In one fell swoop, the United States Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) awarded over 140 contracts valued at $17.5 billion late last month.
The Simulation and Training Omnibus Contract (STOC II) is meant to serve as contracting vehicle with a life of ten years to quickly procure S&T technology for U.S. and coalition service members. “The overall purpose of STOC II is to have highly-qualified contractors on-hand to rapidly satisfy the needs of our nation’s Warfighters,” explained Brian Murphy, the PEO STRI contracting officer responsible for STOC II in a statement.
STOC II contained two contractor tiers – Full and Open Lot and the Partial Small Business Set Aside (SBSA) Lot. It seems the Full and Open Lot housed every well-known contractor in the known universe: Northrop Grumman, CACI, SAIC, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, are among the 127 companies listed in Full and Open Lot. The SBSA Lot listed 98 companies, many of whom were small business listed on the Full and Open Lot list, because small businesses listed on the Full and Open list are eligible to compete with those on the SBSA Lot list.
Simulation and Training technology is ripe area of the defense sector according to many industry analysts. Because S&T is intertwined with other areas of importance, like robotics, neuroscience, and supercomputing, the military is going to be investing billions of dollars in research and development in the coming years. In a recent special report by Washington Technology, Dr. John Parmentola, Director for Research and Laboratory Management for the Army, talked about S&T application to a broader spectrum. “What we are trying to do is to build training environments that deal with human variability to try to most effectively and efficiently train soldiers to certain standards. So this gets pretty sophisticated in terms of the way we will train our soldiers in the future.” Through development of simulation technology, the army is trying to understand the “software of the brain.”
“If we can understand the software of the brain, if you want to call it software, how the brain operates, how it does things, and then once we understand that, we can embed that into a fairly wide range of systems,” Dr. Parmentola told Washington Technology.
As the DOD budget gets diced over the next few months, rest assured that money will be there for S&T development, and a lot of it.
[...] The same comments have come down from execs at SAIC, CSC, L-3, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and others. As to what the first deliverables under STOC II, PEO STRI has posted a number of Sources Sought notices and draft documents, but haven’t yet posted any Request for Proposals (RFPs). Most of the sources sought close by the end of this month or early April, and they range from aircraft and vehicle simulation to soldier-worn equipment used in situations not unlike laser tag. [...]