By Jeff Vedders
Since the U.S. military is a key component of many communities, and with the current attention to homeland security and defense, targeting companies that supply to the military and defense industries has increasingly become a major economic strategy for several economic development organizations. The websites below will provide you with a look at companies winning defense contracts and doing work for the military.
This first link will take you to the Department of Defense website, specifically to where awarded contracts are announced. The link is http://www.defenselink.mil/contracts/. All announcements on this site are for contracts over $5 million, archived back to October 1994. Announcements are made every day at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. You can also subscribe for email announcements.
Another useful web site is for the Defense Daily Network at http://www.defensedaily.com. This is the website for Defense Daily, a daily publication for business leads and defense market intelligence within the defense sector. Much of the website is only available through a subscription, but some free items are interesting and informative. The site contains information regarding Department of Defense Budgets and special reports issued by the military. Generally, the most recent information is only available to subscribers. The site also links to program profiles for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. This information is a few years old, but it lists major weapons and military equipment programs. For example, you can learn quite a bit about the Army’s Blackhawk helicopter from its entry: its mission, a detailed description, its foreign counterpart, and its program status and projected activities. The description for each entry sometimes lists the prime contractor. A very useful industry link section provides links to other defense sites.
Finally, take a look at the National Defense Industry Association’s (NDIA) web site at http://www.ndia.org/. This association of over 1,100 corporate members and more than 29,000 individuals from defense and national industry includes foreign nations with whom the U.S., through the Department of Defense, has a Memorandum of Understanding. Included are organizations that sell goods and services to the various Departments of the Executive Branch of government. Best of all, this web site lists all of their member companies, with detailed descriptions and links to their web sites.