Twenty-Four Years on One Competition
Friday's board handed Northrop Grumman the Missile Defense Agency's IRBM/ICBM targets work through August 2035, one offer solicited and one received. The last time anyone else got to bid was March 2011, and the only public window to object ran sixteen days in February 2024.
Every other sole-source line on Friday's board named its authority.
The Navy cited 10 U.S. Code 3204(a)(1) four separate times: long lead materials for CVN 82, the Boeing flight control surface repair order, the USS Pinckney availability at NASSCO, the Virginia class turbine generator IDIQ. A fifth line, the Trident II modification, reached back for the superseded 2304(a)(1).
One line cited nothing at all.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Chandler, Arizona, $508,490,719, described only as "a noncompetitive, cost-plus-fixed-fee, cost reimbursable, and fixed-price-incentive contract." One offer solicited, one offer received.
Performance period September 2026 through August 2035.
That is nine years of flight test support for the Missile Defense Agency's Intermediate Range and Intercontinental Ballistic Missile targets, and it replaces a contract that has been running since March 2011 (chart below).
Which puts the requirement under contract from 2011 to 2035 on the strength of a single competition held twenty-four years before the work ends.
What 2011 Actually Looked Like
The competition MDA is still living off was not a formality.
The draft RFP went out July 2, 2009 as HQ0147-09-R-0011, with an industry day that August and two published rounds of Q&A. That draft got pulled and re-scoped by target class. A second draft, HQ0147-10-R-0023, ran industry days on October 18 and 19, 2010, collected "Target Concept" letters, pushed the interested-offeror feedback deadline to October 25, published three more Q&A sets, and offered courtesy MAP and PMAP audits at prime contractor facilities.
MDA signed HQ0147-11-C-0006 on March 7, 2011. Full and open competition, four offers received, NAICS 336414, guided missile manufacturing.
The award notice put it at "$1.1 billion if all options are exercised."
The winner was Orbital Sciences Corporation, 3380 South Price Road, Chandler.
Fifteen and a half years and 396 modifications later, that contract has drawn $1,525,805,288 in obligations against a face value MDA last stated at $1.922 billion. The company on it is Northrop Grumman, at 1575 South Price Road in the same town.
The contract number never changed.
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