The U.S. Air Force has abruptly canceled a highly competitive cybersecurity tech solicitation worth at least $5 billion just before crossing the finish line due to an overwhelming number of proposals from the private sector.
The Air Combat Command, one of nine major commands in the Air Force, decided to pull the plug on the $5 billion Enterprise Cyber Capabilities (EC2) contract competition more than 18 months after it began. It said the 250 proposals it received were an unmanageable number for the service to evaluate and process.
In a notice on SAM.gov, the Air Force said it “gave deliberate consideration to the cancellation of this solicitation and the facts support this cancellation as being in the best interest of the Government.”
“While it is good that the requirement generated significant industry interest with over 250 proposals received, the established acquisition strategy and evaluation methodology were not suitable to result in a manageable number of prime contract awards,” the notice states.
“It is in neither the U.S. Air Force’s nor industry’s best interest to award far more prime contracts than the program and its supporting workforce can properly administer and for which sufficient competitive opportunities are projected to provide fair opportunity to a significant number of prime contractors,” the notice says.
The Air Force intended to use the EC2 contract for command-and-control, planning and operations, vulnerability research, full-spectrum testing, software and tool development, modeling and simulation, and threat assessment.
The Air Force released the pre-solicitation in March 2022. Six months later, the final solicitation went live and proposals were due in January 2023. Along the way, there were multiple amendments and updates. Until the cancellation, the Air Force indicated it was in the source selection process.
During the solicitation phase, companies pursuing the contract had spent two years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs before the Air Force abruptly canceled the cyber contract.
According to the Air Force, it considered other approaches to amend the solicitation, but the changes would’ve required the service branch “to reissue the solicitation and industry to incur additional proposal costs for this requirement.”
“Analysis is ongoing to determine the best means, be it another solicitation or existing vehicle, to fulfill cyber requirements that were originally projected for EC2,” the notice states.
