Colt’s Manufacturing Co. LLC, West Hartford, Connecticut, was awarded a $57,722,819 firm-fixed-price Foreign Military Sales (Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan, Senegal, Tunisia and Pakistan) contract for procurement of up to 10,000 additional M4 and M4A1 5.56mm carbine rifles. One bid was solicited with one bid received. Work will be performed in West Hartford, Connecticut, with an estimated completion date of Sept. 20, 2019. Fiscal 2018 foreign military sales funds in the amount of $57,722,819 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Warren, Michigan, is the contracting activity (W56HZV-18-F-0115).
Evidently there were no other bidders for this contract?
I’m all for the health of Colt but procurement of up to 10,000 additional M4 and M4A1 5.56mm carbine rifles at $57,722,819 comes out to $5,772ish per rifle.
Do these contracts generally include spares, mags, etc.?
If not, that isn’t good news for those of us who expect our tax dollars to be used wisely.
I probably don’t understand, so I’ll look for the source document.
ETA: found the story: https://dod.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract-View/Article/1641072/ Searched under the contract number and found nothing. Could someone who has knowledge of how these things work give me the skinny on why it apparently breaks down to over 5,000 a rifle?
Think of it as an addition onto an existing contract, done as a “group buy” with different line items on the “menu.” Countries pony up dollars and they can select all kinds of line items to go along that could be spares, tech support, special tool-sets, consumables, etc. TACOM in MI administers the contract; these are export-controlled so countries can’t go direct. The major end-item (“the gun”) is likely to not be the only thing covering the full scope of the contract so, yeah, the math almost never works unless you can see all the delivery orders.
Foreign military sales is just that - sales - so it’s likely those countries are spending their own money, as opposed to us. There are exceptions, as I’ll explain below, but this is probably an example of several countries that approached the U.S. government asking to purchase M4s, and the government lumped them into one contract that was awarded to Colt.
These programs are all inclusive, so the cost per unit covers everything from contract development to manufacturing and testing, to shipment overseas, and finally training for the end user and maybe a 10-year maintenance plan that covers all parts. Often a large batch of repair parts is tacked on to the contract that adds a large lump sum to the overall price.
The President cut Pakistan’s Coalition Support Fund (CSF), which is a security assistance fund that reimbursed Pakistan for the security operations that they conduct along the Afghan border. The Pakistanis provide a yearly report (almost like receipts) detailing the cost of their operations (fuel, food, ammunition, etc.) to justify the reimbursement, and we reimburse them for up to $300 million per year. The President cut that fund due to our assessment that they were failing to effectively control the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and other groups along the border.
Pakistan received several types of assistance from us. We give them some Foreign Military Financing (FMF), which is essentially like a grant that they can spend to purchase military equipment from us. A lot of that (if not all) has been cut over the past couple years. However, they also purchase some equipment outright from us, with their own military budget, which I believe is how they procure small arms like this. I worked on some of those programs but don’t recall how they got M4s specifically. Their special operations troops have been using them for 5-10 years now.
FMS program is ( usually );US dollars that must be spent on US manufactured products. Everything I have seen run through that program has been Uncle Sugar’s money that had to be spent on US goods - usually administered by US gov in conjunction with the foreign national mil rep
When you are talking about Egypt “buying” F-15s or Greece’s Apache FMS that is certainly true. Not all FMS transfers are funded by the U.S.
We just delivered an FMS package that was paid for by the foreign country, and are about to bid on a very large FMS contract for a European country that will be (mostly) purchased by that country, not the U.S.
FMS contracts also include the cost for the U.S. government to administer/oversee the program, another reason that you cannot compare the cost of this contract to the simple purchase of X number of M-4s.
The simple need to scrub non-exportable information from technical documentation adds significant cost to FMS contracts.
If a country receives a Patriot missile system, for example, the capabilities and techical documents may not be the same as a system fielded to the U.S.
Full disclosure - Raytheon sell Patriot systems, and I have zero affiliation with Raytheon. That was a theoretical example.
If I sounded argumentative, I apologize. I intended to add to what you said, not contradict it. One of the things I like about FMS is that they benefit U.S. companies
