The Army has awarded BAE Systems a $437 million task order for open source intelligence support, the company announced Oct. 15 during the 2019 Association of the United States Army conference.

As part of the task order, BAE Systems will provide the Army and Army Intelligence & Security Command (INSCOM) approved partners with open source solutions to publicly available data.

“We’re proud to continue to partner with the U.S. Army and support their critical national security missions with this new capability,” Peder Jungck, vice president and general manager of BAE Systems’ intelligence solutions business.

The company won the initial award of the five-year task order and began ramping up in August, Jungck said. The task order is an extension of projects the company has been doing for the Army, but this is the first time the work been consolidated and awarded as a larger contract, he explained.

“If you look at contracts in general around OSINT there’s been kind of small ones, there’s been lots of pilots out of agencies and even within the Army and throughout INSCOM there were different kind of brigades and battalions that had their own set of tools," he said. "This is one of the first of the really large OSINT and AI consolidation contracts. I don’t think anybody’s really had a large one like this.”

The contract ranges from providing open source intelligence solutions to training Army personnel on how to treat open source data, whether it’s social media, news or other publicly available information. According to Jungck, the company will take the tools it’s developed from pathfinder programs, prior contracts with agencies such as DARPA as well as internal innovations to provide the Army with the tools they need.

BAE Systems will also help the Army determine the appropriate policies and governance structures to apply to OSINT as a separate data type. As part of its support, the company will also establish and manage a secure cloud hosting environment.