ManTech International

ManTech was founded in New Jersey in 1968 by George Pedersen and Franc Wertheimer. They started off with a contract from the U.S. Navy to build sophisticated war-gaming models for submarines. The company was little known outside the Pentagon until 1988, when it agreed to purchase a subsidiary of Northrop Corp. that provided technical and management support to federal agencies such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency. A Washington Post article later that year reported that ManTech, then privately held, was regarded as “something of a mystery” and that its chairman and co-founder George Pedersen did not let himself be photographed.

Before the Northrop deal, ManTech grew largely by acquiring obscure professional services and engineering firms such as Mathetics Corp. and Energystics Corp. Later, ManTech expanded its military and national-security presence by purchasing companies such as Aegis Research Corp. ManTech, which held an initial public offering of stock in 2002, continued to grow by acquisition. It bought technical services company CTX Corp. in 2002, software integration company Integrated Data Systems in 2003, and background investigations company MSM Security Services also in 2003.

ManTech’s stock price plunged more than 30 percent in 2004 when investors realized that the revenue stream from a new background-check contract it won thanks to the MSM acquisition would not be as rapid as expected. Later that year, the company announced the layoff of about 100 employees and posted a quarterly loss.

ManTech rebounded in early 2005 with the announcement that a joint venture it led had been awarded a $209 million contract by the U.S. Army to provide “multi-disciplined intelligence and security support.” The company sold off its environmental services business but acquired intelligence contractor Gray Hawk Systems for $100 million. In January 2006 ManTech was chosen to be the lead subcontractor on a $300 million contract to provide logistics services to the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several months later, the company was one of five contractors awarded a $4 billion blanket purchase agreement from the U.S. Agency for International Development for information technology services. ManTech was then named by Lucent Technologies as a subcontractor on a $4 billion contract to upgrade the Army’s communications infrastructure.

In 2007 ManTech received a contract worth up to $159 million to help the Army with mine-clearing work in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait by maintaining equipment and providing training. It went on to receive other awards such as a contract to maintain tanks at various Army bases around the United States and another from the Defense Department to support “interagency anti-terrorism missions.”

In February 2007, ManTech announced that its troubled MSM Security Services operation would be sold to ManTech chief executive George Pedersen for $3 million. In May 2007 ManTech completed the acquisition of SRS Technologies, a provider of systems engineering services to intelligence, military and homeland security agencies. And in November 2007 ManTech announced plans to acquire McDonald Bradley, an information technology provider to the same sectors served by SRS.