GAO Tanker Decision Could Come Tomorrow

A pro-​​Boeing source sent me the fol­low­ing this AM…

The best indi­ca­tion we have at this point is that the GAO deci­sion on the Boeing protest of the Air Force tanker con­tract is likely to be announced late Wednesday. The ini­tial announce­ment in these cases (e.g. the CSAR-​​X protest) will be some­what lim­ited, sim­ply stat­ing the GAOs con­clu­sion, for exam­ple, that the Air Force made seri­ous mis­takes in con­duct­ing the com­pe­ti­tion. In the CSAR-​​X case, the announce­ment said: GAO sus­tained the protest on the basis that the Air Forces actual eval­u­a­tion of the MPLCC (most prob­a­ble life-​​cycle cost) was incon­sis­tent with the required approach as set forth in the solic­i­ta­tion. GAO rec­om­mended that the solic­i­ta­tion should be amended, but later rec­om­mended that the CSAR-​​X com­pe­ti­tion be re-​​opened.

So it looks like GAO might make an ini­tial call on the tanker deal tomor­row — a day ear­lier than planned.

And here’s another inter­est­ing way of phras­ing the con­tro­versy from the anti-​​EADS folks as well:

The Air Force was pres­sured into alter­ing the pro­gram require­ments and the deci­sion­mak­ing mod­els, lead­ing to its sub­se­quent mis­judg­ment of the fac­tors of 1] Mission Capability, 2] Risk, 3] Past Performance and 4] Cost.

The Air Force was pres­sured? By whom? McCain…who spent lit­tle time on this issue once it was recompeted?

The argu­ments are get­ting weirder and weirder as this goes for­ward. We’re all sort of hold­ing our breath to see how this shakes out. Colin’s piece yes­ter­day was inter­est­ing too in not­ing the cold recep­tion U.S. reps could get at Farnborough if the KC-​​45 is pulled.

– Christian

June 17th, 2008 | The Tanker Tango | 48263 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2008/06/17/gao-tanker-decision-could-come-tomorrow/GAO+Tanker+Decision+Could+Come+Tomorrow2008-06-17+16%3A55%3A28lowe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.