NCIA/ACQ/2026/07186

NCIA-ACQ-1.017(07.25)

NCIA Request for Information (RFI)

OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE (OSINT) COMMERCIAL ORBAT

DATA

RFI-CO-42616067-ORBAT

Thursday, 28 May 2026

NCIA Request for Information (RFI)

To: Industry Partners Distribution List

1. The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) is conducting market research to identify qualified vendors and gather input on potential solutions to support the upcoming acquisition for Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) processing capabilities. We hereby issue the attached Request for Information (RFI) RFI-CO-42616067 to solicit feedback from capable and interested industry partners of commercial Order of Battle (ORBAT) data.

2. This RFI is a follow-on to the earlier RFI-CO- 424330-OSINT released on 29 January 2026 that sought to gain market research on Open-Source Data Processing Capabilities. This RFI is issued for planning purposes only and is not a request for bids. It is part of NCIA’s effort to ensure it has a clear understanding of the marketplace, available capabilities, and potential acquisition strategies.

3. We value your insight and invite you to:

a. Provide a response to the information requested at Annex A.

b. Share relevant corporate capabilities and experience;

c. Provide your responses to the RFI questions in Annex C.

4. Submission instructions and additional details can be found in the enclosure to this RFI.

5. Only companies from a NATO member country can participate in or respond to this RFI

(https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/nato_countries.htm).

6. Should you have any questions or need clarification, please contact Nicholas Griffin, Senior Contracting Officer, at Nicholas.Griffin@ncia.nato.int

7. We thank you in advance for your time and input, and we look forward to engaging with you as we shape this potential acquisition.

8. Annexes:

• Request for Information at Annex A

• High-Level Summary of Requirements at Annex B

• RFI Questions at Annex C

• Distribution List at Annex D For the Chief of Acquisition:

Jean-Luc Guellec Principal Contracting Officer https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/nato_countries.htm mailto:Nicholas.Griffin@ncia.nato.int

Table of Contents

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION

A. Introduction

B. Purpose

C. Background

D. Submission Instructions

E. Industry Engagement

F. Disclaimer

G. Use of Information Provided through Responses

H. RFI Point of Contact

Annex A – Requested Information

Annex B – High-Level Summary of Requirements for the Open Source Commercial

ORBAT

Annex C – RFI Questions

Annex D – Distribution List

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION

A. Introduction

1. Further to NCIA/ACQ/2026/06643, the NATO Communications and Information

Agency (NCIA) is conducting further market research to identify potential sources for Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) data - outlined at Annex B - to inform the project requirements. This Request for Information (RFI) is issued solely for informational purposes and does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP), Request for Quotation (RFQ), or invitation for bid.

B. Purpose

1. The purpose of this RFI is to obtain input from industry to help inform the NCIA’s acquisition planning. Responses to this RFI will assist in refining requirements, identifying capabilities, and shaping the strategy for any future solicitation.

C. Background

1. NCIA seeks to provide analysts within its Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) community with a scalable capability to collect, process, and exploit Open-Source Information (OSINF).

2. This capability will enable OSINT analysts to access and analyse information required to satisfy the Commander’s critical intelligence requirements at the speed of relevance, whilst maintaining a stringent focus on security aspects.

3. Whilst the service is envisaged to contain several key capabilities, the purpose of this RFI is to focus on access to OSINT data to provide an unclassified, assured and continually updated Order Of Battle (ORBAT) of adversary military equipment, infrastructure and capabilities within NATO areas of interest.

4. A High-Level Summary of the Open-Source Data requirements are contained within Annex B.

5. The RFI seeks to elicit the view of industry partners on the availability of the envisioned data service and facilitate the Agency’s insight into best-in-class industry solutions, including current market capabilities, and pricing models of Services offered.

6. A full list of questions that the Agency would like to canvass industry views on are contained within Annex C

D. Submission Instructions

1. Interested parties are invited to respond in accordance with the instructions below:

a. Submit responses via the email address in section H no later than 17:00 hours

Central European Time (CET) on 12 June 2026.

b. Responses should be submitted in PDF or Word format and must not exceed 10 pages, including:

i. Responses to Annex A, comments on Annex B

ii. Responses to the questions in Annex C excluding:

i. Cover page

ii. Company brochures or product literature (if included)

iii. Attachments such as past performance references

c. Use the following subject line for submission

i. “Response to RFI [RFI-CO-42616067-ORBAT] – [Company Name]”

E. Industry Engagement

1. The NCIA does not envisage conducting further industry engagement following the receipt of RFI responses.

2. However, should this approach change, further information on additional RFIs and/or

Industry Day events will be published through the NCIA ‘Current Opportunities’ page and distributed via the National Delegations, NATEXs, and Embassies.

F. Disclaimer

1. This RFI is for planning and informational purposes only and shall not be construed as a solicitation or obligation on the part of the NCIA. The NCIA does not intend to award a contract based on responses to this RFI. Respondents are solely responsible for all costs incurred in responding to this RFI. The NCIA will consider and analyse all information received from this RFI and may use these findings to develop a future solicitation. The NCIA will consider all responses as confidential commercial information and will protect it as such.

2. NCIA reserves the right, at any time, to cancel this informal market survey, partially or in its entirety. No legal liability on the part of NCIA for payment of any sort shall arise and in no event will a cause of action lie with any prospective participant for the recovery of any costs incurred in connection with the preparation of documentation or participation in response hereto. All effort initiated or undertaken by prospective informal market survey participants shall be done considering and accepting this fact.

G. Use of Information Provided through Responses

1. Confidentiality of Responses

The NCIA may incorporate industry comments and responses, in part or in whole, into a future release of a solicitation. Should respondents include proprietary data in their responses that they do not wish to be disclosed to the public for any purpose, or used by NCIA (except for internal evaluation purposes), they must:

a. Mark the title page with the following legend:

This document includes data that shall not be disclosed outside NATO and shall not be duplicated, used, or disclosed – in whole or in part – for any purpose other than for NCIA internal evaluation purposes, unless otherwise expressly authorised by [insert company name]. This restriction does not limit the NCIA’s right to use information contained in this data without restriction if it is obtained from another source. The data subject to this restriction are contained in sheets [insert numbers or other identification of sheets]

b. Mark each sheet of data it wishes to restrict with the following legend:

https://www.ncia.nato.int/business/procurement/current-opportunities

Use or disclosure of data contained on this sheet is subject to the restriction on the title page of this document.

H. RFI Point of Contact

1. Nicholas Griffin – Senior Contracting Officer

2. Nicholas.Griffin@ncia.nato.int mailto:Nicholas.Griffin@ncia.nato.int

Annex A – Requested Information

1. Respondents are encouraged to provide the following information in their response:

a. Company Information

i. Legal Business Name

ii. Address

iii. Website

iv. Primary Point of Contact

v. Email address

vi. Size of organisation

b. Technical Capability

i. Summary of relevant capabilities and past performance

c. Feedback and Recommendations

i. Comments on the draft High-Level Summary of Requirements for

Open-Source Commercial ORBAT (Annex B)

ii. Responses to the RFI Questions in Annex C – RFI Questions

iii. Innovations or alternatives

iv. Rough Order Magnitude (ROM), including any assumptions upon which they are based

d. Questions or Concerns

i. Risks, concerns, or barriers

ii. Suggestions for risk mitigation or enhancing competition

Annex B – High-Level Summary of Requirements for the Open Source Commercial ORBAT

Note: This is a DRAFT and subject to change. The NCIA is seeking industry feedback.

1. Background

The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) aims to support the Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) community by providing a scalable capability to collect, process, and exploit Open-Source Information (OSINF). This capability will enable OSINT analysts to access and analyse the information required to satisfy the Commander’s critical intelligence requirements at the speed of relevance.

Part of this wider solution is to provide analysts access to an unclassified, assured and continually updated database of structured adversary military equipment specifications, infrastructure and capabilities, as well as country-level assessments. This database will be used on both unclassified and classified networks as a baseline dataset for multiple functional areas within NATO, providing a persistent, searchable data layer. This data must be available through an API and interlinked to enable analysts to search correlated datasets of all known military vehicles, vessels, aircraft and their associated capabilities, weapons, locations, etc, whilst understanding the broader associated military and country capabilities.

NCIA is specifically seeking information on commercially available, operationally mature data products and services that already exist within the market and are subject to continual maintenance and update cycles. Responses focused solely on bespoke consultancy, ad-hoc research tasks, or one-off capability assessments are out of scope for this market engagement. The intent of this RFI is to understand currently available market offerings that provide persistent access to structured defence and military capability data that is accessible through an API.

2. Scope

a. Functional Requirements. The Contractor shall deliver a fully integrated API capability that functions as a data layer within multiple NATO Functional Area Services (FAS). This data layer shall provide structured, interconnected, and continuously updated defence intelligence across the following datasets:

i. Equipment & Platforms: Technical specifications, capabilities, imagery, and operational status for systems including land, sea, air, and space platforms, weapons, sensors, and subsystems.

ii. Orders of Battle (ORBAT): Global military force structures, unit compositions, command relationships, and base locations for all state armed forces.

iii. Military Installations: Geolocated data on worldwide military facilities, from airfields and naval bases to early-warning sites and nuclear infrastructure.

iv. Country Reporting: Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information, Physical Environment and Time (PMESII-PT) assessments on key countries of interest, structured for rapid threat and stability analysis.

b. Non-Functional Requirements

i. Continual update of the above datasets to ensure timeliness of this baseline data.

ii. Continual update of interconnections and addition of new connections where required to ensure integrity and accessibility of data on both unclassified and classified NATO networks, requiring cleared personnel to manage this data.

iii. Training where required to ensure analysts across the NATO enterprise are able to best access and integrate data relevant to their areas of interest.

iv. The data must be available via an API in a format which enables multiple FAS to ingest the datasets in different formats, thus enabling searching and retrieving in a variety of ways, e.g. geo-referenced, semantic searches etc.

3. Objectives

a. The objective of this data service is to provide NATO analysts an assured baseline of unclassified data on which to build tailored datasets for individual FASs.

i. Intelligence. When classified sources are incomplete—particularly for third-party or non-state actors—this data will fill critical gaps and flag where further collection is required.

ii. Operational planning. Operational planners can leverage this ORBAT and equipment data alongside NATO force disposition data to generate comparative force ratios and inform wargaming.

iii. Indicators and Warnings. This data can be used to understand baseline activity and to detect patterns of life changes—such as unusual military deployments, equipment movements near contested areas, or procurement activity by adversary defence companies—that serve as early warning indicators.

iv. Multinational interoperability. Because open-source data is shareable without classification constraints, it provides a “common ground truth” across all 32 NATO Allies and partner nations. This will reduce reliance on national classified intelligence for baseline situational awareness, thus increasing the speed of analysis and response between all 32 NATO Allies, informing operational planning in a parallel path to the national classified intelligence systems.

4. Envisaged Contractual Relationship

a. As stated in the Objectives section, the Agency envisages this OSINF dataset to be provided by a successful bidder in any subsequent NATO Competitive Procurement procedure.

5. Deliverables

Deliverable Description Frequency Format

Training User training Initially in bulk for all users and as required

Dedicated online sessions or on demand training courses through the tool

6. Purchaser Furnished Equipment (PFE) / Information (PFI)

a. Nil – API service requested

7. Period of Performance

a. 3-year period with the option to extend if required.

8. Place of Performance

a. API solution required for access by global NATO users.

Annex C – RFI Questions

In order for the NCIA to gain a greater understanding of market-leading Open Source Commercial ORBATs, please provide responses to the following questions in your response:

Question Number Question

1 Please provide the following company information:

- Legal business name

- Address

- Website

- Primary point of contact

- Email address

- Size of organisation, including employee headcount and overall scale of operations.

2 Please provide any comments that you have on the High-Level Requirements in Annex B, including:

- Risks, concerns, or barriers

- Suggestions for risk mitigation or enhancing competition

- Any innovations or alternatives

- Clarification requests.

3 Please provide a summary of your relevant capabilities, in relation to the scope of the High-Level Requirements stated in Annex B, Including:

- Breadth of data

- Sources and methods used to build and update your database

- Organisation and integration of your database

- How your database is hosted and can be accessed by multiple users

- Any assurance and trackability available regarding the accuracy and integrity of your data.

4 Please provide a summary of your company's past experience of delivering similar Services to customers operating in highly-regulated environments, e.g. police, defence

5 Please describe your standard incident management service levels for API availability and related service support for

Priority classifications P0-P4, or your organisation’s equivalent levels, including:

- Typical response target times from incident logging to assignment/work-in-progress status

- Typical service restoration target times from incident logging to restoration of service

- Any distinctions between business hours and out-of-hours support arrangements

- Whether targets are measured in wall-clock time, business hours, or working days

- Any associated service credits, escalation procedures, or service level commitments

6 Please provide a summary of how your organisation maintains the security of its services, including technical, operational, and organisational controls. Where applicable, please reference any industry-recognised security standards or certifications.

7 Please explain your costing model and provide a ROM (considering any assumptions) for the envisioned Services, including:

- Licensing costs for 250 users via a cloud-based service

- Licensing costs for access to data through APIs for up to 5000 users.

8 Please outline your pricing model for surge or incremental usage – such as scalability for crisis operations or options for Nations -including:

- If applicable, cost per additional licences

- Any volume-based pricing tiers or discounts

- Minimum or maximum licence thresholds

- The process and timelines for increasing or decreasing licence volumes.

9 Please describe your approach to the use of subcontractors or third parties in the delivery of the proposed solution and services, including, how security, compliance, and confidentiality requirements are applied to subcontractors.

Annex D – Distribution List

1. NATO Delegation (Attn: Investment Adviser)

1. Albania 12. Greece 23. Poland

2. Belgium 13. Hungary 24. Portugal

3. Bulgaria 14. Iceland 25. Romania

4. Canada 15. Italy 26. Slovakia

5. Croatia 16. Latvia 27. Slovenia

6. Czechia 17. Lithuania 28. Spain

7. Denmark 18. Luxembourg 29. Sweden

8. Estonia 19. Montenegro 30. Türkiye

9. Finland 20. Netherlands 31. United Kingdom

10. France 21. North Macedonia 32. United States

11. Germany 22. Norway

2. All NATEXs