Pentagon Awards $116.5 Million in Defense Contracts Tuesday

Byline: Richard Smith The Department of Defense awarded nine new defense contracts Tuesday, worth $116.5 million in total. The largest of these contracts went to privately-held defense contractor General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which was awarded a sole-source, firm-fixed-price contract worth $43.3 million to supply the U.S. Air Force with field retrofit kits for work on MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles by July 5, 2017. Only one publicly-traded defense contractor -- Exelis XLS -- benefitted from the remaining awards. But it won four of them, all related to space-monitoring radar systems operated by the U.S. Air Force. Specifically: a $9 million contract modification related to sustainment of the Globus II space radar system through Dec. 31, 2015. an $8.4 million contract modification to perform system sustainment on the C-6 space radar system, also running through Dec. 31, 2015. an $8.1 million contract modification funding sustainment work on the Air Force's Distributed Space Command and Control-Dahlgren system (through, you guessed it, Dec. 31, 2015). and finally, a $7.4 million contract modification for sustainment of Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) weapons systems. This one, too, runs through Dec. 31, 2015.