Leidos has won a potential $270 million single-award indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to supply up to 100 Medium Energy Mobile Systems over a five-year ordering period. CBP announced the award on June 18, 2026, continuing a multi-year relationship between the agency and the Reston, Virginia-based defense contractor for non-intrusive inspection technology deployed at the border. The contract adds to an already substantial CBP portfolio for Leidos and locks in the company as the exclusive supplier of truck-mounted border inspection systems through at least fiscal year 2031.
Background
CBP's Non-Intrusive Inspection program uses X-ray and gamma-ray imaging systems to screen vehicles, cargo, trailers, and shipping containers without requiring officers to physically open or unload them. The systems detect concealed contraband, illicit drugs, currency, and weapons of mass destruction or weapons of mass effect — threats that manual inspection at high-volume ports of entry cannot realistically catch at scale. NII technology allows CBP officers to review detailed internal imagery of a conveyance in seconds, flagging anomalies for secondary examination rather than halting commercial traffic for physical search.
Leidos has been a primary supplier of NII systems to CBP for years. In 2021, the company secured a $480 million contract from CBP for Multi-Energy Portal systems — fixed-portal X-ray lanes designed for commercial vehicle traffic at land ports. MEMS fill a different operational niche: truck-mounted systems that can be driven to a location, deployed quickly, and repositioned as mission needs shift, covering checkpoints and inspection locations where permanent infrastructure is not in place or cost-justified. The MEP and MEMS programs together give CBP a layered NII capability — high-throughput fixed lanes for commercial corridors and flexible mobile assets for dynamic deployment elsewhere.
CBP screens tens of millions of conveyances annually across hundreds of ports of entry, land border crossings, and internal checkpoints. Fixed portals handle high-throughput commercial lanes, but mobile systems extend inspection capability to locations that receive irregular or seasonal traffic volumes where building permanent lanes is not cost-effective. The MEMS fleet expands the agency's ability to push screening capability into those gaps and respond quickly when intelligence identifies a new smuggling corridor or emerging threat vector at a previously low-volume crossing.
Key Details
The contract is structured as a single-award IDIQ, meaning CBP will issue all task and delivery orders over the five-year performance period exclusively to Leidos, without re-competing individual buys. A single-award structure signals CBP's confidence in Leidos as the sole integrator and eliminates the administrative overhead of multiple-award task order competitions for what is a specialized, high-integration detection system requiring consistent fielding and sustainment support across diverse locations.
The $270 million ceiling covers up to 100 MEMS units. Each system is truck-mounted and capable of operating in both stationary and mobile scan modes, allowing operators to either park and scan vehicles driving past or maneuver the system alongside stationary conveyances. The dual-mode capability matters at locations where traffic flow patterns vary — an operator can adapt the scan approach to the situation without switching equipment or staging a different asset from another location.
The systems are designed to detect concealed contraband, weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass effect, illicit drugs, and undeclared currency. Medium energy X-ray systems produce imaging at a resolution and penetration depth suited for loaded cargo trucks and trailers — higher penetration than low-energy systems used on smaller passenger vehicles, but configured differently than the very high-energy portal systems used for rail or dense intermodal container inspection.
CBP did not publicly detail how the 100 units will be allocated across specific ports, regions, or delivery phases within the five-year ordering window. The IDIQ structure allows CBP to place orders as budget appropriations become available and as operational priorities develop, rather than committing to a fixed delivery schedule at contract award. That flexibility is standard for equipment programs where fielding pace depends on appropriations timing and demand signals from field operations.
What It Means for Contractors
The award reinforces Leidos's position as CBP's dominant supplier for truck-mounted inspection technology and adds to the company's multi-agency NII portfolio, which spans DHS, DoD, and international customers. The five-year ordering period and single-award structure provide revenue predictability with no re-competition risk over that window, a meaningful competitive advantage in a market segment where contract continuity enables long production runs and cost stability.
For contractors in the broader detection and inspection market, the MEMS award illustrates CBP's preference for experienced suppliers when acquiring operationally complex, mission-critical systems. CBP did not run this through a competitive multiple-award structure — the decision to use a single-award IDIQ reflects an assessment that the operational continuity and integration depth Leidos brings to the NII mission outweighs the price competition benefits a multiple-award vehicle might generate.
Subcontractors working the NII supply chain — manufacturers of X-ray generators, detector arrays, imaging software, vehicle platforms, and radiation safety components — should expect Leidos to remain the prime integrator for CBP mobile inspection buys through at least 2031. Pursuing teaming or supplier relationships with Leidos remains the primary path into this segment of the border security market.
The MEMS award also signals continued CBP capital investment in physical inspection infrastructure alongside the growing shift toward AI-based screening analytics. CBP is not substituting software for hardware — it is expanding both. Companies developing AI-assisted threat detection algorithms for NII imagery should note that a 100-unit MEMS fleet represents a significant new data collection footprint where integration and analytics opportunities may develop as systems are fielded and operated at scale.
Contractors bidding future CBP inspection programs should study how CBP justified the single-award decision in the contract file. Single-award IDIQs above the simplified acquisition threshold require written justification under FAR 16.504(c). Understanding what CBP documented as its rationale — whether specialized expertise, urgency, unique technical capability, or industrial base considerations — will inform how competitors position themselves for the next generation of NII procurements when Leidos's current ordering period closes after 2031.
