The Marine Corps’ aviation acquisition office at Naval Air Station Patuxent River has picked a Virginia company to help build artificial intelligence tools meant to predict when Marine aircraft will need parts and maintenance. The Corps says it went from an approved need to a vendor choice in 34 days.
The office, Deputy Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Aviation–Marine Corps Aviation, announced the selection Oct. 8 in a release on DVIDS. It chose SteerBridge Strategies LLC of Vienna, Va., a certified service-disabled veteran-owned small business, to work with the government on a statement of work for a prototype.
The release says the selection is not a contract award or binding agreement. Any deal still depends on negotiating and finalizing the statement of work and completing other acquisition steps.
What the tools would do
The Marine Corps wants predictive tools, which it calls “Super Intelligence/Machine Learning” technology, to support aviation sustainment: keeping aircraft supplied, maintained and ready to fly. According to the release, the tools would combine supply data, predictive maintenance and operations planning to forecast needs and support decisions.
The government and SteerBridge will “assess, prototype, and refine” the technology to see whether it can improve readiness and help with sustainment and planning, the release says.
A faster buying process
The Marine Corps used an Other Transaction Authority, a contracting tool that lets the Defense Department move faster than under traditional procurement rules for prototypes. The process ran through the Naval Aviation Systems Consortium. Companies submitted white papers and videos instead of full proposals.
The release ties the effort to a directive from the Secretary of War to speed up software acquisition.
“This agile approach demonstrates that we can shorten the timeline from identifying an operational need to delivering a capability to our Marines,” said Lt. Gen. William Swan, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation. “Accelerating our acquisition speed is essential to maintaining our competitive edge and driving the modernization goals outlined in the Marine Corps Aviation Plan.”
Maj. Gen. David Walsh, who leads the Pax River-based Marine aviation acquisition office, said the effort aligns with goals to “accelerate acquisition timelines, strengthen collaboration with industry, and modernize acquisition processes.”
Why it matters here
The office that ran the selection is part of the Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Aviation at Patuxent River. It manages the Marine Corps’ aviation acquisition programs, one of many military aviation offices that make NAS Pax River one of St. Mary’s County’s largest employers.
The release does not say how much the prototype work could be worth, or whether any of it would be done in Southern Maryland.
Last month, Pax River also saw a change of command.
