The stakes are high because the 10-year “multi-award” contract is meant as an umbrella to modernize a wide swathe of Army software programs, although not all. The initial competition next year would select a pool of preferred vendors, who would then compete for individual programs’ software needs as “task orders” under the umbrella contract, with a maximum value of $10 billion.
This is an atrocious strategy. The Army is essentially contracting out their entire IT strategy. There is no level of oversight or incentive structure that will help an organization police such an ill defined contract.