keV, the government sets-up its prime contractors for everything from pencils to intercontinental ballistic missiles a significant time in advance of actual delivery/use/payment.
Prime contractors assemble a variety of subcontractors into a team. Different teams bid, the representatives of a bid are the prime contractors. Everything from pork-barrel politics to domestic procurement law and small company support initiatives have bearing on this. For example, it MAY well be the case that BOTH Utimaco AND Infineon are INELIGIBLE for e.g. Army contracts (as they would be foreign suppliers).
It may be that the Senators from Mass would like to see Sprague get on a roll. Or not.
Again, lots of things go into this. But it essentially always goes this way (with the durable exception of HAL). The bid gets awarded and a prime contractor is announced and that “team” “wins”. Nobody cuts hard deals until a particular team wins. The players then migrate from MOUs to “deals” and things get inked.
These last two PRs can be contrasted with the SSP/EDS fiasco where deals were done, but no solid prime contract/customer was in place. The whole thing then unraveled, but with enforceable components, was settled through stock etc.
I do not believe the prime contractor has the flexibility to swap in whatever it feels like after the contract is awarded (as you suggest). The contract was awarded to a bid that involved certain components. The prime cannot suddenly dump the company from Lee and go with something from Germany or Switzerland. It just doesn’t work that way. If Lockheed sells the DoD a plane stated to have GE engines, then is has GE engines.
Contracts can have flexility in some areas, and be entirely inflexible in others.
In the case of the services Wave hopes to delivery, the preponderance of the competition is foreign, so for at least *this* round, Wave won
All IMO.
The above content is my opinion.
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