Another company is challenging the Defense Information Systems Agency’s decision to expand the scope of Leidos’ $11 billion Defense Enclave Services contract to include combatant commands.
Competitive Range Solutions, LLC, filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office on Oct. 8, GAO records show.
The company argues that the agency should have competed the combatant command network migration work instead of adding it to Leidos’ existing contract.
The company says the sole source is the result of the agency’s lack of adequate advanced planning and that DISA unreasonably bundled additional work.
The bid protest follows DISA’s renewed effort to award the combatant command migration work to Leidos without competition after the agency conducted a market research effort in response to another protest filed by General Dynamics Information Technology in July.
DISA first attempted to add work to the Enclave contract, which supports Fourth Estate network modernization efforts, in June, after Defense Department Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies directed the agency to transition all combatant commands’ common-use IT services to the Defense Department Network by the end of fiscal 2028.
At the time, the agency said expanding the Enclave contract was “the only viable contracting alternative.”
GDIT argued in its protest that DISA should have competed the requirement to migrate 11 combatant commands to DoDNet rather than handing the work to Leidos. The protest challenged DISA’s failure to conduct market research and a new pricing determination.
The protest was later dismissed after DISA said it would conduct new market research, make a new acquisition approach decision, develop a new acquisition plan and take any additional corrective action deemed necessary.
The agency later released two sources sought notices asking industry questions about their ability to migrate the geographic and functional combatant commands into the DoDNet architecture, whether they can meet the Defense Department’s mandated Sept. 30, 2028, deadline, stand up a workforce capable of deploying globally and execute the migrations without disrupting combatant commands’ ongoing operations.
DISA moved quickly through that process – the agency gave industry several days to respond to the first sources sought notice and only 24 hours to respond to the second notice. The pace at which the agency is moving has prompted questions about whether real market research was the agency’s true intent.
Competitive Range Solutions filed its protest after DISA determined once again that Leidos was the only company capable of transitioning all combatant commands to the Defense Department Network.
“Leidos is uniquely qualified to provide the highly specialized services required to execute the combatant commands migrations due to its embedded and specialized knowledge of the Defense Department Network architecture,” the agency said in its latest justification for the noncompetitive contract modification document.
“Leidos has the institutional knowledge of the DoDNet architecture that enables them to rapidly adapt the DoDNet automation scripts to accelerate migrations. As such, Leidos is the only responsible source capable of meeting the [Defense Department chief information officer] migration deadlines, in place to migrate the [DoD] to a zero-trust compliance environment and provide network security that has been exacerbated by AI,” the agency added.
A source familiar with the matter told Federal News Network that consolidating all the geographic and functional combatant commands into a common architecture is complex and fundamentally different from building a common environment for back-office functions, which is what the Enclave contract does.
There is also skepticism around whether DoDNet can support all the combatant commands and whether it is the right end state for an eventual consolidation.
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