War Contracts

Army Picks Two Firms to Compete for $99 Million Central America Construction Work

Sea Pac Engineering and Relyant Global will vie for task orders under a firm-fixed-price deal for facility design, repair and construction, running through July 2031.

First Published: July 13, 2026, 1:29 PM ET

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — Two contractors will compete for orders under a $99 million U.S. Army deal to design, repair and build facilities across Central America.

Sea Pac Engineering Inc., a Los Angeles builder that has delivered more than $400 million in construction across 29 countries, and Relyant Global LLC, a Maryville, Tennessee, firm, will bid against each other for individual task orders. The firm-fixed-price contract carries a total cumulative face value of $99 million, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a July 13, 2026 notice. The government solicited bids over the internet and received eight.

Sea Pac Engineering specializes in new construction, renovation and modernization for the Army Corps of Engineers, the Navy, NASA and the State Department, according to icic.org. The firm has delivered more than $225 million in projects at U.S. military and federal facilities and overseas embassies, according to seapaceng.com.

“SPE aggressively completed work on site through meticulous scheduling and coordination,” said Jeff Yin, deputy resident engineer at the Army Corps of Engineers Los Angeles District, in a testimonial published by the company, according to seapaceng.com.

The stakes fall on the two bidders, who now hold a foothold to capture future work in a region where the U.S. military maintains partnerships and installations. Each order will define its own work location and funding, giving the government flexibility to spread the money across projects through an estimated completion date of July 12, 2031. The arrangement rewards firms with overseas experience and squeezes out competitors that cannot staff distant job sites.

The award ranks as the largest Army contract recorded in 2026, at $99 million, against a year-to-date minimum of $19.9 million. It marks the first contract logged for both Sea Pac Engineering and Relyant Global in the database this year. The deal was one of seven Department of Defense contracts issued nationwide on July 13, 2026, and stands as the 11th Defense contract awarded in California during the year.

For the average U.S. reader, the contract shows how taxpayer dollars fund construction far from home. The work supports diplomatic and military objectives abroad, and the spending flows to private companies that employ American workers. Sea Pac Engineering provides secure employment to more than 70 team members, according to icic.org.

Has this happened before? This has happened before. Sea Pac Engineering has served the State Department’s Overseas Building Operations, and it once won an Elevator World Project of the Year award for modernizing an elevator at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, according to seapaceng.com. The firm’s founder, John Lee, earned a Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year award for building the company since 1993.

The next decision rests with contracting officers at the Army Corps of Engineers Mobile District in Mobile, Alabama, who will issue individual task orders as needs arise. A date for the first task order has not been announced.

Military builders have long followed the flag into contested ground, as happened before. In 1904, the Army Corps of Engineers took over construction of the Panama Canal after French efforts collapsed, and Colonel George Washington Goethals drove the project to completion in 1914 at a cost of roughly $352 million. Yellow fever and malaria had killed thousands during the French attempt, but Army engineers cut the death rate sharply through sanitation. Goethals emerged from the effort as a national figure, and the canal reshaped commerce between two oceans for more than a century.