The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) denied a protest by Lockheed Martin over the U.S. Navy’s selection of the Northrop Grumman RQ-4N Global Hawk UAV for the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) contract. The ruling allows Northrop to proceed with the $2.3 billion system design and development phase of BAMS. The ruling by the GAO also revealed significant performance problems by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) on multiple contracts to supply Predator, Reaper and I-Gnat UAVs and their associated ground control stations to the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army.
Lockheed Martin’s proposal for BAMS was based on the Mariner UAV, a development of the Reaper to be produced by GA-ASI. The Navy found that Lockheed’s proposal promised to be significantly less expensive to develop, produce and operate–$15.8 billion versus $20.9 billion. But the Northrop proposal had a strong technical advantage (the most important evaluation factor) and a significant advantage under the past performance evaluation (the second most important factor). The Navy said that three jet-powered Global Hawks could provide an effective time on station (ETOS) of 96.2 percent versus 84.6 percent for four turboprop-powered Mariners. The Global Hawk also provided superior margins for space, weight and power.
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