South Carolina Research Authority gets $700M contract

The South Carolina Research Authority has been awarded a major military contract that puts it in charge of turning successful lab experiments into mass-produced weapons that soldiers can use in overseas combat.

The $700 million contract, which is the largest in the state-chartered agency’s 25-year history, will make authority workers responsible for executing the development and production of new weaponry, including warheads, explosives and propellants.

Much of the work will be farmed out to other businesses.

“We have to get technology off the drawing board and into production as soon as we can,” SCRA chief executive officer Bill Mahoney said.

For example, workers will begin pushing the production of a 120-millimeter mortar to be guided by a laser to improve its accuracy.

Such a weapon could have been useful during the Israeli conflict, during which some errant-flying mortar rounds ended up “hitting kindergartens rather than the bad guys,” Mahoney said.

The authority will handle hundreds of similar projects during the contract’s seven-year duration, an accomplishment that Mahoney said will boost its bottom line.

Last year, the authority’s revenues totaled about $110 million. Mahoney estimates that this latest contract will at least double that amount.

Unfortunately, the work is not likely to create a deluge of job opportunities at the organization’s North Charleston campus. As much as 90 percent of the contract work will probably be handled by other agencies scattered across the country.

“It’ll mean some handfuls of new jobs in North Charleston, but it won’t be hundreds of new jobs,” Mahoney said.

The primary contract was let by the Army’s Contracting Command Joint Munitions and Lethality Contracting Center Emerging Technologies Center. SCRA is managing the National Warheads and Energetics Consortium’s part of the project.