Not So Fast My Friend!

They Aint Dead Yet Folks.....

Sometimes complaining works. Colt Defense filed a protest of the Army's contract selection as Remington as the new supplier of M4 rifles for service. In a surprising turn of events, the Government Accountability Office has upheld that protest. This doesn't necessarily revoke or change the contract, as the final decision remains with the US Army.


Colt's protest stated that the evaluation process of the bids was faulty and unfair. They highlighted that Remington has no experience supplying this quantity of automatic rifles to the Army, a statement which was dismissed by the GAO. But they agreed that the pricing evaluation process was faulty. Further details of the protest are classified, but Colt says the pricing for their M4 entry was incorrectly based off an older M16 contract which was active from 1967-1997.

Basically, this means that the Army will have to answer in some way to the GAO's decision. They can choose to honor the contract and ignore the GAO, in which case they'll likely end up explaining all of this to Congress. That seems a sticky option. A second option would be to re-open the bidding and start from scratch. Or, they could re-evaluate the bids using the terms of the pricing solicitation from the GAO.

Either way, this is a win for Colt and a hard blow for Remington. All the other competitors now know the price point they have to beat and I'm sure this is not the last we've heard of the M4 Army contract.

Thanks to GearScout for all the info contained herein.
Be safe and see you next time.
~Mac