General Dynamics wins $2 billion U.S. Army IT deal

The U.S. Army has awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $2 billion to General Dynamics to provide IT products to the U.S. federal government.

The contract creates a catalogue of IT products from a variety of vendors with prices negotiated by General Dynamics and the Army. The product list and prices will be updated throughout the life of the contract, spokesmen for General Dynamics and the Army said.

This contract benefits the Army by giving it a single point of contact for purchasing and customer service and by ensuring it is provided with the latest technology available, said Rod Matthews, contracting officer at the Army’s Aviation and Missile Command (AMCOM), on Thursday.

Moreover, General Dynamics has a proven track record of excellence with the federal government and needs no learning curve on how the federal government works and what it needs, Matthews said.

The products include both conventional IT products as well as “rugged” products, adapted to withstand severe weather conditions and to operate in difficult places, such as battlefields.

The most likely buyers of these products will be U.S. Department of Defense agencies, such as the Army, the Marine Corps and the Air Force, but all other federal agencies are also eligible to purchase from this catalogue.

The contract, announced Tuesday, is called the Army’s Common Hardware/Software III (CHS-3) and includes a broad variety of IT products, such as PCs, handheld devices, networking equipment, commercial software, application development tools, and printers.

Now in effect, CHS-3 replaces a similar 10-year contract called CHS-2 which ends in April 2005 and whose primary contractor is General Dynamics as well.

The Army isn’t bound to purchase a minimum amount from General Dynamics, so it’s hard to predict at this point whether the $2 billion maximum will be fulfilled, said Rob Doolittle, director of public affairs at General Dynamics, based in Falls Church, Va., on Wednesday

Orders on CHS-2 have so far amounted to almost $900 million, Doolittle said, adding that the contract’s ceiling is $1.7 billion.

The contracting authority is AMCOM, while the management is in charge of the Army’s Project Manager Army Tactical Operations Centers/Air and Missile Defense Command and Control Systems.

The contract was awarded to General Dynamics’ C4 Systems unit, which specializes in computing and communications systems for the defense industry. Other vendors involved in the General Dynamics contract include Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, and DRS Technologies. As the primary contractor, General Dynamics provides the products and adapts them as needed.