The police training contract is supposed to be decided next month, and the company has not been officially notified that it’s getting it. | Department of Defense photo. Blackwater likely to receive contract

Former officials familiar with the deal say that Blackwater is likely to get a Defense Department-issued contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to train and mentor Afghan police.

The police training contract is supposed to be decided next month, and the company has not been officially notified that it’s getting it. But the only competing bid for the contract, submitted by Northrop with MPRI, has been disqualified, a former official knowledgeable about the contract said.


“We have no knowledge that the contract will be awarded to us,” Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Blackwater, now known as Xe, told POLITICO Thursday.

Lockheed, meanwhile, is quite likely to be awarded an associated logistics contract to support the Afghanistan police training effort (a contract known as TORP 166), for which Blackwater also bid, the former officials said.

While a Blackwater subsidiary’s activities in Afghanistan were the subject of a scathing hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday, the U.S. Central Command and the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, are said to be very happy with the company’s work in Afghanistan, the former official familiar with the contracting deal told POLITICO. Blackwater has contracts to do intelligence support, counternarcotics support (with the Drug Enforcement Administration) and work on the Afghan-Pakistani border, the former official said.

The DoD has five “primes” — companies eligible to bid on contracts in Afghanistan: Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop, Arinc (owned by Carlyle) and Blackwater. Of those, only Blackwater bid for both parts of the Afghan police training contract — involving training/mentoring and logistics. Its only competitor for the logistics contract was Lockheed. The former official said the Army had Lockheed resubmit its proposal to make it more suitable for the logistics contract.

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