Recompeted
October 25, 20266 min readSubscribers

Why Would the Navy Compete Less Often?

NAVSEA amended its Multi-Ship Sustainment Partnership solicitation Friday night and moved proposals to Dec. 21. The structure underneath it hands groups of three to six DDG-51s to a single-award IDIQ, which means no fair opportunity, no synopsis, and one competitive event covering three years of Norfolk availabilities. The Navy wrote down why in its own market research.

In January 2010 the Navy signed a contract in Norfolk whose description nobody would write today. DDG NON-DOCKER NORFOLK MSMO, $278,821,067.75, Marine Hydraulics International.

One contract. One homeport. One class of ship, and every non-docking availability inside it.

That was Multi-Ship Multi-Option, and the Navy threw it out. In 2015 it moved to Multiple Award Contract-Multi Order, and GAO wrote the switch up that November: the old strategy "used cost-reimbursement contracts and was only competed among ship repair contractors every 5 years," while the new one would use firm-fixed-price contracts and "increased competition." Under MAC-MO, GAO recorded, NAVSEA "plans to compete orders for each availability."

Friday night NAVSEA amended a solicitation that walks it back.

What Friday Changed

N00024-26-R-4439 is the Multi-Ship Sustainment Partnership, issued by Portfolio Acquisition Executive Maritime for fleet maintenance availabilities and incremental SRAs on DDG-51 class ships homeported in Norfolk. The amended notice posted at 19:25:36Z on Oct. 23, and Amendment 0001 and did five things worth your calendar:

  • Moved the proposal due date from Nov. 30 to Dec. 21.
  • Stretched the deadline for Bidders Questions Set 3 to Nov. 9, which is the last date anyone gets to change the terms.
  • Added FAR 52.217-9 to Section I, so the ordering periods now carry an option to extend.
  • Posted answers to the Gate 1 questions as Attachment J-3.
  • Conceded that the reference discs at Attachment J-2, the work item plans and drawings, are "still under development."

So the technical library you would price against does not exist yet, and proposals are due in eight weeks.

The contract type is fixed price with award fees, and each award carries three one-year ordering periods.

The Navy intends up to three contracts in the Facilitized Lot, solicited full and open, and up to three in the Non-Facilitized Lot, solicited as a small business set-aside.

And every one of them is a single-award IDIQ.

"Why would a program office deliberately buy itself fewer competitions?"

NAVSEA answered that in writing nine months ago, in its own market research, and the answer is the most useful paragraph in the whole file.

The rest of this brief is for subscribers.

The specific solicitations, dockets, and dates to act on sit past this line.

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