Who Competes for Work at a Plant They Already Run?

If you build for the Army's ammunition plants, eleven contract numbers landed while you were asleep.

Army Contracting Command Rock Island awarded 11 indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity Multiple-Award Task Order Contracts on November 5, then published each one to SAM as its own award notice between 00:28 and 00:41 Zulu the next morning. Thirteen minutes for the entire slate.

The scope is design, build, facility modernization and commissioning across the seven government-owned, contractor-operated Army ammunition plants: Holston, Iowa, Lake City, Milan, Quad City Cartridge Case Facility, Radford and Scranton.

Base ordering period runs 1,826 calendar days. Every notice carries the same number, $4,171,491,000, and the same set-aside, which is none.

Seat five went to BAE Systems Ordnance Systems Inc. of Kingsport, Tennessee.

Kingsport is Holston.

The Route This Work Used to Take

Before there was a pool, there was an operator, and the operator got the work.

Pull the modernization and construction task orders ACC-Rock Island has written at Radford Army Ammunition Plant since late 2022 and you get four of them, all to BAE Systems Ordnance Systems, all out of contracting office code W519TC, which is the same office that just awarded the pool. Together they carry $674.7 million on the record (chart below).

Offers received on every single action of all four: one.

The shape of those orders matters more than the dollars. W519TC23F0017, the new chemical grind facility, was signed in November 2022 as an undefinitized contract action and definitized by modification four years later. W519TC23F0174, solvent sustainment phase II, opened at $16.3 million and then grew through an unpriced change order, two separate increases to the not-to-exceed ceiling, and a mod whose stated purpose was to raise the obligated value to 90 percent of that ceiling.

That is the pattern a UCA produces. Work starts before price is agreed, the ceiling moves, definitization arrives when it arrives.

DFARS subpart 217.74 is the governing text and it is stricter on paper than the record reads. 217.7404-2 requires a not-to-exceed price. 217.7404-3(a) wants definitization inside 180 days of a qualifying proposal, extendable by 90 more only on a written determination from the head of the contracting activity. 217.7404-4(a) caps obligations at 50 percent of the NTE price before definitization, or 75 percent where the contractor got a qualifying proposal in first.

Worth noting that 217.7401 defines a contract action to include task and delivery orders, so none of this is escaped by calling it an order.

What Eleven Seats Change

A pool replaces the justification with a competition.

Under FAR 16.505(b)(1)(i), the contracting officer has to give every awardee a fair opportunity to be considered for each order above the micro-purchase threshold. There are exceptions and the CO gets, in the regulation's own words, "broad discretion in developing appropriate order placement procedures," including streamlined ones and oral presentations.

So the practical change for a builder is concrete. The next chemical grind facility has to be offered to eleven companies, and ten of them have never had to price that plant before.

The eleven, with their seat numbers:

• Clark Construction Group (DA005), Burns & McDonnell (DA009), Hensel Phelps (DA012), Alberici Constructors (DA013)
• J. Kokolakis Contracting (DA007), M.C. Dean (DA008), Parsons Government Services (DA010)
• Bering-Weston JV (DA011), Applied Research Associates (DA016), MSM Group North America (DA015)
• BAE Systems Ordnance Systems (DA014)