Pentagon Insider: Defense Department Awards $465 Million in Contracts Thursday

The Pentagon announced an even dozen new defense contracts Thursday, valued at  $465 million total. By far the largest of these awards was an Army contract hiring four small, privately-owned construction firms to perform “construction, restoration and maintenance of real property” work at Ft. Knox, Ky. Valued at $245 million, the construction contract accounted for more than half the funds on offer Thursday.

Among more traditional defense contractors, Boeing (NYSE:BA) came away with one contract win, and a piece of another. For $14.7 million, the defense giant will redesign the “array drive and beam steering controller for the AN/APG-79 active electronically scanned array radio detection,” work that will be performed for the U.S. Navy and the government of Australia. Boeing will also get a piece of a $28.6 million contract awarded to its joint venture with Textron (NYSE:TXT), the Bell Boeing Joint Project Office. The JPO has been instructed to supply the Defense Logistics Agency with unspecified “various depot-level repairables” under a pre-existing contract.

Raytheon (NYSE:RTN) won a contract all for itself, a $14.6 million option exercise hiring it to perform engineering and technical services on U.S. Navy Standard Missile-2 (SM-2) and Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) surface-to-air missiles.

The biggest publicly-traded corporation winning work from the Pentagon Thursday, however, was BAE Systems (NasdaqOTH:BAESY). For $54.7 million, BAE will upgrade 236 Brazilian M113 armored personnel carriers, with the Pentagon acting as intermediary on the contract.

Insider trading notes
Insider trading reports for BAE are, of course, not available from the SEC, BAE being a foreign-listed company.

Insider transactions reports at each of Boeing, Textron, and Raytheon, meanwhile, have leaned in the direction of insider selling, with more sales transactions than purchases reported on Form 4 filings over the past three months. Of the three, Textron’s sales trends seem least worrisome, with only one reported insider sale during the period — and that one for only 1,744 shares.

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