The Defense Information Systems Agency is once again trying to add the combatant command network migration work to Leidos’ $11 billion Defense Enclave Services contract. 

In a justification document published on Monday, DISA said Leidos was the only company capable of transitioning all combatant commands to the Defense Department Network.

“No other vendor provided responses that demonstrated it could provide these services to the scale, magnitude and speed required by the government,” DISA wrote. “More specifically, no other respondent, other than Leidos, was able to illustrate an approach that mitigated technical risk associated with conducting both automated endpoint and network migrations and implementing training and adoption measures that support uninterrupted mission operations.”

The justification comes after General Dynamics Information Technology challenged DISA’s decision to add the combatant command work to Leidos’ existing contract, arguing that the agency should have conducted market research and competed the new work given the scale of the effort.

The bid protest was dismissed after DISA agreed to take corrective action, including conducting market research, making a new acquisition approach decision and developing a new acquisition plan.

DISA subsequently launched the market research portion of the corrective action, addressing one of GDIT’s complaints. The agency said 24 companies responded to its sources sought notice that asked industry questions about their qualifications to migrate the geographic and functional combatant commands into the DoDNet architecture, including whether they can meet the Defense Department’s mandated Sept. 30, 2028, deadline and execute the migrations without disrupting combatant commands’ ongoing operations.

Some questioned the pace at which the agency was moving. For instance, the agency only gave industry 24 hours to respond to its second sources sought. 

A source familiar with the matter said the agency’s approach called into question whether real market research was the agency’s true intent.  

After taking those steps, however, the agency’s new justification document once again looks to add the combatant command migration work to Leidos’ massive contract.

DISA said that in order to migrate combatant commands by 2028, a vendor would need access to the author of the migration script to “effectively adapt the DoDNet automation scripts, Active Directory schemas, and Identity, Credential and Access Management structures that currently exist within DoDNet.”

“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,” DISA said.

“Transition to a new contractor would result in unacceptable delays in fulfilling the agency’s critical requirements. These delays will limit the successful and timely completion of the expanded migration tasks to the combatant commands,” the agency added.

DISA also said that competing the work would result in about $15 million in duplicative costs.

In addition, the agency said this contract action would not increase the $11.5 billion ceiling.

Skeptics questioned whether DoDNet is prepared to support the combatant commands.

Developing services that can support combatant commands will also be fundamentally different from building a common environment for back-office functions, which is what the Enclave effort is currently focused on.

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