Lockheed Martin [LMT] has received a potential five-year, $82.5 million follow-on contract to provide continued support to the Defense Department’s National Cyber Range (NCR), which allows cyber security tools to be evaluated and malicious software code to be introduced and studied.
The Pentagon on May 23 announced a $14.2 million award to Lockheed Martin for the NCR but the Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), which serves as the contracting activity, put the overall value of the contract at $82.5 million over the five years. The Pentagon in May said the initial obligation of FY ’14 funds for the NCR work is $5.6 million.
The work will be done for the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Training and Logistics, Test Resource Management Center, which took over management of the NCR from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2013.
Lockheed Martin in 2009 received an initial development contract for the NCR and then was picked in 2010 to complete development of the range. The NCR can be scaled and reconfigured and provides a 10 to 20 times reduction in the time and cost to evaluate new cyber tools while improving confidence in the real-world performance of these tools,” PEO STRI said.
PEO STRI said in its justification of a non-competitive follow-on contract to Lockheed Martin that the DoD Director of Operational Test and Evaluation estimates the potential savings of $3 billion to the current classified cyber portfolio by sticking with the company for NCR support. The Army office also said that in 2012
ManTech International [MANT] had expressed interest in competing for the NCR follow-on work but was rejected because the company’s “stated capabilities do not address the full scope of the NCR requirements.” It also said that if the NCR assets were transitioned to ManTech the related costs would be “substantial” and the delays “unacceptable.”
PEO STRI said the estimated DoD cyber budget in FY ’14 is $30 billion.