Leidos joins Anduril in U.S. Air Force design deal

The U.S. Air Force has awarded Leidos an $85 million ceiling contract for digital design tools meant to help engineer future aircraft, the second company in as many days to win a spot under the same research program that Anduril Industries joined a day earlier.

The Air Force Research Laboratory made the award to Leidos, a Reston, Virginia-based technology and engineering contractor, under the VOLARE program, formally known as Digital System-Level Mission-Driven Integrated Design Methods for Aerospace Systems. Like the earlier Anduril award, this is an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract, meaning the $85 million is a ceiling rather than guaranteed funding, with the Air Force issuing individual task orders as work is needed.

Work will take place in Dayton, Ohio, and the contract runs through Sept. 18, 2036, a 10-year window that closely mirrors Anduril’s own VOLARE deal, which was awarded one day earlier and runs through Sept. 17, 2036.

Both awards stem from the same competition, in which eight companies submitted offers. The near-identical contract numbers, Anduril’s FA2391-26-D-B013 and Leidos’s FA2391-26-D-B015, along with matching $85 million ceilings and the shared eight-offer count, indicate the Air Force Research Laboratory structured VOLARE as a multi-award IDIQ, selecting more than one contractor to compete for task orders rather than picking a single winner. As with Anduril’s contract, no funds are obligated on the base agreement itself. The first task order under this award, worth $75,000 in fiscal 2026 research funds, has been issued to get the work started.

VOLARE covers two related goals: building software that can model an aircraft’s overall vehicle systems, and developing methods for designing thermal management systems, the cooling architecture that keeps an aircraft’s engines, electronics and sensors from overheating. Modern military aircraft pack growing amounts of high-power radar, computing and directed-energy equipment into the same airframe, making heat management as much a design challenge as the weapons or sensors themselves.

Leidos is a large federal technology and engineering contractor with a long history supporting defense, intelligence and civilian government agencies, though the company has not previously been publicly tied to this specific style of digital-engineering work for aircraft design in the way Anduril has through its recent missile-development prize win.

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