Air Force awards 10-year data link contract

The Air Force has awarded nine companies positions on a potential 10-year, $496 million contract to help operate time-sensitive applications and tactical platforms used on the branch's data links community.

Ten bids were submitted for the Data Link Enterprise contract, the Defense Department said in its Tuesday contracts digest.

Vendors will focus on accommodating command-and-control data, signals intelligence, geospatial intelligence, full-motion video data and information capture.

Awardees are:

• BAE Systems Inc.
• Boeing’s PhantomWorks unit
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Cubic Corp.
• L3 Technologies
• Lockheed Martin
• Northrop Grumman
• Raytheon
• Rockwell Collins

The solicitation released in June also details requirements for research, system development, new system migration, anti-access/area denial strategy development, studies, analysis and expansion in the use of higher data rates for existing and emerging terminals.