Area of Interest: OSW Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) Modeling and Simulation

Updated Nov 11, 2026

Solicitation from the Washington Headquarters Services (WHS). Due Nov 16, 2026, 4:00 PM (UTC-5), 5 days left.

Bid documents (3)

• Phase I OSW CAPE Modeling and Simulation 23 KB
• OSW CAPE MS Consolidated Phase I Questions With Answers 143 KB
• Phase I OSW CAPE Modeling and Simulation - Amendment 1 23 KB

Paid members download every document from this page, or buy this bid alone.

Description

Amendment 1 - Answers to timely submitted questions are attached. NEW SUBMISSION DATE - Monday, November 16, 2026 - 4:00PM ET. __________ The Department of War (DOW) Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) supports the Office of the Secretary of War (OSW). The Director of CAPE is the principal staff assistant to the Secretary of War for Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation.

In fulfilling this role, the Director of CAPE provides independent, non-advocate, and data-driven analytical evaluations directly to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of War regarding defense program investments, major force structure posture, and strategic resourcing trade-offs. The Director’s principal responsibilities include: Analyze and evaluate plans, programs, and budgets in relation to U.S. defense objectives, projected threats, allied contributions, estimated costs, and resource constraints.

Review, analyze, and evaluate programs, including classified programs, for executing approved policies. Provide leadership in developing and promoting improved analytical tools and methods for analyzing national security planning and the allocation of resources. Ensure that the costs of DoW programs, including classified programs, are presented accurately and completely.

Assess effects of DoW spending on the U.S. economy and evaluate alternative policies to ensure that DoW programs can be implemented efficiently. Currently, CAPE’s campaign- and mission-level Modeling and Simulation (M&S) relies on heavy, time-intensive physics engines (e.g., AFSIM) that execute discrete, bespoke combat runs. While highly detailed, these simulation approaches are too slow, computationally expensive, and inflexible to support executive-level sensitivity sweeps across multi-dimensional threat environments and Department warfighting capabilities.

CAPE’s current environment leverages HPC resources that provide 1.5 terabytes (TB) of usable memory and 2,000 Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores with no wall clock time restraints. On average, individual simulation execution via AFSIM requires 1 hour of real time to complete and 20 gigabytes (GB) of accessible RAM. This constraint, coupled with sharp disparities in compute architecture, hardware availability, and security accreditation across existing CAPE enclaves restrict analysts to limited, manual workflows while preventing the execution of high-throughput, compute-intensive campaign analytics.

CAPE is seeking innovative solutions to establish a next-generation modeling architecture, replacing its legacy M&S infrastructure. To dramatically compress the cycle time between defense budget queries and statistically defensible warfighting insights, the target environment must integrate three interdependent functional layers: (1) A high-performance simulation execution layer to execute large numbers of model (e.g., AFSIM) runs to span the parameter space.

Runs in this layer are computationally intensive and resource demanding but will be executed infrequently and systematically using advanced Design of Experiments techniques. (2) A machine-learned surrogate emulation layer to train ultra-fast emulator models from simulation results and detect out-of-sample queries. While the government plans to develop and calibrate these surrogate emulators and analytical models in-house, the commercial solution must provide the extensible data staging, pipeline integration, and execution framework to ingest batch simulation results and host these government-developed models.

(3) An intuitive self-service quantitative analysis layer housing pre-built methods for sensitivity analysis, marginal gain estimates, etc., and tools for custom analysis (e.g., tradespace decisions between range, speed, and lethality of weapon systems) and visualization. The solution must support both current operational needs and have flexibility to accommodate future growth in data volume, model complexity, user demand, and computational intensity.

This next generation environment will establish an open, scalable, and unified computational backbone designed to modernize Department decision support. The scope of this effort includes the following core technical and performance requirements. A high-performance compute environment sized to meet demanding modeling, simulation, and analytic workloads.

Proposed solution architectures should span options to allow for parameter evaluation in the simulation layer on the order of 1,200 individual simulations (i.e., light case - isolated missions only) to be executed within 10 hours real-time, up to 150,000 individual simulations (i.e., heavy case – full joint campaign) to be executed within 2 weeks real-time. Of note, current CAPE architecture would require 1 year of simulation execution runtime for the heavy case.

Secure, efficient, data and software movement both into and out of the environment, as well as the ability to interface with external networks to enable transfer of data in accordance with applicable security and access controls. The environment must support network throughput of 100 Mbps - 1 Gbps. The solution must also support connectivity over HTTPS to designated external OSW and mission-relevant data sources, including OSW CAPE-furnished databases and other authorized repositories (e.g., War Data Platform), as applicable.

Ability to accommodate evolving development ecosystems and diverse sets of software including M&S tools and analytic technologies. This includes modern software (e.g., Python, R, Java, etc.), scalable data platforms, scalable parallelizable processes (e.g., containers), optimization tools (e.g., GAMS), artificial intelligence capabilities (e.g., large language models), and neural network development (e.g., PyTorch), provided they can be incorporated in a secure and maintainable manner.

The solution must enable efficient onboarding, integration, and removal of models and software as mission needs evolve. The Gove

The description continues in the official notice.

Contracting contact

• Danny Uhr · [email protected]
• Eric Langett · [email protected]

As published on the official notice. Ask questions in writing and before any questions deadline the notice sets.

Is your business small enough?

For NAICS 541715, a business counts as small if it has no more than 11 employees (SBA size standard, with exceptions in the notes). This notice is not set aside, but the size decides your small business status on it. SBA table, current as of Oct 15, 2026.

Notice history

• Nov 10, 2026: Solicitation Due Nov 16, 2026, 4:00 PM (UTC-5)
• Nov 2, 2026: Special Notice Due Nov 12, 2026, 4:00 PM (UTC-5)

Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences contracts right now

There are 271 open government contract opportunities in this trade (NAICS 541715), 39 posted in the last 7 days; 29% are set aside for small businesses. The agencies buying the most are Department of the Air Force, Department of the Army and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Most of the work with a stated place is in Maryland, District of Columbia and New Mexico. A notice in this trade gives a median of 52 days from posting to deadline; this one gives 6 days.

All open research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences contracts

Coming up in this trade

Planned contracts from the agencies' procurement forecasts, often months before a solicitation. Plans can change.

Recent awards in this trade

• Hayzel, LLC $2.5 million · Department of the Army · Nov 5, 2026
• Airborne Holdings Inc $232,060 · Department of the Navy · Nov 3, 2026
• UNIVERSITY OF MAINE SYSTEM Orono ME $632,224 · Department of the Army · Nov 3, 2026
• Yale Univ NEW Haven $8.6 million · Department of Veterans Affairs · Oct 29, 2026
• ICF Incorporated, L.L.C. $2.9 million · Environmental Protection Agency · Oct 29, 2026

From the award notices agencies publish.

Similar open research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences bids