CACI Inc.-Federal, the contracting arm of McLean, Virginia-based CACI International, was awarded a $113,760,906 contract on May 8, 2026, to provide Integrated Business Systems support to the Military Sealift Command (MSC), the Navy component responsible for moving 90 percent of all military cargo and fuel in wartime. The contract, designated N3220526F0025, was competed on a full and open basis with four proposals received.

Scope of Work

MSC's Integrated Business Systems span the enterprise resource planning, financial management, logistics, maintenance, and human resources applications that keep a fleet of approximately 125 civilian-crewed government-owned vessels and hundreds of chartered commercial ships running. The contract covers both the sustainment of existing systems — keeping legacy applications operational, patching vulnerabilities, managing licenses — and modernization work, including cloud migration, application rationalization, and alignment with DoD enterprise data standards.

The contract structure reflects the complexity of this mission: it carries a firm-fixed-price component for well-defined sustainment tasks and a cost-plus-fixed-fee component for developmental and research-intensive modernization work. The base period consists of a two-month phase-in followed by a ten-month base ordering period, after which four one-year option periods and one six-month extension option can be exercised — bringing the total potential ordering period to October 31, 2031.

Work will be performed at Military Sealift Command's Norfolk, Virginia headquarters and at MSC field activities worldwide. The contract started May 8, 2026.

CACI's Track Record with MSC

CACI has held the MSC Integrated Business Systems contract through successive iterations and bridge contracts. A 2024 bridge award maintained continuity while the recompete solicitation was finalized. The four-bidder competition on this award indicates that other IT services firms contested CACI's position, though their identities have not been publicly disclosed in the contracting notice.

For CACI, MSC represents one segment of a substantial Navy IT services portfolio that also includes work for Naval Sea Systems Command, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command successor (now Naval Information Warfare Systems Command), and multiple program executive offices. The firm has built deep institutional knowledge of Navy financial and logistics systems — a difficult asset to replicate quickly, which likely contributed to its ability to win a contested recompete.

Why MSC IT Matters for Wartime Logistics

Military Sealift Command is not a glamorous headline — it doesn't develop weapons or run combat operations — but it is the backbone of U.S. power projection. Every tank, aircraft, ammunition pallet, and fuel barrel that deploys to a theater of war travels predominantly by sea, and MSC manages that movement. Its business systems are the digital layer that coordinates vessel scheduling, cargo manifests, fuel inventory, maintenance readiness, crew pay, and contract management for a $6 billion-plus annual operating budget.

Failures in these systems — data loss, system downtime, integration breaks during a surge — translate directly into logistics delays at the operational level. The Defense Logistics Agency and Transportation Command have both flagged legacy IT modernization at MSC as a readiness risk in internal assessments. The new CACI contract is explicitly framed to address that risk: the phase-in period allows a deliberate transition from bridge contract activities to a modernized operating model.

Broader IT Contracting Landscape

The MSC award is one of dozens of medium-to-large Navy IT sustainment contracts active at any given time. It does not flow through a government-wide acquisition contract (GWAC) like Alliant 2 or CIO-SP3 — it is a standalone direct award, which means there is no ceiling competition at the vehicle level. This structure is typical for complex, mission-specific IT environments where the scope and security requirements are too narrow for a broad GWAC task order.

Navy IT modernization more broadly is being shaped by the Naval Operational Architecture (NOA) initiative, which aims to rationalize the service's fragmented portfolio of business applications into a unified, cloud-hosted environment. MSC's Integrated Business Systems modernization work must eventually conform to NOA standards — a requirement that CACI's modernization task orders will need to address.

What It Means for Contractors

  • CACI is the prime; firms with Navy logistics IT expertise, NAVSEA financial systems experience, or cloud migration credentials for DoD IL4/IL5 environments should contact CACI's teaming and subcontracting office to explore partnership opportunities under the new contract.
  • The four-bidder competition signals this is not a locked-down sole-source environment — firms that invested in proposal development this cycle and came close are well-positioned to compete on the follow-on in 2031.
  • Small businesses: check the solicitation for subcontracting plan requirements; large prime contracts of this size carry mandatory small business participation goals that CACI must meet.
  • Watch for separate MSC solicitations on cybersecurity assessment, network infrastructure, and vessel communications systems — those are typically awarded separately from the business systems contract.

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