RecompetedHow Defense Contracts Change Hands
Recompeted is a publication about the moment a defense contract comes up for grabs: the mechanisms that decide who keeps the work, read daily from the public record. Here is what we do and who it's for.
On June 24, the Space Force awarded Boeing $2 billion to build the next two MUOS narrowband communications satellites. Lockheed Martin had owned that constellation since 2004; it built all five satellites on orbit. An incumbency old enough to vote changed hands in a two-bid competition.
If the announcement surprised you, you weren't reading the record. In 2024 the Space Force paid both Boeing and Lockheed roughly $66 million each for competing preliminary designs. The moment that concept money split two ways, the record was telling you the incumbent would have to win its franchise back on the merits, and the real race was on, two years before any press release.
That gap, between what the record says and when the press says it, is where this publication lives.
What Recompeted is
Recompeted covers US defense procurement's recurring main event: the recompete, the moment an incumbent's contract comes up for grabs.
Everything we publish is built from the public record: FPDS and USAspending award data (end dates, modifications, bridge awards), SAM.gov solicitations and sources-sought notices, the GAO bid-protest docket, and the Pentagon's daily contract announcements. Each piece takes one movement in that record and walks the mechanism that produced it: the protest clock that just started, the option exercise that just bought an incumbent another year, the sources-sought that says an agency is shopping.
Underneath the daily coverage sits a maintained dataset: the expiration pipeline, every DoD prime contract above $50 million whose period of performance ends 6 to 24 months out. Today it holds 1,197 contracts carrying $437 billion (chart below). The first full edition of The Pipeline, published Saturday, carries the board; a new edition lands the first of every month, and as tracked recompetes get decided, a scoreboard of who held and who flipped compounds alongside it.
The coverage comes in a few recurring shapes, all short enough to read between meetings:
- Mechanism briefs: one live event traced through the machinery that produced it, ending with the solicitation numbers, docket numbers, and dates to check.
- The Recompete Radar: the raw feed of what moved across SAM.gov, the Pentagon announcements, the GAO docket, and FPDS, so you can cancel a monitoring chore or two.
- One-chart briefs: one number that moved, one house chart, and what it means for a pursuit decision.
- Spotlights: positive-only profiles of companies and program offices playing the game well.
- The Pipeline: the monthly board itself.
Who it's for
You, if the following describes your week: you run capture or BD at a defense prime or mid-tier, you price proposals, or you cover govcon names for a living, and some part of your job is knowing which expiring contracts matter, when an incumbent is genuinely vulnerable, and how protest and bridge dynamics move the timeline you are planning against.
We write to that reader as a peer. You will never catch this desk explaining what an IDIQ is.
What we are not
Honest scoping, once, so it never needs repeating: this is a newsletter, and it is not GovWin. There is no agency-forecast scraping at scale here, no opportunity scoring, no CRM integration.
What we build instead is the thing the expensive tools mostly don't: the public-data pipeline plus the read. The forecast platforms tell you everything an agency says it might buy; the trade press tells you what was announced yesterday. The interesting layer sits between them, in why contracts change hands, and it is visible in the record before it is visible anywhere else. MUOS is what that looks like once you know the sequence.
Final Thoughts
The wager behind this publication is simple: the procurement record is the most honest narrator in this industry, and almost nobody reads it end to end, every day, with memory.
We do. The archive already holds the first week of that reading: the mechanism behind a 21-year incumbency on Guam, the protest statistics every capture team should have taped up, a team that just took a $499 million franchise away from an incumbent, and the method post explaining how the watching works.
Free posts land in the open; the daily paid coverage and the monthly Pipeline run behind the subscription. Either way, welcome.
Thanks for reading.