In This Week’s Newsletter:
- Opportunity Spotlight of the Week: DON FTSS VI
- Four To Follow: Four Interesting Pursuits
- Capture Corner: Capture Planning for DoW Leadership Churn
- Pricing Insights: Why a Competitive Assessment Is the Backbone of Price-to-Win
Opportunity Alert – DON FTSS VI
Contact Katie: katie.clatterbuck@hinzconsulting.com
Department of the Navy, Naval Air Systems Command, Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division, Fielded Training Systems Support VI (FTSS VI).
The Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division is preparing FTSS VI, a multiple-award contract supporting Navy and Marine Corps fielded training systems. Services include contractor operation and maintenance, instructional support, training device relocation, training systems management, modifications, spares and product support, in-service engineering office support, and training device demilitarization and disposal. The Government anticipates approximately 19 known follow-on task orders valued at roughly $2.8B over an eight-year support period, with additional Navy, Marine Corps, and Foreign Military Sales task orders expected. This effort is currently identified as a partial small business set-aside, with final set-aside decisions pending market research. The final RFP is expected in June 2027, with an estimated award in June 2028. Reach out to Hinz Consulting for any Capture Management, Competitive Analysis, Price to Win, or Proposal support. Continue to monitor SAM.gov and PIEE for updates on this opportunity.
Four to Follow
- Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Information and Technology, Onboarding, Management, Engineering, Governance, and Assurance Services (OMEGA 2.0). The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning OMEGA 2.0 as a follow-on effort to scale the Digital Transformation Center and expand support across additional cloud technologies, including SaaS, PaaS, and emerging platforms. The contractor will provide standards, governance, operations, maintenance, platform management, engineering, license management, sustainment, technology adoption, end user support, and AI governance and assurance services across a large 24/7/365 environment supporting more than 100,000 users and over 200 applications. This $999M opportunity includes a 12-month base, four 12-month option periods, and 24 optional tasks. The set-aside has not been determined, though VA is evaluating potential SDVOSB set-aside capability. The final RFP is estimated for release in December 2026, with an estimated award in September 2027.
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Glenn Research Center, Space Power and Reactor Capabilities (SPARC). NASA Glenn Research Center issued a draft RFP for the SPARC multiple-award IDIQ on August 30, 2026. This effort supports development of nuclear power systems for use in space and on the lunar surface, with the primary purpose of maturing, testing, and designing flight technology for the Lunar Reactor-1 program. Work may include definition, design, development, analysis, fabrication, assembly, testing, verification, delivery, operation, and related ground development activities for space systems and supporting equipment. The Government anticipates multiple IDIQ awards with firm-fixed-price task orders for the first Lunar Reactor-1 phase. This Full and Open/Unrestricted opportunity has an undetermined value and is set for final RFP release on November 15, 2026, with an estimated award on April 15, 2027. Comments on the draft are due September 28, 2026, and an industry day is planned for September 14, 2026.
- Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Office of Information Technology, Enterprise Gateway and Integration Services III (EGIS III). USCIS is preparing EGIS III as the next generation enterprise integration backbone connecting USCIS internal systems with DHS components, interagency partners, and authorized external entities. The contractor will design, develop, modernize, secure, operate, and maintain a cloud-hosted integration platform supporting enterprise services and more than 100 microservices. Scope includes enterprise integration and orchestration, cloud-native and DevSecOps enablement, data integrity and governance, AI-enabled anomaly detection, advanced targeting and risk scoring, investigative data pipelines, and AI-assisted case processing. This $73.96M task order opportunity may use Federal Supply Schedule ordering procedures under FAR 8.4, with eligibility likely limited to Schedule holders. The set-aside has not been determined. The solicitation is estimated for release in January 2027, with an estimated award in March 2027.
- Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate, Enterprise Resource Planning Common Services (ERP CS). The Air Force Business and Enterprise Systems Directorate is seeking a contractor to build, integrate, and sustain Enterprise Resource Planning Common Services on the Cloud One Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. Work includes design, development, deployment, documentation, implementation, integration, automation, cybersecurity, maintenance, sustainment, transition management, and collaboration with the program office, DISA, Cloud One, and original equipment manufacturers. Sustainment includes service, storage, database, capacity, backup and restore, patching, disaster recovery, incident management, and troubleshooting support. This $192.4M Full and Open/Unrestricted task order is expected to include a one-year base and four one-year options, with performance at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The solicitation is expected in January 2027, with an estimated award in January 2028.
Capture Planning for DoW Leadership Churn
Contact Nick: nick.mccauley@hinzconsulting.com
Good capture teams already built for the reality that their champions will rotate. A PEO or program office command tour typically runs two to three years, so relationship continuity is never guaranteed on the military side. Civilian leadership tends to stick around longer — SES and career program leads regularly outlast two or three rotations of their uniformed counterparts.
What’s different right now isn’t that “eventually, leaders leave”. It’s the rate, and the reason.
For example, the Army has gone from ten active-duty four-star generals in January 2025 to five today. Overall, Secretary of War Hegseth has removed or sidelined more than a dozen admirals and generals since taking office, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Army Chief of Staff.
Capture must account for increased churn.
1. Distinguish Expected Rotation from Unexpected Churn Normal command turnover is a schedule you can plan around. What we’re seeing now is different — early reliefs, compressed timelines, and vacancies left unfilled rather than backfilled on the usual cadence. Treat the two differently in your capture plan: scheduled rotations get a transition plan; abnormal churn gets a contingency plan.
2. Track Vision Shift, Not Just Vacancies A new leader rarely just fills a seat — they shift what the program is optimizing for, and how your company needs to position to match it. This is more than an interpersonal read right now: DoW’s ongoing restructuring is replacing Program Executive Officers with Portfolio Acquisition Executives who have explicit authority to move funding across programs, waive non-statutory requirements, and prioritize a “good enough now” solution over a “perfect later” one. Vision shift used to be a soft, personality-driven read. It’s becoming a structural feature of the job itself — every leadership change is now also a live question: what does this specific portfolio structure reward, and does our positioning still answer it?
3. Read the Risk Appetite Before You Assume It A leader installed after a high-profile relief can move in either direction — some become protective and risk-averse, sticking with safe, proven vendors to avoid becoming the next headline. Others lean into the aggressive change mandate that got their predecessor removed, actively seeking new entrants and unproven solutions to signal a break from the old approach. The Pentagon’s own acquisition reform language — explicitly favoring speed and new competition over incumbency — suggests which direction leadership is being pushed institutionally, even before you know the individual. Don’t assume risk tolerance. Read it.
4. Diversify Advocacy Beyond a Single Champion A pursuit built entirely around one relationship is a pursuit one PCS or forced retirement away from starting over. Build advocacy at two levels down from the decision-maker, not just at the top.
5. Document Institutional Knowledge Before It Walks Out the Door When a champion departs, so does their unwritten context — what actually matters to evaluators, what killed the last competitor’s bid, the real pain point beneath the RFP language. Capture that knowledge in your CRM the moment you sense a departure is coming, not after it happens.
Bottom line: Command turbulence isn’t background noise for anyone pursuing DoW work right now — it’s an active variable. Capture teams that build relationship diversity, structural awareness, and risk-appetite reads into their process will out-position the teams still working off last quarter’s org chart.
Why a Competitive Assessment Is the Backbone of Price-to-Win
Contact Dr. Tom: thomas.hudgins@hinzconsulting.com
Price-to-Win helps answer an important question: what price gives us the best chance of winning and can we perform profitably? Most teams try to answer it by looking inward; build a bottoms-up cost estimate, add target margin, call it a PTW. That’s a price to bidand part of the analysis. Whether it wins depends on what everyone else does, and a cost model can’t tell you that.
PTW is a relative number. Take a $48 million Price To Win. This might be aggressive for large primes carrying heavy overhead and conservative for a lean small business with a low wrap rate. Same scope, same figure, opposite meaning. Without knowing the field, PTW has no reference point.
A competitive assessment supplies that reference point. It identifies who is realistically bidding, whether an incumbent can shave staffing through knowledge others lack, and which teaming arrangements bring a low-cost partner into play. It models competitor cost structures (indirect rates), labor mixes, geographic wage differentials and using public filings and prior award data. It surfaces pricing behavior: some firms consistently buy in, others hold margin and walk away. And it exposes solution-driven price gaps, like a competitor whose automation platform lets them bid twenty fewer FTEs for identical outcomes.
Done well, the assessment converts PTW from a single number into a probability curve. Leadership can then weigh a solution tradeoff: $52 million at roughly 30 percent win probability with healthy margin, or $48 million at 65 percent with thinner margin and defined execution risk. That’s a business decision rather than a coin flip.
Skip the work and you might have two possible scenarios: You price at cost plus desired margin, lose, and blame the customer for going cheap. Or you slash price out of fear, win, and absorb losses across the period of performance.
Price-to-Win isn’t a pricing exercise with a competitive footnote. It’s a competitive assessment that drives business decisions.
- September 8-10th: Billington Cyber Summitin Washington D.C.
- September 9-10th: Geogov 2026 in Herndon, VA
- September 14-16th: Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, MD
- September 24th: 2026 Intel Summit in Falls Church, VA