The Department of War's July 27 contracts release shows Conti Federal Services LLC of Orlando, Florida picking up two new firm-fixed-price construction awards at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, worth a combined $87.58 million, the latest in a string of buildout contracts the company has won at the base that will host the Air Force's first operational B-21 Raider squadron.
Background
Ellsworth Air Force Base sits at the center of the Air Force's plan to field the B-21 Raider, the Northrop Grumman-built stealth bomber intended to eventually replace the B-1B and B-2 fleets. The base has been designated the aircraft's first main operating base, and for the past several years the Army Corps of Engineers has steadily funded the facilities needed to support it: hangars, fuel systems, maintenance docks and other specialized infrastructure that a new bomber type requires before it can begin flying operational sorties. Standing up a main operating base for a new aircraft is not a single construction project — it is a sequence of individually solicited, individually awarded contracts stretched across several years, each one covering a discrete piece of the base's eventual footprint.
Conti Federal Services has built nearly all of it. USASpending.gov's award history for the company shows a $140,761,739.47 contract in 2024 to construct a B-21 Phase Maintenance Hangar at Ellsworth, a $67,427,817 contract the same year for a B-21 Fuel System Maintenance Dock, a $73,759,870.65 award in 2023 for a B-21 RF Hangar, and a $46.7 million contract in 2023 for a B-21 WLT Facility. Each of those awards ran through the same contracting office — the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District — and named Ellsworth as the place of performance. Taken together, those four prior contracts alone add up to more than $328 million in disclosed federal construction spending steered to a single contractor at a single installation, before the two newest awards are even counted.
That history matters for reading the July 27 announcement correctly. A contracting activity does not need to repeat a program name in every follow-on award once a contractor is already the established builder at a base; the Omaha District's pattern of returning to Conti Federal for successive scopes of work at Ellsworth is itself part of the record, visible only by tracing the awardee and the installation across multiple, separately announced contracts rather than reading any single announcement in isolation.
Key Details
The July 27 release lists two separate awards to Conti Federal Services, both design-bid-build construction contracts and both administered by the Army Corps of Engineers' Omaha District:
- $49,887,334 under contract W9128F-26-C-A046 for environmental protection shelters.
- $37,694,967 under contract W9128F-26-C-A045 for an alert facility.
Both contracts share an estimated completion date of November 6, 2028, and both list Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota as the place of performance. Neither the environmental protection shelters award nor the alert facility award is labeled "B-21" in the Department of War's announcement text — the descriptions are generic enough to apply to any installation. But the location, the contracting office and the contractor all match Conti Federal's prior run of explicitly B-21-labeled work at the same base, and an alert facility supporting a nuclear-capable bomber squadron is a standard piece of main-operating-base infrastructure.
Combined, the two July 27 awards total $87,582,301, pushing Conti Federal's disclosed Ellsworth construction work to more than $416 million once the company's 2023 and 2024 hangar, dock and facility contracts are added in. The Department of War's release does not break out a total dollar figure across the company's Ellsworth history, and this article does not assert one beyond adding the publicly listed award amounts.
Both new contracts are structured as design-bid-build, meaning the government's design is largely finalized before construction bidding begins, rather than design-build, where the contractor handles design and construction together. That structure typically produces a tighter, more predictable scope at award — useful context for reading why two separate facilities at the same base, awarded the same day, carry different contract numbers even though both point to the same November 6, 2028 completion date.
What It Means for Contractors
The pattern at Ellsworth illustrates how the Army Corps of Engineers has been sequencing B-21 beddown construction as a series of separate design-bid-build contracts rather than one large program contract, and how an incumbent that wins early scope work tends to keep winning later scope at the same installation. For construction contractors chasing military construction dollars tied to new weapons systems, the lesson is less about long-term backlog and more about how these programs get built out piece by piece: hangars first, then fuel and maintenance infrastructure, then support facilities like the alert building and environmental protection shelters awarded here. Firms that want in on B-21 beddown work at other future main operating bases should expect the same office — Omaha District — to run similarly structured competitions in stages rather than a single consolidated procurement.
The two July 27 contracts are also a reminder that not every award tied to a major weapons program will say so explicitly in the announcement. Contractors and competitors tracking B-21 infrastructure spending need to cross-reference contracting office, installation and awardee against known program history — as the Department of War's own contract announcements often omit program names for generic construction scopes even when the underlying work supports a specific aircraft.
For Conti Federal Services specifically, the award extends a multi-year relationship with the Omaha District that has made the company the default builder for one of the Air Force's highest-visibility construction programs. Competitors that have not yet cracked into Ellsworth's B-21 buildout will have to wait for the next tranche of solicitations, whenever the Corps of Engineers issues them, to make a play for the remaining beddown scope.
None of the source documents reviewed for this article confirm how many additional facilities remain to be built at Ellsworth or when the Corps of Engineers plans to solicit them, so contractors should treat the base's B-21 buildout as an open-ended program rather than one nearing a defined close. What the public award record does show is a consistent contracting relationship: six separate contracts since 2023, all through the same Omaha District office, all naming the same base, and all going to the same firm. Any contractor evaluating whether to compete for the next Ellsworth solicitation should weigh that incumbency pattern against its own past performance and teaming options before committing bid-and-proposal resources.
