‘They run on information’: SAIC nabs $229M NORAD, NORTHCOM modernization contract

WASHINGTON — Recently awarded a $229 million Pentagon contract, the IT firm SAIC sees its mission to modernize systems at US Northern Command and NORAD as critical to fending off America’s foes, especially in the Arctic, a company executive told Breaking Defense.

“The combatant commands like NORAD, NORTHCOM, they run on information. Their ability to have situational awareness with regards to, I’ll say current events, as well as emerging threats, and especially with the intensifying challenges we have from an overall national security standpoint up around the Arctic region [where] we’re getting tested more and more by China, by Russia,” Executive Vice President of the company’s Air Force and Combatant Commands Business Group Vinnie DiFronzo said. “This is both with regards to testing near our air borders, as well as the evolving cyber threat.

“If we do not secure this properly and make sure that their systems are operating effectively, then their decision-making is going to be degraded,” he said of the commands. “And you know, overall US national security will be degraded accordingly.”

On Wednesday the company announced it had received the $229 million contract as part of the NORAD and NORTHCOM Information Technology Enterprise Services (NITES) program, which is designed to provide the two combatant commands with IT management services, delivery and maintenance.

Though the original request for proposal to industry was pretty “generic,” SAIC executive Vinnie DiFronzo told Breaking Defense, the needs would likely revolve around moving the combatant commands to the cloud and building a more “resilient” cybersecurity architecture in line with where the Pentagon sees zero trust principles going. 

DiFronzo added that the modernization efforts will also likely include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. The idea is that this will help the commands efficiently sort through their data so it can be leveraged more easily. 

He said having AI and ML baked into their systems will also help bolster cybersecurity concerns.

“As a trend going forward, we will be using more AI and ML to be able to address emerging cyber problems, both to mitigate them, as well as to detect those problems as they emerge, because that’s an evolving threat as well,” he said. 

DiFronzo also said SAIC’s recent work on the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) Cloud Based Command and Control (CBC2) program will help the company provide more advanced IT capabilities for NORAD and USNORTHCOM. 

The Pentagon awarded SAIC a $112 million contract in January 2023 to develop the ABMS cloud-based command and control software integrator program for NORAD, USNORTHCOM and the Pacific Air Forces. 

“We were able to in part leverage the experience that we’ve had with the Advanced Battle Management System cloud-based C2 program, “ DiFronzo said. “So [there is] a lot of potential synergy there between this current mission IT system that they have, what we’ve already done there, to be able to marry that and allow them to modernize more quickly.”