U.S. Air Force pays $333M to help troops hunt hackers

The U.S. Air Force has awarded a $332.8 million contract to help its cyber defenders collect, store and analyze network data where it is gathered, so the information can be shared across the military’s common cyber warfare system instead of sitting in separate tools.

Enlighten IT Consulting, a Columbia, Maryland-based subsidiary of shipbuilder and defense contractor HII, won the firm-fixed-price contract after a competition that drew seven offers, the U.S. Department of War said in its Oct. 19 contract announcements. The award was made on Sept. 30, 2026, and the work runs through Sept. 30, 2032, at locations inside and outside the continental United States.

The contract pays for an enterprise service that will make the U.S. Air Force’s Integrated Defensive Cyber System work with a key piece of the Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture, the framework U.S. Cyber Command uses to tie together the tools that military cyber units use to find and fight intruders on Pentagon networks. That piece, known as the Common Runtime Stack for Data, handles analytics, storage and data transport at the network edge, meaning close to where sensors and cyber teams actually pick up the information.

In practice, defensive cyber operators hunt for hackers by sifting through huge volumes of network logs and traffic data. Processing that data near where it is collected, and moving it into a shared format, lets teams from different units and services see the same picture and analyze it faster, without having to ship every byte back to a central data center first.

The money comes from fiscal 2026 U.S. Air Force operations and maintenance and research and development funds, as well as U.S. Space Force research and development and operations funds, an indication that the system will also support Guardians defending Space Force networks. The announcement did not say how much was obligated at the time of award.

The U.S. Air Force bought the service through a Commercial Solutions Opening on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, a Pentagon platform that lets companies pitch commercial technology, often through short video submissions, and lets the government award contracts faster than through a traditional solicitation. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, is the contracting office.

In 2025 it won a $53 million contract to provide support services for the Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture’s Common Runtime Stack for Data and its own Rapid Analytic Deployment and Management Framework, and it has also held U.S. Air Force contracts for the Integrated Defensive Cyber System’s data fabric and for development of the Joint Cyber Command and Control system. The company joined HII through its acquisition of Alion Science and Technology.