In an increasingly sharp war of words and legal maneuvers, Amazon Web Services Inc. is stepping up its protest of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract award, asking the U.S. Department of Defense for more clarity around corrective action it has proposed taking.

The company filed a second, concurrent bid protest directly with the DOD Monday. Though the protest hasn’t been made public yet, in the words of Amazon.com Inc.’s communications chief in a new blog post today, the award is “fatally flawed on all six of the technical evaluation factors.”

The protest comes after a federal court judge’s decision to grant the DOD a 120-day remand to “reconsider the aspects of the procurement challenged in Amazon’s protest of the JEDI contract.” However, the judge considered only one evaluation factor and now Amazon is saying that the DOD needs to look at all of them.

The DOD awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project to Microsoft Corp. ahead of AWS in October following a hotly contested bidding process that saw earlier bids from IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. also lose out. The JEDI contract, which has a value of $10 billion over 10 years, was expected to be awarded to AWS until very late in the process.

AWS protested the award in the Court of Federal Claims in December, before winning a temporary restraining order in March that prevented the DOD and Microsoft from building out the JEDI cloud infrastructure. That came after the court ruled that AWS was likely to show that the DOD erred in its technical evaluation of Microsoft’s bid.

Now, AWS says the DOD has amended the JEDI solicitation for a key part of the contract that deals with pricing scenarios for online cloud storage. The amendment came after the Court of Federal Claims ruled that the DOD’s evaluation of this factor did not comply with the contract’s requirements, and means both AWS and Microsoft can submit revised proposals.

But AWS says the amended language in the contract is “ambiguous.”

“As the DOD was defining the new storage requirement, they didn’t clearly define it,” Drew Herdener, vice president of worldwide communications at Amazon, wrote in a blog post early this morning. “We asked multiple times for clarification, to which the DOD was unresponsive. It left us no option but to appeal to the agency to clarify it.”

Moreover, Amazon is asking the DOD to consider more than simply that one technical evaluation factor. “Because the first issue the judge reviewed was sufficient to issue the injunction against JEDI, she did not need to address the many other issues raised in our complaint,” Herdener said. “The DOD initially said they’d correct the evaluation, but only this one flaw. We objected to that approach because it’s likely to lead us back to this same situation if the DOD doesn’t also rectify the other flaws.”

The other flaws, according to AWS, involve faulty consideration of factors such as levels of security, edge computing capabilities, information security and access controls and application data hosting and portability.

Microsoft had responded to the latest protest Thursday with a blog post penned by Corporate Vice President of Communications Frank X. Shaw, who said AWS was purposefully blocking the company’s work with the DOD on JEDI.

“This latest filing – filed with the DOD this time – is another example of Amazon trying to bog down JEDI in complaints, litigation and other delays designed to force a do-over to rescue its failed bid,” Shaw wrote, mentioning his own active duty as a Marine officer in the 1980s. “And now Amazon is at it again, trying to grind this process to a halt, keeping vital technology from the men and women in uniform — the very people Amazon says it supports.”

Shaw added that Microsoft isn’t aware of the exact content of Amazon’s new protest because the complaint was filed “out of view of the public and directly with the DOD.” He added that Amazon’s latest move is “disappointing, but not surprising.”

Those comments apparently sparked the response from Herdener today, and he had more to say about Microsoft, raising recent and earlier issues with its cloud services and accusing it of trying to “bully its way to an unjust victory.”

“Microsoft is doing an awful lot of posturing,” he wrote. “We understand why. Nobody knowledgeable and objective believes they have the better offering. And, this has been further underscored by their spotty operational performance during the COVID-19 crisis (and in 2020 YTD).”

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