GAO dismisses Northrop's protest over AFSOC radio frequency countermeasures program award

The Government Accountability Office earlier this month dismissed Northrop Grumman's bid protest alleging the Air Force unfairly chose BAE Systems to install radio frequency countermeasures equipment onto AC-130J and MC-130J aircraft, saying the company's arguments had no merit.

Northrop, whose $384.6 million offering earned the same engineering scores as BAE's $359.1 million offering, argued its proposal did not pose long-term risk and that the Air Force judged the bid using factors that were never discussed. Northrop learned the award would go to BAE Jan. 7.

"While Northrop Grumman clearly wishes that the competing factors considered, and judgments made, by the [source-selection authority] had led to a different selection decision, it has wholly failed to establish that the SSA's judgments and conclusions were unreasonable or contrary to the stated evaluation factors," GAO's May 1 report stated.

Radio frequency countermeasures would make Lockheed Martin's AC-130J gunship and MC-130J transport and tanker aircraft more survivable and allow them to "detect, identify, locate, deny, degrade, deceive, disrupt and defeat threat systems in operational environments," according to the program's statement of work.

The source-selection advisory council recommended that the SSA choose Northrop, but the top official believed BAE would offer a more mature system. GAO noted that a different source-selection staff, judging by different criteria, could easily have picked Northrop's submission.

The GAO and Air Force agreed that BAE offered the best value because its bid met all of the requirements, costs less and is less likely to face delays when integrating its system onto the aircraft.

"The record shows that the SSA was concerned with both Northrop Grumman's incomplete software/firmware coding and hardware design, as well as the necessary testing/integration and potential rework that could be required following completion of Northrop Grumman's unfinished efforts," the GAO report stated. "In this regard, the [source-selection advisory council], itself, expressly acknowledged that consideration of BAE’s more mature system architecture, along with Northrop Grumman’s 'design maturity risk' could lead to the reasonable selection of BAE’s solution."

As for Northrop's allegation that conversations with the Air Force were not meaningful and did not mention the service would ultimately consider factors like power consumption, GAO stated: "An agency is not obligated to 'spoon-feed' an offeror as to the particular manner in which each and every item could be revised."

The RFCM system is expected to reach initial operating capability on both aircraft in 2019.