando awarded the task orders to GDIT in August as part of the $975 million Mission Training Complex Capabilities Support II indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract.

Under the first task order, worth $180 million, GDIT will train soldiers across the U.S. Army Pacific mission training complexes, where soldiers and units receive simulation training to prepare for deployment. The first task order has a one-year base period with four option years.

For the second task order, valued at $150 million, GDIT will provide training services at the XVIII Airborne Corps mission training complexes. The second task order has a five-year base period and six option months.

“Advanced training capabilities are critical to maintaining warfighter superiority,” Brian Sheridan, GDIT’s senior vice president for defense, said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our long-standing support to the Army with modern training services that will meet the demands of a constantly evolving battlefield environment.”

Over the course of the programs, GDIT will train more than 500,000 soldiers through live, virtual and constructive environments, providing immersive exercises, according to a news release. The contractor will also provide logistical and technical support.

GDIT is a subsidiary of Reston-based Fortune 500 aerospace and defense contractor General Dynamics, which employs more than 100,000 people worldwide and reported $42.3 billion in 2023 revenue. GDIT has about 30,000 employees across 30 countries.

Unanet acquires D.C. AI firm

Dulles-based software company Unanet has acquired Washington, D.C.-based GovPro AI, Unanet announced Friday.

Unanet did not disclose financial details of the transaction, which it completed in November.

Unanet provides project-based enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software solutions for government contractors and the architecture, engineering and construction industries. GovPro AI provides AI-powered proposal writing platforms for government contractors.

“Unanet is continuing to deliver on its promise to solve real business challenges for our customers,” Unanet Chief Innovation Officer Steve Karp said in a statement. “In addition to helping customers across the GovCon and AEC industries respond to RFPs more efficiently, GovPro AI’s technology and team will accelerate Unanet’s broader AI strategy.”

GovPro AI’s platform creates a first proposal draft for responding to federal requests for proposals. With the platform, government contractors can reduce the average time to create a proposal draft by 70% and can halve proposal generation costs, according to a news release.

Unanet plans to extend the tech into the architecture, engineering and construction market in 2025.

“Being part of the Unanet team means we can advance our innovation and refine the solution features,” GovPro AI founder Alexander Cohen said in a statement. “I’m looking forward to exploring new use cases for customers and continuing to deliver a more efficient, modern way of improving business development.”

With about 375 employees, Unanet has more than 4,000 customers.

Defense/public safety tech manufacturer moving to SWVA

Wrap Technologies, an Arizona-based public safety and defense technology company, is locating its manufacturing and distribution base in Norton’s Project Intersection industrial park, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Friday.

The company will occupy a new, 20,000-square-foot building at Project Intersection, where U.S. Route 23 and Highway 58 meet. In August, a $10.4 million EarthLink call center became the industrial park’s first tenant. Project Intersection is a development project of the Lonesome Pine Regional Industrial Facilities Authority, a multijurisdictional cooperative authority encompassing Dickenson, Lee, Scott and Wise counties and the City of Norton.

Wrap Technologies CEO Scot Cohen said in an interview Friday that the new plant will be ready by late 2025, but Wrap will be starting production in early 2025 in a temporary local facility. He added that the company, which will remain headquartered in Arizona, expects to invest $4.1 million in hiring new employees. Many of the new jobs will involve manufacturing, engineering and logistics, Cohen said, and the company will also be hiring people to train police officers and other first responders on how to use equipment produced by Wrap.

Scot Cohen. Photo courtesy Wrap Technologies

The company produces tools for law enforcement officers, including BolaWrap, a lasso-like restraint device made from Kevlar that police can use to de-escalate conflicts in the field, and Wrap is building training platforms using virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “On the VR side, there’s a lot of conversation with two local universities” — the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and Emory & Henry University — Cohen said. The company, which has 1,000 police departments worldwide as customers, also has plans for integrated body camera systems and drone technologies for safer and more efficient law enforcement, according to the governor’s news release.

Though Wrap primarily provides public safety technology to police departments across the country, it also is involved in producing defense technology, although there’s a fair amount of overlap between the two sectors, Cohen said.

The reason Wrap is setting up in Virginia is multifold. First, the company supplies products and training to more than 40 police departments in Virginia, including in Richmond and Fairfax County, Cohen said, and the state has skilled workers and strong political leadership. Although Wrap has received offers to move its manufacturing to other countries, “there wasn’t even anybody close” to Virginia’s bid, he added. “The state has everything we want.”

The Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority (VCEDA) approved a $3.16 million loan for the Norton Industrial Development Authority to build the new facility at Project Intersection, and the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission awarded regional economic development groups an $800,000 grant through its Southwest Economic Development program to assist with this project. Youngkin approved a $425,000 Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund grant as well, and the Virginia Jobs Investment Program will support employee training activities at no cost to Wrap.

“As Wrap Technologies brings its operations to Virginia and creates more than 120 jobs, we are reaffirming the commonwealth’s leadership in technology and innovation,” Youngkin said in a statement. “This expansion further accelerates our efforts to develop key technology hubs in the region.”

BAE Systems lands $202M in Navy ship repair contracts

Falls Church-based BAE Systems Inc.’s Norfolk Ship Repair unit has received two U.S. Navy contracts worth a combined $202 million for maintenance, modernization and repair of two vessels.

The U.S. arm of British defense giant BAE Systems announced the awards Monday. Its shipyard employees and their subcontractors will begin working on the guided missile destroyer USS Laboon (DDG 58) and the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD 1) in February and March 2025, respectively.

“The award of these two contracts will provide extensive work for our Norfolk shipyard team,” David M. Thomas Jr., vice president and general manager of BAE Systems Norfolk Ship Repair, said in a statement. “We look forward to using our proven experience on recent LHD and DDG work to return these ships to the fleet in excellent condition.”

According to the Department of Defense’s mid-October announcement of the awards, the Norfolk Ship Repair unit received a $114.8 million firm-fixed-price contract for work on the USS Laboon, commissioned in 1995. The contract also includes options that, if exercised, would bring its total value to $117.9 million.

BAE Systems will dry-dock the ship to perform underwater hull maintenance and repair the ship’s main propulsion system, preserve internal ballast and fuel tanks and the external superstructure, and rehabilitate crew berthing and dining compartments.

The $87.58 million firm-fixed-price contract for work on the USS Wasp includes options that, if exercised, would bring its total value to more than $104.69 million. The current USS Wasp is the 10th ship to carry the name and was commissioned in 1989. Work on both ships is expected to be completed by February 2026.

On the Wasp, BAE Systems will perform mechanical work, inspect and repair interior hull structures and refurbish habitability spaces for the crew and Marine troops. The company’s shipyard previously worked aboard the Wasp from February 2021 to April 2023.

The contractor’s Norfolk shipyard has about 900 employees.

Earlier this year, the Norfolk team began working aboard the dock landing ship USS Carter Hall, and the shipyard is currently finishing repair periods aboard USS Kearsarge, a Wasp-class ship, and destroyer USS Nitze.

BAE Systems has about 41,000 employees worldwide and reported $13.6 billion in 2023 revenue. In addition to its Norfolk shipyard, the company has one each in Florida and California.

Paragon Systems fined $52M for alleged fraud

Herndon-based federal contractor Paragon Systems agreed Tuesday to pay $52 million to resolve allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that Paragon used its own subsidiaries to fraudulently win small business set-aside contracts, violating the federal False Claims and Anti-Kickback acts.

The company is one of the federal government’s largest providers of security, fire and emergency response and mission support services, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s news release, and former top officials at Paragon allegedly directed female relatives and friends to “serve as figurehead owners of purported small businesses” to win set-aside contracts from the Department of Homeland Security that were meant to go to woman-owned small businesses and service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, as well as other types of small businesses.

In 2020, Securitas Critical Infrastructure Services (SCIS) rebranded under its subsidiary Paragon Systems’ name. Paragon is a subsidiary of the Swedish security giant Securitas, which announced in September it had set a provision of $53 million to pay the settlement costs.

“The investigation relates to alleged misconduct by certain former employees and to Paragon’s relationship with various small business entities which were a direct or indirect party to contracts with the U.S. government starting around 2012,” Securitas said in a statement then. “Paragon is cooperating fully with the investigation.” According to a news release Thursday, the settlement will be paid throughout 2025.

In the alleged scheme, Paragon executives controlled Maryland-based limited liability companies Athena Services International and Athena Joint Venture Services, and these purported small businesses “surreptitiously paid substantial sums of money” — more than 300 payments totaling more than $11 million — as “consulting payments” to the former Paragon executives.

According to the DOJ, Paragon’s president, vice president of business development, vice president of operations, compliance manager and contracts manager were allegedly involved.

“Those who fraudulently procure, or assist others to fraudulently procure, small business set-aside contracts will be held accountable,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said in a statement. “When ineligible companies obtain contracts reserved for veteran owned or socially or economically disadvantaged businesses, they prevent the small business community from receiving the contracting opportunities that Congress intended.”

Athena Services International and Athena Joint Venture Services and their owner, Alisa Silverman, along with Paragon, agreed to pay more than $1.6 million to resolve their liability, as well as the allegations that ASI improperly received a Paycheck Protection Program loan that was forgiven in full. The DOJ filed a complaint against another purported small business, Patronus Systems, and its owner, Mabel O’Quinn, the news release said.

“This settlement is the largest civil recovery in over a decade by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS-OIG),” DHS Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari said. “The settlement sends a clear message that the federal government will continue to investigate and prosecute fraud, waste and abuse to protect small businesses owned by service-disabled veterans and other socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. I am grateful for the continued partnership with the Department of Justice and for the whistleblower who initiated the complaint.”

Whistleblower Todd Pattison is set to receive more than $9 million as part of the settlement, the DOJ said.

If Trump cuts federal workforce, Warner predicts ‘disaster’ for Va.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner said Thursday he hopes President-elect Donald Trump won’t pursue massive cuts and relocations in the federal workforce — because if he does, it would be a “disaster for Virginia’s economy,” particularly in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. “We would get hit worse than any other state,” Virginia’s senior senator said.

Warner, a moderate Democrat known for reaching across the aisle, said also that Trump’s proposed immigrant deportations and additional restrictions on immigration and guest workers would harm the state’s agriculture, seafood, hospitality and poultry businesses by depriving them of workers.

“There is no state in the nation that gets hurt worse than Virginia when we have government shutdowns … when we in Congress don’t do our job, because we have not only a massive federal workforce, but we have a huge contractor workforce as well,” Warner said during a press call Thursday. “When you think not just [about] the contractor workforce up in Northern Virginia, but all the folks … who are at our military installations as we go down through the peninsula into Hampton Roads, we would get hit worse than any other states. These kind of attacks that Mr. Trump has made on the federal workforce, I think is unwarranted.”

Trump has said he wants to rid the executive branch of “rogue bureaucrats,” whom he claims hampered his agenda during his first term as president. He also said he would bring in more political appointees to serve in agencies, instead of just the highest-level positions like secretaries and commissioners.

Warner added that if Trump “dramatically cut[s] back on our national security,” that would be particularly painful to Virginia’s government contracting and technology sectors, as well as to the military presence in Virginia.

“The president-elect has said he wants to have the world’s strongest national security defense,” Warner said. “We’ve got to protect our armed forces. Part of what we’ve got in Hampton Roads is a major Coast Guard facility, and that doesn’t get lumped in with national security. So, any time you talk about cutting non-defense spending, think about items that are not classic defense, but I would call the Coast Guard very important.”

The state has more than 140,000 civilian federal employees, and Trump’s platform calls for 100,000 federal jobs to be moved out of the Washington, D.C., metro region to other states. He also has vowed to revive Schedule F, which Trump instituted at the end of his first term in 2020, to strip civil service protections from potentially 50,000 career government workers, making them at-will workers and more vulnerable to firing.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who joined Trump twice on the campaign trail in Virginia, said in August that Virginia’s federal civil servants shouldn’t be afraid, because “there are fabulous opportunities for folks to find a new employer in Virginia should the one they work for move away.” But Democrats and others have said it’s not that simple to find a new job that matches up with workers’ abilities and training.

“My message to federal workers is I will be there to protect them, to protect their professionalism, to protect their careers,” Warner said. “The idea is, well, Donald Trump claims to be a good businessperson. If he is, he would recognize that by moving federal workers all over the country, you’d lose vast amounts of experience, vast amounts of folks who know their jobs and do their jobs for Democratic or Republican administrations.” He added that he and newly re-elected U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine are “already on a bill” to oppose Schedule F from being re-enacted, and U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat who represents part of Fairfax County, has sponsored a companion bill in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“If President-elect Trump comes in and takes an axe to cut back … without looking at the programs that he’s cutting,” Warner said, “no area in the country will get hit harder than Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.”

The wind energy sector — including Dominion Energy’s offshore wind farm and connected industry in Hampton Roads — could also see changes during a Trump presidency, as could the state’s nuclear industry, spanning from Newport News Shipbuilding’s construction of nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers for the Navy to nuclear fuel and reactor manufacturers BWX Technologies and Framatome in Lynchburg, Warner said.

As for immigration restrictions on guest worker visas and other temporary foreign worker programs — as well as the possibility of mass detentions and deportations of undocumented migrants residing in the United States — Warner said that family-owned seafood businesses on the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula in Virginia will be “dramatically hit. Without those workers, Virginia would lose thousands of Virginia-based jobs and many, many multigenerational businesses. Many of these businesses bring the same workers in every year. They go back [home], they come for the season.”

Immigrants also hold jobs at Virginia’s orchards, farms, poultry businesses and hotels, the senator said. “And then you’ve got landscape workers,” which is less of a seasonal job in the South, he noted. “I’d love to see some resolution so we can add more predictability.”

HII’s Mission Technologies secures $3B DOD contract

Huntington Ingalls Industries’ McLean-based Mission Technologies division won a $3 billion contract to provide the Department of Defense logistics and intelligence support and technology.

Under the Logistics Services, ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] Operations and Next-Gen Technology (LOGIX) task order, the HII division will provide strategy-level support to the DOD and its mission partners. HII announced the award, which supports the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy, on Wednesday.

Todd Gentry, president of Mission Technologies’ All-Domain Operations group, said in a statement: “LOGIX positions our team to expand our support to mission partners globally, partnering with DOD to provide worldclass intelligence, integrated logistics, and emerging technologies and solutions to enhance and inform our mission partners’ decision space in a multi-domain contested environment. We’re honored to have been selected and are ready to execute.”

Newport News-based Huntington Ingalls Industries is the nation’s largest military shipbuilder and the largest industrial employer in Virginia. The Fortune 500 company employs more than 44,000 workers. The Mission Technologies division has more than 7,000 employees and more than 100 facilities globally.

Also on Wednesday, HII reported its third quarter earnings. The shipbuilder’s revenue was $2.7 billion, down 2.4% from the third quarter of 2023. Lower volume at Mississippi-based Ingalls Shipbuilding and Newport News Shipbuilding drove the decrease, but Mission Technologies’ growth partially offset it, according to HII.

HII also lowered its fiscal 2024 shipbuilding revenue expectations — from a range of $8.8 billion to $9.1 billion down to approximately $8.8 billion — because of uncertainty about the timing of a Navy contract on Virginia-class Block V and Block VI and Columbia-class submarines, supply chain delays and a less experienced workforce. The company increased its expected revenue from the Mission Technologies division, though, from a range of $2.75 billion to $2.8 billion to a range of $2.8 billion to $2.85 billion.

Defense tech startups close major funding rounds

Venture capital firms are betting big on two Northern Virginia-based defense contracting startups that are promising high-tech solutions to military challenges. In August, McLean-based Defcon AI announced it had raised $44 million in seed funding led by San Francisco investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners. The same month, Parry Labs in Alexandria raised $80 million in its first institutional funding round, led by Capitol Meridian Partners.

That both are headquartered in NoVa should come as no surprise, says Defcon AI CEO Yisroel Brumer, a quantum physicist who spent 15 years at the Pentagon before becoming a founding partner of Defcon AI’s parent tech incubator, Red Cell Partners. “The quality of senior leaders in the area is outstanding,” he says. 

Red Cell launched Defcon AI in 2022 to address the Department of Defense’s need to field operational artificial intelligence at scale to maintain advantages on the battlefield. Defcon’s first product is Artiv, an operational mission planner for contested logistics environments.

“There is a challenge integrating real operational defense expertise with real revolutionary software engineering. There’s a lot of organizations that have one of those two things. Very few organizations have both of them,” Brumer says. “And that’s what Defcon was really stood up to do: to bring in four-star generals, operators, people who deeply understand defense operations and the kind of revolutionary software engineering you see in Silicon Valley and create a culture where the two could talk to each other, which is actually the hard part and where the pain is.”

Meanwhile, Parry Labs was co-founded in 2015 by defense sector veteran-turned-entrepreneur John “JD” Parkes, who previously worked as airborne mission lead in the DOD’s Office of Strategic Capabilities.

“We wanted to make integrating and installing and implementing new software and systems on military applications significantly cheaper and faster. Today we call that or call ourselves a digital system integrator,” Parkes says. “What we’re focused on is delivering zero-trust cybersecurity environments over-the-air updates, really good standardization of data, and then easy accessibility to these environments for mission and safety critical environments.” 

The two companies are contributing to a record-breaking year in which defense tech startups in the U.S. raised $2.5 billion by August, according to data from Crunchbase.com. That figure surpasses the 2023 total of $2.1 billion and is on track to surpass 2022’s record high of $2.6 billion.

Raytheon wins $900M contract modification

The Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency has awarded a $900 million contract modification to Raytheon, a subsidiary of Arlington County’s RTX, according to a DOD notice posted Friday. 

Under the extension, Raytheon, a defense contractor that is also based in Arlington County, will continue operations and support for the Sea-based, X-band Radar (SBX 1), a nine-story, floating radar system that can detect and track ballistic missiles, and the 13 Army-Navy Transportable Radar Surveillance and Control Model 2 radar systems, which also detect and track ballistic missiles.  

The non-competitive two-year-extension will increase the ceiling of the indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract from $1.7 billion to $2.6 billion. The modification will extend the ordering period to Oct. 31, 2026, resulting in an overall contract ordering period of nine years.

In 2017, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Raytheon a $1.5 billion deal for operations and sustainment of the X-band Radar and the Army Navy Transportable Radar Surveillance Model 2 systems.

Work will be performed in Massachusetts and at multiple radar sites inside and outside the United States.

In 2020, Raytheon merged with United Technologies to form Raytheon Technologies. In 2022, the company relocated its global headquarters from Massachusetts to Arlington. The company rebranded as RTX in 2023.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Raytheon has agreed to pay more than $950 million to resolve multiple allegations that include fraud and bribing a Qatari official.

With more than 185,000 employees globally, RTX reported $68.9 billion in sales in 2023.

Leidos wins $331M Army IT contract

The U.S. Army has awarded a $331 million IT contract to Leidos to modernize its network, the Reston-based Fortune 500 federal contractor announced Monday.

The Army Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications and Network (PEO C3N), formerly known as the PEO C3T, awarded the contract, which has a one-year base period of performance with four one-year option periods for a total contract value of $331 million if all options are exercised. 

“We are proud to partner with the Army in deploying the Global Unified Network, which will enhance interoperability and security across all levels of operations,” Steve Hull, president of Leidos’ digital modernization sector, stated in a news release. “This initiative not only aligns with the Army’s Network Modernization Strategy but also aims to position us at the forefront of advancing military communication capabilities in an increasingly complex global landscape.”

The Army Unified Network plan, unveiled in 2021, addresses information technology, encompassing hardware, software and infrastructure. Using software-defined networking technologies, an approach that allows for the building and managing of networks with software, Army officials plan to transition to a zero trust cybersecurity model, and sunset the Joint Regional Security Stacks, an IT security program, according to Leidos. Under the contract, the Reston company will deploy the Army’s Global Unified Network to individual Army sites, delivering “a standardized, orchestrated modern network architecture.”

Leidos provides technology, engineering and science services to defense, intelligence, civil and health market customers. It has about 48,000 employees and reported approximately $15.4 billion in 2023 revenue.