CARLSBAD, September 25 — Viasat has won a seven-year contract to supply satellite connectivity to the United States Marine Corps, an award the Carlsbad, California-based operator announced on September 25, 2026. The vehicle is an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract with a ceiling of up to $307 million. Viasat has already taken an initial $42 million (approximately €36.8 million) task order under it.
That first tranche is the only money guaranteed so far; the rest sits with the Marine Corps, which can issue further task orders over the seven-year term as operational demands evolve.
What the Marines are actually buying
Under the hood, this is a managed services deal rather than a hardware sale. Viasat will run fully managed, end-to-end global satellite services for the Corps, spanning L-band, Ku-band and Ka-band networks. The company will combine its own spacecraft — including ViaSat-3 — with capacity leased from partner constellations.
The technical reality is that Marine traffic will be able to move across multiple satellite networks rather than sitting on a single orbit or a single provider. That is the resilience argument, and it is the detail that matters: a unit ashore, afloat or in the air is meant to stay connected even when one path degrades or is denied.
Victor Farah, Senior Vice President of Government Solutions and Services at Viasat, framed the award in those terms. “We’re extremely proud the Marine Corps has selected Viasat to continue as its trusted partner for enterprise, multi-orbit SATCOM services,” he said. “Our team is committed to delivering an information advantage through flexible, high-performance and secure connectivity that will support the communications demands of rapidly evolving and expeditionary operations.”
An existing relationship, extended
The contract continues a relationship that already exists. Viasat has been supplying the Marine Corps with enterprise satellite communications, and this award keeps it in place for another seven years. Viasat is publicly traded and operates a fleet of satellites providing broadband and communications services to commercial, government and military customers worldwide.
ViaSat-3 is its next-generation high-capacity satellite system, and it forms part of the capacity mix on offer here. The company’s government solutions division serves US and allied military customers with managed satellite services.
The scope is global, which reflects the expeditionary nature of Marine Corps operations. Those units expect to work across dispersed and potentially austere environments, where the connectivity has to follow them rather than the other way round. As ever with IDIQ structures, the ceiling is not a spend.
It is a permission. The Marine Corps gets flexibility to scale its connectivity requirements up or down, and Viasat carries the burden of holding capacity ready against orders that may or may not arrive.
The award also fits a broader pattern in US military procurement, in which commercial satellite communications capacity is bought through multi-year, multi-provider contracts to support operations across land, air and sea domains rather than through bespoke government constellations alone. The announcement was reported on September 25, 2026, by Chris Forrester of Advanced Television. What to watch next is the task order flow.
The $42 million initial award is the first tranche of work; how quickly the Marine Corps issues further orders against the $307 million ceiling will show how hard it intends to lean on commercial multi-orbit capacity.
