Booz Allen Secures $506 Million Deal To Support Army’s MOSA Push For Aviation Fleet
Booz Allen Hamilton has been awarded a five-year, $506 million deal to support the Army’s push toward getting after Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA) approaches “at scale” across its aviation fleet.
Tim Lawrence, an executive vice president and the lead for Booz Allen’s Army business, told Defense Daily it will help the Army modernize its existing, enduring aviation fleet and drive advanced capabilities into new programs, like the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft and Future Tactical UAS, with MOSA serving as the “foundational” aspect of the work.
“A transformational part of the approach [with this work] is really this idea of using MOSA and driving MOSA at scale across [Program Executive Office] Aviation and through all their programs. And I say transformational because, to my knowledge, this is the first real at-scale, MOSA-focused contract at least in the Army, maybe in DoD,” Lawrence said.
Army aviation officials have cited moving away from bespoke, stovepiped configurations and embracing MOSA and open standards as critical to enabling rapid technology insertion and long-term cost savings on both future platforms and the enduring fleet.
“The Army’s very serious about driving modularity, driving open architectures, driving data standards, so we view this as a seminal program,” Lawrence said. “If we can prove the concept of driving the MOSA approach through both new programs and the existing fleet, you could take this and apply it to ground vehicles, sensors, communications.”
Under the contract, Booz Allen said it’s working with the Army’s PEO Aviation and Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team to “develop and integrate critical combat systems supporting Army aviation vertical lift capabilities,” with the MOSA-focused effort aiming to enhance “reliability, maintainability, quality, supportability, and interoperability for weapons systems while evaluating new technologies for potential implementation across a range of programs and responsibilities.”
The five-year $506 million deal is Booz Allen’s largest task order to date under the Air Force-led Information Analysis Center Multiple Award Contract (IAC MAC) vehicle, which Lawrence noted covers projects “designed to enhance the S&T and R&D community” and support the Defense Technical Information Center repository.
The task order was originally awarded last October, but was then contested in two subsequent protests by KBR, before the deal was re-awarded for the final time and Booz Allen began work earlier this spring.
Lawrence detailed Booz Allen’s approach to helping the Army’s push toward MOSA in its aviation programs, noting the company would take a “combat systems integrator-kind of role” that would leverage digital engineering, model-based systems engineering, cyber, AI and analytics.
“We really focused heavily on this idea of driving new capabilities in a horizontal way through the programs. Think of the traditional way of doing modernization and technology upgrades. You have [Original Equipment Manufacturers] (OEM), they own the entire stack of capability. If you want to upgrade a comms system or something in the software stack, you have to go through that OEM and basically do a vertical acquisition and modification. Our focus is trying to take concepts from S&T or experimentation or from prototyping and to see how you integrate those across multiple programs in a more horizontal fashion,” Lawrence told Defense Daily.
Booz Allen’s team for the work includes over 20 firms, with Lawrence touting the company’s decision to take a non-exclusive approach to assembling its partners for the project and utilizing its “very robust tech scouting and venture capital” arm of the business.
“We really have an open team,” Lawrence said. “No one on our team was exclusive to us and that’s the real break from traditional contracting that you see in DoD. So we’re able to pull in all of the traditional OEMs that have a stake in these programs, the technology companies, the start-ups, academia.”
“We really talked about the ability to not only bring the right capability from the right teammate depending on the platform or the technology, but also being able to onboard quickly,” Lawrence added, citing Anduril as one example of a partner working on the contract.
Lawrence said he sees this contract as a “concerted effort” on the part of the Army to further its MOSA push and that the work with PEO Aviation and FVL CFT is an opportunity “drive a set of transformative processes” that could be applied across the Army.
“I believe the Army is serious about getting this done. And this is going to be enduring, it isn’t going to be a flash in the pan,” Lawrence said.
Booz Allen is working through specifics now on deliverables and associated timelines with PEO Aviation and the FVL, Lawrence noted, with more details likely to be finalized through the end of 2024.
“I would like to think at the end of the five years that we have made significant progress in moving the Army toward a set of systematic processes to really effectively drive MOSA through programs of record in aviation [and] that we’ve accomplished a number of efforts and modernization and technology upgrades on existing and new platforms,” Lawrence told Defense Daily. “But I can’t imagine all the questions will be answered. [The aim is] this will move the Army from, ‘We know we want to do [MOSA]. It’s really important. It’s going to create more efficiency, more effectiveness, quicker responses and get us out of this sort of stovepiped approach for acquisition of platforms and upgrades and modernization,” to an approach of ‘We’ve really got it locked and loaded.’
A version of this story originally appeared in affiliate publication Defense Daily.
The post Booz Allen Secures $506 Million Deal To Support Army’s MOSA Push For Aviation Fleet appeared first on Avionics International.
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