The lack of detail points me in the direction of a sole-source contract rather than a full and open competition. This is common for buying small quantities of items that are commericially available. Or restocking previous buys. Running a wide open solicitation effort is very expensive and time consuming.

The SERE kit specs we worked on already existed, we were just helping the govt. to bring them up to date and add real world testing criteria. Yet that took hours of teleconferences, document reviews, etc. The specs for a few items ran into the dozens of pages. These kits will go to a very specific set of warfighters and are specially tailored to their work environment.

I agree that the AF specs were someone's lazy effort. But not all procurements are that way.