By Emelie Rutherford
The Coast Guard said Tuesday it is fully committed to a schedule for ending its use of lead-system integrators (LSI) as Congress continues to seek legal limits on the service’s use of such contractual arrangements.
Assistant Commandant for Acquisition Rear Adm. Ronald Rabago said the service continues to assume LSI responsibilities for its Deepwater ship-aircraft-system system modernization effort–formerly steered by a Northrop Grumman [NOC]-Lockheed Martin [LMT] LSI called Integrated Coast Guard Systems (ICGS)–and finding synergies between Deepwater and non-Deepwater acquisitions.
“Pretty soon, we really won’t be talking about those two things as separate entities, it’ll be just our acquisition effort as we go forward,” Rabago told reporters at Coast Guard offices in Washington.
After ICGS encountered cost overruns, delays, and technical problems with Deepwater, the Coat Guard in April 2007 announced it would take over the LSI role from the corporate team and bring those responsibilities in-house.
The House passed a Coast Guard authorization bill last month that would place statutory limits on LSIs, setups that have fallen out of favor under which private companies coordinate and manage work of other contractors and subcontractors for the government.
The bill states the Coast Guard cannot use a LSI for an acquisition contract, delivery order, or task order starting 180 days after the bill’s enactment. However, the bill allows varied exceptions under which LSIs could be used, including to complete General Dynamics‘ [GD] Rescue 21, a maritime 911 emergency radio system, and the second and third National Security Cutters (NSCs) started under ICGS (Defense Daily, Oct. 26).
Rabago declined Tuesday to comment much on the pending legislation, other than to say: “Many of the things that are in the language are things that…we see value (in) and we are looking at or we’ve already done.”
Shortly after the Coast Guard announced it would drop ICGS as the Deepwater LSI two years ago, it entered into a second installment of its contract with the industry team as it continued to phase out the LSI setup. Rabago said yesterday that that award term with ICGS, which allows the service to issue delivery task orders, will officially end in January 2011 and will not be extended any further.
“The amount of delivery task orders we’ve issued and continue to issue has declined markedly, until we’re down to just what we need to keep the existing assets going,” he said. “Essentially, we intend not to award, obviously, another award term after January ’11.”
The contract for the fourth NSC, which the service expects to negotiate this month, will be placed with Northrop Grumman, not ICGS, he said.
“So really what we have is some finishing work to do on the existing (Deepwater) contracts that were delivery task orders we’ve issued before, and we need to finish that out in a way that makes sense,” he said.
The Coast Guard also still has a LSI-type relationship with General Dynamics for Rescue 21.
“That contract is scheduled to end in approximately 2012 with the delivery of the last contracted-for pieces,” Rabago said. “And we’re in the process obviously of already supporting existing assets and figuring out how we’re going to do the pieces that we are not going to be contracting with the prime contractor in that area.”