Boeing backers pleased with tanker RFP specifications - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Boeing backers pleased with tanker RFP specifications

Boeing supporters in Congress were upbeat and Northrop Grumman partisans were glum following a Defense Department briefing on the latest Air Force plans to order new aerial refueling tankers.

During morning briefings for lawmakers Wednesday, it became clear that the Air Force has made few changes of substance to the requirements it set last fall for a new fleet of tankers. In December, Northrop complained that those requirements favored Boeing, and warned that unless they were changed, Northrop and its partner, Europe’s Airbus, might not compete for a $35 billion contract to build 179 refueling planes.

After hearing details of the Air Force’s new request for proposals, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., said he was “cautiously optimistic.” Some of the work on Boeing tankers would be done in Kansas, and Tiahrt has been an unabashed Boeing supporter.

“This is not the RFP I would have written,” Tiahrt said, but the Pentagon “made the right decision in rejecting the narrow interests of a foreign company.”

Tiahrt said he wanted the RFP to “account for the illegal subsidies” that Airbus received from European governments. The subsidies give “the French tanker a hidden cost advantage,” he said.

In contrast to Tiahrt ebullience, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., fired off a statement in bold-face type declaring that “the final RFP discredits the integrity of the entire process.”

Alabama stands to benefit if Northrop wins the tanker contract because a new aircraft plant would be built in Mobile and thousands of workers would be hired to assemble the tankers there.

“Capabilities that would better protect the lives of our men and women in uniform were neglected in the draft RFP” and in the final version, he said. “The Air Force did not make a single revision to the key war-fighter requirements.”

Shelby said that “the RFP clearly favors a smaller, less capable airframe.” The plane Boeing is expected to offer the Air Force is smaller than the one offered by Northrop and Airbus.

“I am concerned that the Defense Department may not get two competitive bids in this process,” Shelby said.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., added to Shelby’s denunciation.

“This solicitation has been doctored to such a degree,” Sessions said, that Northrop may drop out of the competition fearing that the RFP precludes it from winning. A Northrop-Airbus withdrawal “would be tragic for the military and for U.S. taxpayers,” he said. “We know from experience that sole-source bidding leads to less capability, more costs and more fraud.”

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., focused on the jobs that a Boeing win would bring to her state.

“The bottom line is that the tanker brings jobs, not only on the assembly lines in Everett, but also to aerospace suppliers and businesses, large and small, across our state and nation,” she said. “Especially now, America’s tanker should be built by America’s workers.”

The effort to supply the Air Force with new tankers is nearly a decade old.

It began in 2001, when the Air Force and Boeing developed a plan for the Air Force to lease and eventually buy 100 new Boeing tankers.

That effort collapsed in 2003 after Boeing hired Darleen Druyun, the senior Air Force contracting official who arranged the lease. Druyun and Boeing’s chief financial officer, Michael Sears, were convicted of conflict-of-interest law violations and served prison sentences over the matter.

In 2005, Northrop teamed with Airbus in a revived Air Force effort to acquire new tankers. And in 2008, Northrop won a tanker contract.

Boeing promptly protested the award, and four months later the Government Accountability Office voided the contract, agreeing with Boeing that the Air Force had bungled the competition.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates halted Air Force attempts to promptly replay the Boeing-Northrop tanker contest, saying it had become too politically charged.

A year of cooling off led to a draft RFP last fall and the final one issued Wednesday.