BAE Systems won a $54 million U.S. Navy contract to develop the Dual Band Decoy (DBD) for Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets. Raytheon was disqualified due to a conflict of interest with a former Navy employee.
By Shreya M
The contract award to create a new decoy system to replace the towed decoys flown on select U.S. Navy jets was confirmed by BAE Systems months ago. According to the business, a $54 million contract was granted by Naval Air Systems Command in September for the development of the Dual Band Decoy (DBD). Under the terms of the deal, Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, which are now equipped with BAE's ALE-55 towed decoy, will continue to receive towed decoys from the business.
“We are expanding on the ALE-55's years of mission success as a potent jamming system with Dual Band Decoy," Don Davidson, head of BAE Systems' Advanced Compact Electronic Warfare Solutions product line, stated. A host aircraft can have towed decoys stretched hundreds of feet behind it. They release a signal that mimics the host's electromagnetic signature. Radar-guided missiles are supposed to be tricked into focusing on the decoy rather than the host fighter by using this signal. A two-band decoy would be intended to fool missiles equipped with sophisticated radio frequency seekers.
A year after the Navy removed Raytheon as the sole rival, BAE announced the deal. According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) protest ruling from August, Raytheon's offer was rejected by the DBD program's contracting officer.
Raytheon objected to the Navy's choice. However, the GAO took the contracting officer's side. According to the GAO decision report, Raytheon had enlisted the assistance of a Navy veteran who had worked on the DBD programme to help prepare the company's proposal for the contract. According to the GAO, the contracting officer concluded that in order to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest, the former Navy employee should have been excluded from any work on the DBD proposal.
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