Defence Services & C5ISR Integration
The industry — Engineering services
Base industry report for 541330 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 11,910
- Under 10 employeesA
- 74%
- Establishments · USA
- 62,590
- Employment · USA
- 1,199,635
- Payroll · USA
- $126.9B
Of 11,910 Canadian establishments with employees, 74% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 12
The binding constraint — entry cost + regulatory drag
The demand is real, large and paid on time by one buyer. The Department of Defense obligated $40.11B of contracts coded to NAICS 541330 in FY2025 [A, USAspending], and $8.81B of it — 22% — went to small businesses [A], so this is not a market sealed shut to anyone under a billion dollars. The mechanism that keeps an ordinary entrant out is that the buyer does not buy from strangers. Booz Allen took about 84% of its FY2026 revenue through 2,426 task orders on IDIQ vehicles [A]: the work is competed among firms already on a vehicle, and getting on one takes past performance on federal contracts that a new firm by definition lacks. Around that sits a stack of eligibility costs paid before the first dollar — personnel and facility security clearances that CACI's 10-K calls 'difficult and time-consuming to obtain' [A], DFARS cost-accounting and audit regimes, and a CMMC third-party cyber certification phasing in from November 2025 to November 2028 that Leidos says decides whether it can bid at all [A]. Scale does not buy much margin either: on FY2025–26 filings operating margin ran from 3.3% at Amentum to 12.3% at Leidos [A, derived], and the primes keep consolidating — CACI paid $2.64B for ARKA in March 2026, Amentum was formed by merging with Jacobs' government business, and KBR is spinning off its mission-technology arm [A]. The reachable lane is therefore a cleared subcontractor or a small-business set-aside holder working under a prime, which is a services firm built around people who already hold clearances and a prime who sponsors them. Canada has the same shape at smaller scale — Calian, the nearest listed Canadian comparable, reported C$774M of FY2025 revenue across defence, health and other lines [A]. Eligibility, not capital, decides it: even a funded entrant waits years for clearances and past performance.
Defence services are bought by one national government at a time and are gated by national security clearance, export control (ITAR/EAR in the US, the Controlled Goods regime in Canada) and domestic-supplier preference, so firms compete within one country's defence budget. The large primes cross borders only through subsidiaries cleared in each country.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 10 of 12 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 12 named · 10 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| LeidosNYSE: LDOSA | $17.2B | — | FY2025 revenues, fiscal year ended 2 January 2026 (Form 10-K filed 17 Feb 2026); 47,000 employees |
| AmentumNYSE: AMTMA | $14.4B | — | FY2025 revenue, fiscal year ended 3 October 2025 (Form 10-K filed 25 Nov 2025); first full year after the Jacobs CMS merger, so not comparable with FY2024 |
| General Dynamics TechnologiesNYSE: GDA | $13.5B | — | 2025 Technologies segment revenue (GDIT and Mission Systems): IT services $9,057M, C5ISR solutions $4,414M (Form 10-K filed 30 Jan 2026) |
| Booz Allen HamiltonNYSE: BAHA | $11.2B | — | FY2026 revenue, fiscal year ended 31 March 2026, down 6% (Form 10-K filed 22 May 2026) |
| CACI InternationalNYSE: CACIA | $9.6B | — | FY2026 revenue, fiscal year ended 30 June 2026 (Form 10-K filed 6 Aug 2026) |
| SAICNASDAQ: SAICA | $7.3B | — | FY2026 revenue, fiscal year ended 30 January 2026 (Form 10-K filed 16 Mar 2026) |
| KBRNYSE: KBRA | $7.8B | — | FY2025 revenue, fiscal year ended 2 January 2026; Mission Technology Solutions segment $5,581M, which KBR plans to spin off (Form 10-K filed 26 Feb 2026) |
| ParsonsNYSE: PSNA | $6.4B | — | FY2025 revenue, year ended 31 December 2025; Federal Solutions is 51% of revenue (Form 10-K filed 11 Feb 2026) |
| L3Harris TechnologiesNYSE: LHXA | $21.9B | — | FY2025 revenue, fiscal year ended 2 January 2026, mostly products rather than services; 75% from US Government customers (Form 10-K filed 12 Feb 2026) |
| BAE Systems Inc.A | not disclosed | — | US subsidiary of BAE Systems plc; its BAE Systems Technology Solutions & Services Inc. entity received $951M of DoD obligations coded 541330 in FY2025 (USAspending), second only to Electric Boat. No US-subsidiary revenue was read. |
| PeratonA | not disclosed | — | Privately held; Peraton Inc. received $554M of obligations coded 541330 across agencies in FY2025 (USAspending). No revenue was read. |
| Calian GroupTSX: CGYA | $774MCAD | — | FY2025 revenue, year ended 30 September 2025, all lines (defence, space, health, IT and cyber); C$1.4B backlog (results release 26 Nov 2025) |
Evidence
Evidence. Every company figure was read in the company's latest Form 10-K on SEC EDGAR (Archives and data.sec.gov XBRL), checked against each filings list on 21 October 2026 for a newer annual period: Leidos, KBR and L3Harris FY ended 2 Jan 2026; SAIC FY ended 30 Jan 2026; Booz Allen FY ended 31 Mar 2026; CACI FY ended 30 Jun 2026; Amentum FY ended 3 Oct 2025 (its FY2026 10-K is not yet due); Parsons and General Dynamics FY2025 [A]. Operating margins are derived as XBRL OperatingIncomeLoss over revenue [A, derived]. Federal obligations come from the USAspending API (spending_by_category, contract award types A–D, federal fiscal years, NAICS 541330, awarding agency Department of Defense), pulled 21 October 2026 [A]. Calian's revenue and backlog were read in its 26 November 2025 results release on calian.com [A]. What these figures do not establish: NAICS 541330 is how contracting officers code a contract, not a market definition — the largest single recipient is Electric Boat (submarine design, $6.30B), and much C5ISR and mission-IT work is coded 541512, 541519 or 541715 instead, so the $40.11B is neither the C5ISR market nor its ceiling. Recipient counts are by legal entity, so concentration is understated. FY2026 USAspending figures (DoD $32.63B to date) were pulled but not used because DoD reports with a lag and the year includes the October–November 2025 shutdown. No segment revenue for BAE Systems Inc. or Peraton was read, and no Canadian DND spend on engineering services by code was found. The time and cost of obtaining a facility clearance, of CMMC certification and of getting onto an IDIQ vehicle were not measured; the filings say these gates exist, and the judgment that they are what keeps an entrant out is the analyst's. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.