The Air Force has selected five companies to jointly develop capability upgrades for U.S. Cyber Command’s (CYBERCOM) new joint warfighting platform, a service spokesperson told Defense Daily, adding the new capability has reached its first milestone to offer 10 new tools for cyber units.
Maj. Bryan Lewis, an Air Force spokesman, confirmed Northrop Grumman [NOC], Lockheed Martin [LMT], General Dynamics [GD], ManTech [MANT] and Accenture [ACN] were each awarded two-year, $24 million contracts in February to provide Cyber Enterprise Services (CES) for Unified Platform, CYBERCOM’s first integrated warfighting system.
“Leveraging discrete activities-based deliveries, development teams will participate in an agile team-based approach to implement system improvements, delivering mission value frequently, cost-effectively, responsively, and with high quality,” Lewis told Defense Daily.
The Air Force is serving as the acquisition lead for Unified Platform, which will serve as an integrated system to bring together offensive, defensive and command and control operations for the Cyber Mission Forces across the services.
Unified Platform recently met its first milestone to deliver 10 new features that are already available to Cyber Mission Forces, according to Lewis, adding the Air Force is unable to disclose details on the new applications.
“As an agile acquisition, Unified Platform is in continuous integration/continuous delivery perpetually providing and delivering capability rapidly to cyber warriors,” Lewis said.
Northrop Grumman, which was previously awarded a $54.6 million contract to serve as the systems coordinator to build Unified Platform, announced last week that it was selected for CES to develop specific applications and analytics for the program (Defense Daily, April 18).
“As the system coordinator, Northrop is supporting the Unified Platform project management office to establish the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and to implement Scaled Agile Framework practices across the program,” Lewis said. “The award to Northrop under CES is separate and focuses on the development of capabilities through software development using the CI/CD pipeline the program office is developing with the System Coordinator.”