--Invitation to One-On-One Discussions for the US-UK Countermine Project Arrangement

The Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (MoD) and the Department of Defense of the United States of America (DoD) have entered into a joint program of research into a vehicle-based system for the detection and countering of land mines on military routes. The end objective of the program is to jointly develop and then evaluate a demonstration system. The work will involve both MoD and DoD organizations, plus industrial organizations in both the UK and US, i n a fully collaborative program that will pool and share all information produced. All work will be exploitable by either nation for future countermine and related work. The program will focus on countering buried and surface laid anti-vehicle land mines under the following conditions (in priority order): a. Real time medium range (5m to 50m) mine detection and recognition from a ground vehicle; b. Real time short-range (less than 5m) mine detection, recognition, and identification from a ground vehicle ; c. Countering the threat at short range (less than 5m) from a ground vehicle. The technical demonstrator system must provide a rate of advance broadly compatible with the tempo of military operations and be compatible with a medium weight force. The t echnical demonstrator system must also offer the potential for enhancement to provide capability against a wider range of threats, more rapid rates of advance and other terrain. The key to success for the program is early and continued industry participat ion. To this end, UK and US sponsors provided program briefings to industry on the 28th October and 9th November 2004 in the US and UK respectively. These briefings outlined the requirements for the program and also presented the UK and US background res earch in this field. The presentation material can be found on http://conference.brtrc.com/ukus. The aim of this announcement is to solicit expressions of interest from both UK and US industries in participating in joint collaboration during future phase s of the program. As discussed at the industry briefing, the next phase of the collaborative program (Phase 2) will include a number of trade-off studies to identify the optimum system components for Phase 3. An invitation to tender (ITT) for the trade-o ff studies, Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) W909MY-05-R-0005, will be available from on or about 21 January 2005 from the US Army Single Face to Industry website at https://abop.monmouth.army.mil. It should be noted that at the end of Phase 2, the UK and US sponsors intend to award a competitive contract for the final phase (Phase 3) that encompasses the systems integration of a technical demonstrator. In order to help industry understand what will be required in the trade-off studies phase, the UK and US sponsors will host One-on-One discussions with interested companies and consortia/partnerships. These discussions will provide interested parties with an opportunity to ask questions regarding the BAA and for parties to discuss their initial thoughts on their technical approach and considerations for trade-off studies. In addition, interested parties are asked to discuss their experience as a system integrator and their approach to equitably addressing export licensing, Intellectual Property Rights, and security issues. Ideally interested parties should have joint UK/US partnerships or intentions to partner, and have a strong systems integration capability. While involvement in the One-on-One process is not a requirement to participation in the BAA, part icipation is encouraged. The one-on-one discussions in the US will take place during 28 February 2005  4 March 2005 in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and in the UK will take place during 7-11 March 2005 at Dstl, Fort Halstead, Kent. Interested par ties should send an email to the Contracting Officer and provide the following information: name of company, address, point of contact, phone number, fax number , name of attendees. Each One-on-One session will be limited to 2 hours and two daily time appointments (1000-1200 and 1400-1600) are available on a first-come basis. Advance written questions or comments, while not required, may be submitted to the Cont racting Officer at contact@example.gov. Interested parties should email contact@example.gov (UK) or contact@example.gov (US) to schedule appointments for One-on-One discussions with the sponsors.