LSI lands $22M Navy contract

By Timothy J. Gibbons, The Times-Union

Logistic Services International Inc. has received the largest surface warfare contract in its history.

Over the next two years, the Jacksonville-based company will be paid $22 million to rewrite the training materials used by journeyman-level engineers who work on naval surface ships.

The training will be used by the engineers who work on all the ships in the U.S. Navy other than aircraft carriers and submarines, said Phil Voss, LSI’s chief corporate development officer.

“That’s a whole bunch of ships,” Voss said. “This is real big.”

The work involves taking the current instructor-led courses used by the Center for Naval Engineering in Norfolk, Va., and re-engineering and revising the courses to make them into self-paced instruction courses.

Since bidding for the contract earlier this year, the company has been hiring workers, bringing about 40 new workers onto the 129-employee team that will be working on the project at LSI’s headquarters at Cecil Field, the Westside airport that used to be a military base.

LSI was one of nine companies bidding on the contract, awarded by the Naval Air Warfare Center, which said the company’s proposal “represented the best value to the government.”

Subcontractors on the project include Northrop Grumman Technical Services, General Dynamics Information Technology and Cape Henry Associates of Virginia, Battelle Memorial Institute of Ohio and Craig Technologies of Cocoa Beach.