Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] said last week that the U.S. Air Force had awarded the company a $315 million contract for their collaboration on Phase II of a prototype Tactical Operations Center-Light (TOC-L) for the service’s Advanced Battle Management System effort. The company’s main subcontractor for TOC-L is L3Harris Technologies [LHX].
TOC-L is to be light and allow military forces to speed the establishment of data links and connections with military/commercial sensors when the forces deploy.
“Booz Allen’s TOC-L prototype will use the company’s Modular Detachment Kit (MDK) concept as its foundation to securely connect sensors, decision makers, and weapons at the edge,” the company said. “MDK is a fielded capability that has demonstrated significant mission impact in live-fire exercises and operational deployments.”
Testing of MDK with the Air Force and U.S. Army stretch back to 2022 and has included “20 large-scale exercises and experiments,” according to Steve Escaravage, the president of Booz Allen’s Defense Technology Group (Defense Daily, Oct. 24, 2022).
“To accelerate the development and fielding of this critical capability for the nation’s warfighters, Booz Allen will leverage its C2 Tech Facility in North Charleston, South Carolina and its Flagship Engineering Facility in Panama City Beach, Fla.,” the company said. “These are part of the company’s network of more than 20 U.S.-based tech facilities nationwide.”
With expertise in tactical radios, datalinks, waveform development and “deployable digital infrastructure, L3Harris will support sustainment and modernization of TOC-L across multiple combatant commands,” the company said.
“We are finally starting to get real capability into the pipeline, and the TOC-L is a great example of how we are turning prototyping and experimentation into real capability,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Luke Cropsey, the Department of the Air Force’s program executive officer for command, control, communications and battle management, posted on LinkedIn last week. “Now we need to speed it up by 10x!”
The service said that it is field testing 16 TOC-L prototypes in Phase I. The Air Force’s TPY-4 radars by Lockheed Martin [LMT] and TOC-L are to be significantly lighter than current TPS-75 radars and their required air picture support.
In May, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) rejected a protest by Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen of an Air Force $293 million award to Science Applications International Corp. [SAIC] last year in the second round of the service’s competition to find an integrator for TOC-L (Defense Daily, May 9).
Lockheed Martin has been the integrator for TOC-L Phase I–a three-year effort that began in January 2023 and includes procurement of the 16 TOC-L experimental systems and their integration with sensors. Lockheed Martin contended that SAIC’s position as the cloud-based command and control (CBC2) contractor for the Air Force and SAIC’s membership in the digital infrastructure consortium create an organizational conflict of interest (OCI), but GAO agreed with the Air Force that the service’s systems engineering and design review processes had “mitigated” any OCI.
