Eleven Seats, Eleven Thousand Dollars
Army Contracting Command put all three lanes of its live training vehicle up for a possible open season this morning, with responses due Oct. 7. One of those lanes holds Lockheed, General Dynamics, Cubic and HII, carries a $378.7 million ceiling, and has issued $11,000 of work in the 540 days since award. Here is what a seat on each lane has actually earned, before you spend two weeks trying to win one.
Three sources-sought notices went up on SAM this morning within six minutes of each other. Same contracting office, same NAICS, same response deadline.
Same program, cut three ways.
None of them is a recompete. Army Contracting Command's APG-Orlando division is asking whether it should hold an open season on the Live Training, Ranges, and Combat Training Centers multiple-award contracts, the vehicles the Capability Program Executive Simulation, Training, Test and Threat buys its range instrumentation and targetry through.
The notices are careful about it. "The Government has not determined whether it will conduct an open season or make additional awards."
Responses are due Oct. 7 at 4:00pm ET, fourteen calendar days from posting. What they want is a capability statement, your size status under NAICS 333310, your ISO 9001 certificate, and an entity-level government property plan.
So the question in front of anyone who fields range equipment is whether that is two weeks well spent.
"What is a seat on this thing actually worth?"
What the Three Lanes Actually Are
The split is by complexity and by who is allowed to bid:
- LTRaC MAC 1 is a small business set-aside for target lifters. Stationary and moving infantry targets, stationary and moving armor targets, range-control computers, the live-fire hardware itself. Four holders: Inveris, Riptide Software, Shock Stream, Theissen Training Systems. Ceiling $359,827,053, awarded May 5, 2025.
- LTRaC MAC 2 is a small business set-aside for what the notice calls "less-complex" instrumentation refresh. FASIT, DRTS, HITS, JPMRC-IS, CTC-IS, STE-LTS, aviation instrumentation, RF player units, and the Marine Corps' RISCON-T. Twelve holders. Ceiling $344,119,306, awarded Nov. 27, 2024.
- LTRaC MAC 3 is full and open, for complex life-cycle support across multiple sites and subsystems. Eleven holders, and the marquee is there: Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics One Source, Cubic, HII Mission Technologies, Saab, Vertex, Tyto, Corps Solutions, plus Riptide, Theissen and Shock Stream again. Ceiling $378,719,231, awarded April 1, 2025.
Combined, that is $1.08 billion of ceiling sitting across twenty-seven seats, all of it at the same buying office, all of it inside eight-year ordering windows that run into 2032 and 2033.
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