HR001118S0009-Amendment-01.pdf

Amendment 01 to DARPA BAA HR001118S0009, Protected Forward Communications (PFC)

The purpose of Amendment 01 to DARPA BAA HR0001118S0009, Protected Forward Communications (PFC) is to make the following change:

A. Incorporates Questions and Answers (Q&A):

Q1: Has a contractor performed similar work to this for the government in the past? If available, please provide the incumbent contract number. If you are unable to provide a contract number, is it safe to assume this is a new requirement for the government?

A1: This is a new Research and Development (R&D) program specific Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for DARPA.

Q2: Have you decided if the PFC award will be using the Other Transaction Authority contract vehicle, full and open, or something else?

A2: Per Page 4 of HR001118S0009: “Types of instruments that may be awarded – Procurement contract or other transaction.”

Per Page 20 of HR001118S0009: “Proposals identified for negotiation may result in a procurement contract or other transaction” and “In all cases, the Government contracting officer shall have sole discretion to select award instrument type, regardless of instrument type proposed, and to negotiate all instrument terms and conditions with selectees.”

Further, as stated on page 37 of the BAA, in section 4.3.2.2, (10), the proposer should indicate on their cover sheet the type of award instrument requested. Thus, per the language in the BAA, HR001118S0009, DARPA anticipates awarding procurement contracts or other transactions under this effort; however, the final authority for the selection of instrument type is up to the discretion of the Government contracting officer.

Q3: Is DARPA open to considering technologies with maturity levels below TRL5?

A3: Per Page 8 of HR001118S0009: ‘PFC will provide defense in depth by interrupting multiple elements of the EW-driven kill chain depicted in Figure 2. To accomplish this program goal, PFC will draw on technology and systems methods that are now sufficiently mature (≥ TRL 5 unless compellingly justified) and permit the system designer the freedom to flexibly optimize the technologies employed to deliver compelling systems capability with appropriate capacity/availability/security and backwards compatibility to facilitate system introduction.’

Per Page 16 of HR001118S0009: Table 4, Deliverable Item 9, ‘Link technologies functionally validated with OTA experimental support’ is due at the Systems Requirements Review (SRR).

Per Page 10 of HR001118S0009: ‘By SRR, initial risk mitigation of enabling technologies, including experimental validation of any unsubstantiated or unproven link technologies shall substantiate the viability of system link technologies.’

Amendment 01 to DARPA BAA HR001118S0009, Protected Forward Communications (PFC)

Thus, consistent with the BAA, HR001118S0009, DARPA is open to technologies at lower maturity levels than 5 provided they can be compellingly justified. In particular, any unsubstantiated or unproven link technologies should be functionally validated with OTA experimental support by the SRR.

B. All other original DARPA BAA HR001118S0009 data remains unchanged.