Va. Beach contractor lands $782M Navy contract

Published April 30, 2020 by Sydney Lake

Global Technical Systems is building a $70 million headquarters and manufacturing facility on the former Owl Creek Golf Course site. Photo courtesy Global Technical Systems

Navy veteran Terry Spitzer has dedicated much of his career to manufacturing equipment to be used by his former U.S. Armed Forces branch.

In April, Global Technical Systems (GTS), the Virginia Beach-based company Spitzer and his wife, Yusun, co-founded in 1997, landed a $782 million contract to manufacture equipment for the Navy’s combat system network.

“This is further validation of our commitment to serve the U.S. Armed Forces with American-made products,” Spitzer says.

Under the contract, GTS will manufacture high-tech equipment, including servers, processors, encrypted devices and cybersecurity hardware.

“We take a ‘computer on steroids’ and integrate it with the most up-to-date, commercially available technology and provide that to the Navy to be able to process better, quicker, faster,” Spitzer explains.

GTS is also in the process of building a $70 million new headquarters and manufacturing facility on the site of the former Owl Creek Golf Course on Birdneck Road. GTS has previously said it hopes to add as many as 1,100 employees to its existing 100-person workforce after the new 630,000-square-foot facility is fully operational in fall 2021. (GTS purchased the 110-acre former golf course in 2018 from the city of Virginia Beach and a private landowner.)

The firm plans to migrate its corporate headquarters from its present site on Lynnhaven Parkway to the new site this summer. Its current offices across from Lynnhaven Mall will become home to GTS’s SPARQ Global subsidiary, which focuses on commercial cybersecurity solutions using GTS technology.

Much of the work for the new Navy contract will take place at the Birdneck Road facility, as well as manufacturing chemical-free, kinetically charged batteries.

“It’s not a battery like you’re used to,” Spitzer says. “These mechanical batteries have very high energy and power density and you would use them in pulsed weapons, energy magazines and energy grids. Mechanical power densities are off the chart, meaning we can release a lot of power very quickly.”

Additionally, GTS has become a U.S. pipeline for manufacturing sensitive components and hardware for the Department of Defense that had formerly been available only from China.

“We saw that has been an issue,” Spitzer says, “and we’ve developed our own technology for microservers and different hardware enterprise approaches to be able to have our own homegrown U.S. technologies.”