The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Mobile District awarded a $499,000,000 firm-fixed-price architect-engineer indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract on May 15, 2026, to 13 firms for military design and construction services across the South Atlantic Division. The contract ceiling is $499 million and the ordering period runs through May 2031. Awardees include AECOM Technical Services, Arcadis-Exp Federal Joint Venture, and Burns & McDonnell Engineering Company, among 10 other firms.
South Atlantic Division Military Design Portfolio
The USACE South Atlantic Division encompasses installations and military construction projects across the southeastern United States, including major Army and Air Force installations in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, North and South Carolina, and several Caribbean and international locations. The A-E IDIQ supports the full range of military construction design services: facility design for barracks, training facilities, maintenance shops, airfield infrastructure, utilities, and mission-specific structures that meet DoD security and construction standards.
Architect-engineer IDIQs are the standard vehicle for military installation design work. Rather than competitively awarding each individual design project, the Corps uses the IDIQ to establish a pool of pre-qualified firms, then issues task orders to individual awardees for specific projects. The competition for individual task orders typically involves a best-value evaluation of the firm's design approach, proposed team, and price — a process that is faster and less costly than running a full competition for each project separately.
The 13-firm pool reflects the Corps' goal of maintaining adequate competition for task orders while limiting the pool size enough that each firm has a reasonable opportunity to receive work. Very large IDIQ pools — some have hundreds of awardees — can dilute task order competition to the point where firms question whether the IDIQ award is worth the teaming and proposal costs involved. The 13-firm ceiling is sized to support robust task order competition across a portfolio of dozens of projects annually.
MILCON Demand Drivers in the Southeast
South Atlantic Division installations have seen sustained military construction investment driven by several factors. The Army's INDOPACOM and EUCOM reposturing has increased training requirements at southeastern installations, driving demand for range improvements, simulation facilities, and troop housing. The Air Force has invested heavily in F-35 basing infrastructure at Eglin Air Force Base and other southeastern installations. And the broader MILCON backlog — deferred maintenance and modernization that accumulated during the budget caps of the 2010s — continues to generate design work across installation categories.
Climate resilience is an increasingly significant driver of MILCON design work in the Southeast. Installations in coastal Florida and the Carolinas face sea level rise, hurricane risk, and extreme heat that require updated design standards for new construction and renovation projects. The Corps has been incorporating FEMA flood zone mapping, DoD climate vulnerability assessments, and updated energy efficiency standards into facility design requirements, which adds scope to design task orders and requires A-E firms to have in-house expertise in resilience-focused design.
What It Means for Contractors
The 13-firm IDIQ represents a five-year pipeline of design work that will feed hundreds of individual task orders. Firms not among the 13 awardees can still participate in South Atlantic military design work by teaming with IDIQ holders, either as named subconsultants in task order proposals or through long-term teaming agreements with the prime awardees. A-E firms with specialty capabilities — airfield design, hazardous materials remediation, historic preservation, anti-terrorism/force protection engineering — are particularly valuable team members and can often negotiate flow-down agreements with multiple IDIQ holders simultaneously.
South Atlantic Division's MILCON Pipeline and A-E Market Dynamics
The South Atlantic Division is one of USACE's busiest divisions for military construction, driven by a combination of installation growth related to force restructuring, long-deferred recapitalization needs at aging facilities, and the division's geographic responsibility for several high-activity Army and Air Force installations. Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) in North Carolina — home of the 82nd Airborne Division, the XVIII Airborne Corps, and numerous special operations units — has been a sustained generator of design work for training facilities, barracks, and operational infrastructure. Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the home of the 33rd Fighter Wing and a test center for advanced weapons, has required significant A-E design work for F-35 basing infrastructure and range modernization.
The competitive process for the 13-firm IDIQ involved a qualifications-based evaluation that assessed each firm's past performance on comparable military design projects, technical approach to the South Atlantic Division's priority project types, and small business participation commitments. A-E IDIQs are subject to Brooks Act selection procedures, which prohibit price competition at the IDIQ level and require selection based on qualifications alone, with price negotiated separately for each task order. This means the 13 awardees were selected without price competition and will compete on qualifications and technical approach when individual task orders are solicited.
The small business dynamics of this A-E IDIQ are complex. The 13 awardees include both large firms like AECOM — which is classified as a large business — and smaller firms that may qualify as small businesses under the SBA definition. USACE Mobile District typically structures A-E IDIQs to include both large and small awardees, with specific task orders sometimes restricted to small businesses to meet subcontracting and small business participation goals. The presence of AECOM on a contract that may include small business set-aside task orders means the large firm will participate in open competition task orders while small business set-aside orders flow to the qualifying small business awardees.
The $499 million ceiling across 13 firms and five years represents approximately $7.7 million per firm per year on average, though actual task order distribution will vary dramatically based on individual firm qualifications and the project types that emerge during the ordering period. Firms with specialized expertise in airfield design, anti-terrorism force protection engineering, or LEED certification infrastructure may capture a disproportionate share of task orders in their specialty areas relative to firms with broader but shallower capability profiles, and specialty firms that maintain strong track records in these categories will typically capture task orders at rates above their pro-rata share of the pool.
