Pentagon Awards $3.51 Billion in Contracts Wednesday

Rich Smith, The Motley Fool
Updated
Pentagon Awards $3.51 Billion in Contracts Wednesday

The Department of Defense announced contracts worth $3.51 billion on Wednesday. It awarded a staggering 64 separate contracts in all, enough to easily eclipse the record for most contracts awarded in a day, which was set... yesterday.

The biggest award by far went to a legislatively defined "small business" called Kipper Tool of Gainesville, Ga., which won a contract worth up to $976 million to supply the Defense Logistics Agency with "commercial type construction equipment." And yet, large publicly traded firms also got their fair share of Pentagon dollars. For example:

  • Becton Dickinson was awarded a $76.8 million option-year exercise -- the second of seven possible -- to supply the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and federal civilian agencies with "various medical and surgical products" through Sept. 28, 2014.

  • United Technologies won a pair of contracts worth $21.8 million in total. The company will supply the U.S. Air Force with up to $13.9 million worth of "aircraft engine turbine nozzle segment replenishment spares" through Aug. 31, 2016, as well as up to $7.9 million worth of "aircraft engine compressor blade set replenishment spares" through Aug. 30, 2015.

  • NCI won a $16.3 million firm-fixed-price, non-option-eligible, non-multiyear contract to support the Army National Guard Training Division and its Distributed Learning Program.

  • KBR was awarded a $14.2 million contract modification to provide base operation support services at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and Manda Bay in Kenya through June 2017. The work to be performed will include everything from supporting security operations, emergency management, and fire/emergency services, to managing ordnance and supplies, to maintaining the physical plant, running food and laundry services, and organizing morale and recreation.

  • And in perhaps the most interesting contract of all, the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, a pharmaceutical research organization owned by Novartis proper, won a "technology investment agreement" worth $13.2 million for its work on DARPA's Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics: Prophylactic Options to Environmental and Contagious Threats (ADEPT-PROTECT) program. ADEPT-PROTECT aims to confer immunity from a specific pathogen through administering a dose of mRNA or a self-amplifying mRNA-based vector, to encode a neutralizing antibody into a human to protect it. Novartis will be working on this project through Sept. 29, 2016.

The article Pentagon Awards $3.51 Billion in Contracts Wednesday originally appeared on Fool.com.

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