The Defense Intelligence Agency recently announced that 16 companies will share in a potential $17 billion contract that covers a broad range of work involving highly sensitive information and missions.
The winners include Huntington Ingalls Industries, which might not be an easy guess.
The company is better known for building aircraft carriers and submarines at its Newport News shipyard, but this win marks the latest step forward in the company’s effort to diversify beyond the waterfront.
The DIA contract was directly awarded to Fulcrum IT Services, a 400-employee company based in Centreville that HII acquired in February in a move to expand its non-shipbuilding portfolio.
Fulcrum now falls under the company’s Technical Solutions division. Of the 41,000 people employed across HII, about 6,000 work in Technical Solutions. The units in this division span a variety of work, from jobs under the Department of Energy to the development of unmanned mini-submarines.
The DIA contract has a base period of five years. The 16 companies will compete for individual task orders during that time, so the potential value to HII isn’t yet known.
Garry Schwartz, a group president in Technical Solutions, said the work could involve analyzing intelligence or weapons systems, looking at potential threats or providing services such as translation — and more.
“It’s a broad spectrum,” he said.
Fulcrum came to the HII’s attention after stringing together a series of contract wins. In 2016, it secured intelligence-analysis work for U.S. Special Operations Command. Earlier this year, just before HII completed the acquisition, Fulcrum won a contract for work at the Joint Intelligence Operations Center in South Korea, providing all manner of intelligence work there.
“They really built themselves up one win at a time in fairly quick order,” Schwartz said. “They went from some obscurity in the intel community to being fairly successful quickly.”
HII announced the formation of its Technical Solutions division in late 2016. Prior to that, a number of smaller units were buried under the shipbuilding giant. That included a technical services company in Virginia Beach, a ship repair and modernization outfit in San Diego and a Florida-based firm that markets a specialized submarine.
But when the company acquired the Camber Corp., a government services company based in Huntsville, Ala., gave them enough critical mass to stand up a separate unit, and so Technical Solutions was born.
Among its notable wins: being a subcontractor on a potential $25 billion contract to operate and manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and working with Boeing to develop a new extra-large undersea submersible for the Navy.
Hugh Lessig, 757-247-7821, hlessig@dailypress.com
