This article first appeareed in Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.
Pentagon officials have not yet decided whether an upcoming KC-X competition between Boeing and a Northrop Grumman/EADS North America team to build new aerial refueling tankers will be managed by the U.S. Air Force or the Defense Department’s acquisition chief, according to David Van Buren, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition.
The competition was called off last year by Defense Secretary Robert Gates after threats from Boeing that it would not compete under the parameters set forth at the time. In February 2008, Northrop Grumman/EADS won a $1.5 billion contract to develop an Airbus A330-200-based tanker, but Boeing’s protest of the process turned up several missteps on the part of the Air Force in managing the duel. Northrop’s contract was dashed as a result.
The Air Force’s acquisition corps has fallen under scrutiny in part because of the tanker missteps, problems in managing the program to buy new combat-search-and-rescue helicopters and — years ago — an admission from former top procurement official Darleen Druyun that she unfairly steered contracts to Boeing prior to taking an executive position with the company.
While Air Force officials acknowledge problems in some competitions, they are defending their overall record. Out of 165,000 competitive contracts managed by USAF last year, 121 sparked protests. Two — or just 0.07 percent — were sustained, says Lt. Gen. Mark Shackelford, military deputy to the Air Force acquisition czar. “The notion that our process…is a broken process is not borne out by the statistics,” he says.
If the service is empowered to manage the competition, Shackelford says officials are taking the steps to ensure the process is consistent and fair so that if another protest is filed, the service will not be found at fault and airframes can begin being delivered.
However, the stressing conditions leading up to the last fouled attempt have not changed. Boeing is likely to propose a 767 variant; during the earlier competition, Boeing proposed a 767-200LRF, a new variant that combined doors and floors, cockpit and tail sections from other commercial models. This made Boeing’s development cost higher than Northrop and EADS’, which was able to propose the A330-200 with lower up-front cost. And the Pentagon must still grapple with how to fairly compare two dissimilar commercially derived products on a level playing field.
During the course of past attempts at the competition, both contractors threatened not to bid, effectively holding the Pentagon hostage to shift acquisition parameters to fit their proposals or dash the hope of a competition.
Read the rest of this story, see NorGrum’s Global Hawk sales pitch, watch the Panther stalking tangos and ponder how Israel might confront Iran’s nuke program from our friends at Aviation Week, exclusively on Military.com.
– Christian
Just curious, out of those 165,000 contracts the Air Force quoted, how many are for mundane things like supplying toilet paper and how much are those contracts worth? Getting 100,000 contracts right doesn’t mean as much if the price tag doesn’t even equal the cost of one of those mismanaged aircraft.
The article leaves out FAR too much history.
This started in 1996 & the February 2008 contract was in fact the 2nd contract (the 1st being the now infamous KC-767 tanker lease) to have been cancelled due to “missteps” (although how anyone could intellectually honestly use the term ‘misstep’ for the last selection is beyond comprehension) and in fact Pentagon officials had unprecedented oversight during the last process so how they could place sole blaim on the USAF while ignoring their own role in the debacle is quite telling…
Also important to note is that NG/EADS threatened to not bid because it knew (& openly stated as such) that it could not win based on the DOD/USAF requirements/criteria & thus used the fact that their HAD to be another competition to get the requirements/criteria changed to accomodate their noncompetative platform (the DOD/USAF had previously rejected it). After the 2nd selection/contract was cancelled, Gates fundamentally changed the what is now the ended-before-it-began 3rd ‘competiton’ requirements/criteria to FURTHER accomodate/favor the larger A330 platform without any justification or input. So Boeing threatened to not bid unless it was given sufficient time to study the new requirements/criteria in order to come up with the best proposal.
Mr. Sang,
Sir, you are probably a really good poet and you writings may have some obscure merit BUT this isn’t a vent-your-bile-through-poetry site. I’m quite sure that you can find the correct forum for your writings… or you could go pay a hooker to dress up like a nun to take care of your problem.
Sigh, Cauchy needs a suspension to stop posting his random postings.
I suppose the reason why Boeing is acting all uppity is because they ARE cargo planes/tankers incarnate in the US. After everything merged to bits there is nothing left. I think Lockheed used to make the C-5 but that line closed a loong time ago, and so now it’s just Boeing.
It depeand’s on how one list the economic of a combat win. the last ime the hydrolic oil was used
it help 15,000 savio’s of helacoper flight’s in the high hill’s of packasen. out of 15,000 savio’s onely one seal went bad. I have to hold back the cooking resapie do to USDOD Fraud on other account’s. money tock’s hurpacersie walk’s.
the prouducet is used on more than one aircraft type. but do to US DOD fraud the producet line have to be pulled. It only the hydrolic floued the keep the refulling line from freezing.