All on the Same Team

"Companies are going to look to fill niches and find capabilities that they don't have. But like everything else in the government contracting community, it always comes back to relationships," said David M. Nadler, a government contracts attorney at Dickstein Shapiro LLP.

Some contractors have unusually good access to decision-makers in the government because they've been working with the government for years.

The Department of Homeland Security "still has an issue of critical mass," said Brian Walker, Northrop Grumman's vice president of strategic planning for homeland security. "Its positions are filled by contractors. And those contractors are prime targets when you're selecting your team."

As the dance goes on, the challenge for a prime contractor is to put together the best team without promising too much. A 15-member team on which every subcontractor has been told it will get a quarter of the work will not be happy. So the prime contractor has to manage expectations.

"We'll say, 'We think you're the best basket-weaver, so any work that comes out in basket weaving, you're it,'" said Wayne Esser, who leads Boeing's SBInet team. "But if nothing comes out in basket-weaving, tough luck."

Prime contractors often compete for subcontractors, which means that they sometimes have to promise more than they would like. Paul Leslie, chief executive of McLean-based Apogen Technologies Inc., said the company's extensive experience working with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol made it highly sought-after as the prime contractors put together their SBInet bids.

In choosing which team to join, Leslie said he first tried to determine which is likely to win. If there are several strong contenders, the next question is which one offers the most business. That means looking at what other subcontractors have already signed up, and making sure they don't have skills that overlap too closely with what his firm provides, Leslie said.

Given all of that, he said his choice was clear. "It was a matter of 'okay, let's see what we can get.' We started down that path and bingo, we cut the deal with Raytheon."

Leslie said the technology Apogen provides lines up well with Raytheon's needs.

For other potential subcontractors, it's less a question of which team they will join than whether they will get on a team at all.

Lockheed, which is the only prime bidder for the Secure Border Initiative that has not disclosed its teammates, held a series of outreach events in border towns such as Laredo, Tex., and Buffalo this spring and was deluged with proposals from small local companies that wanted to join its bid.

"For many small and mid-size companies, teaming is often the only way they can penetrate the government market," Nadler said. "The large companies are effectively gatekeepers."

That disturbs Daniel J. Guttman, a Johns Hopkins University fellow who specializes in government contracting. To him, the government is already dependent on the private sector to get its work done. Huge contracts and extensive teaming, he said, take the problem one step further by making companies dependent on one another and limiting the true competition that could save the government money.

"It allows companies to reduce their competitive risk," he said.

It doesn't sit well, either, with Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League. He said small companies often end up with considerably less work than what they have been promised. "But they do it because it's either that or nothing," he said. "And at many businesses, they just want to keep their doors open."

For Falls Church-based Digital Design & Imaging Service Inc., the situation is not that dire. But firm president Curt Westergard acknowledged that getting on a winning team for SBInet "would change our whole business."

Until now, the 10-person firm's fleet of camera-equipped balloons has attracted interest primarily from the private sector -- for example, from developers who want to know if the proposed penthouse suite really would have a view of the park. But he thinks there's a role for his balloons in aerial surveillance of the border, too. Now he just has to persuade one of the prime contractors that he's right.

"The payoff would be in aces. But the chance of the payoff is small. We're not on the Fortune 500. We're your average American company," he said. "But we're just going to keep waiting. I'll keep two toes in the pond, and hope that something comes through."