The US Marine Corps has got $150m to spend on an awful lot of new computers.

The procurement is for an estimated 57,000 laptops, 18,000 PCs, 5,860 servers and 3,000 tablet PCs.

The deal is for the 20 to 30 per cent of Marine units not connected up to the Navy Marine Corps Intranet - the $8bn contract that ended up costing supplier EDS $500m in write-offs.

The Marine Corps Common Hardware Suite (MCHS) will set common specifications for the hardware.

A Marines spokesman told GovernmentExecutive.com that although some servers and laptops would be rugged for deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Marines had found that ordinary commercial kit stood up very well to conditions in Iraq.

The Marines intend to award four contracts to manufacturers or resellers and one to a small business.

There's more from GovernmentExecutive.com here.

We hope they've got a webserver on the list too - the Marines website is down at the time of writing. ®