The Naval Aviation Training Systems and Ranges program office (PMA-205) Undersea Warfare Training Ranges (USWTR) team received the Department of the Navy Acquisition Excellence Award for Innovation Excellence Acquisition Team of the Year Nov. 3 at a ceremony held in the Pentagon.  

The Department of the Navy Acquisition Excellence Awards recognize individuals and teams that have demonstrated excellent performance in the acquisition and sustainment of products and services for the Navy and Marine Corps.

The teams winning awards today exemplify the Navy’s best among their peers, those groups which through synergistic relationships, ingenuity and strong business acumen, accomplish missions critical to our nation’s success,” said Jay Stefany, who is performing the duties of Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Jay Stefany.  

The USWTR team employed unique strategies to increase capability, affordability and safety to deliver both new and upgraded underwater training ranges to the warfighter ahead of schedule. 

The team's innovative business approach to recapitalizing and constructing seven undersea ranges resulted in $339 million in cost savings and eliminated five duplicative contract actions. The contract used an off-the-shelf technical data package, merged and shared training and Test and Evaluation (T&E) range expertise, and implemented collaborative contract document approaches to enable a full and open competition source selection process to award in only six months.  

“The team’s unique strategy facilitated both the installation and recapitalization of underwater ranges that are essential to our national security and contribute significantly to the quality of the Navy’s ability to train in complex, immersive scenarios,” said PMA-205 Program Manager Capt. Kevin McGee.

The team acquired and installed an additional total of 500 nautical miles of instrumented undersea warfare training ranges in littoral waters in the Atlantic Ocean and recapitalized existing undersea range sites. Through collaboration with the T&E community, the team devised a plan to combine the specification and design work through the critical design review, immediately reducing government staff labor cost by 50 percent. By merging these technical activities, they enabled the re-use of an existing Technical Data Package (TDP) from a previous undersea range procurement, which addressed requirements across a total of six different undersea ranges for the new full and open competition, resulting in an estimated cost savings of $339 million.   

“This accomplishment is the culmination of two years’ worth of hard work and dedication put in by this team. Each team member consistently went above and beyond in their duties to execute this award ahead of schedule and work cohesively despite being geographically disparate,” said Brandi Payne-Tapponnier, USWTR team lead.

The team recognized the need for common requirements across the training and T&E ranges. This approach provided for unprecedented commonality, and once all the ranges have been recapitalized and constructed, there will be a total of seven training and T&E ranges using only two TDPs. This commonality will greatly reduce the lifecycle costs in the sustainment of these ranges, which have a design operational life approximately 25 years. 

The new multifaceted contract delivers six underwater training ranges, including four deep water range recapitalizations and two shallow water range new constructions which are all scheduled to deliver 17 months early. 

About PMA-205 

PMA-205 provides full life-cycle acquisition of naval aviation training platforms, general training systems, training range instrumentation systems, and distributed mission training centers to provide Navy and Marine Corps pilots, naval flight officers, aircrew, and maintainers with the training equipment required to provide lethal capability and operational readiness.