By Jen DiMascio
If yesterday was any indication, the Air Force’s hope for a quick start to development of aerial refueling tankers after last week’s contract award is unlikely to materialize.
The combination of union support for leading Democrats with conservative Republican support for keeping military manufacturing on U.S. shores makes for a wide alliance protecting Boeing [BA], which lost the bid to Northrop Grumman [NOC].
“It’s going to be a long drawn out fight,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis for the Teal Group. “It’s obvious the battle lines are being drawn.”
Boeing yesterday was pressing for the Air Force to brief the company on its rationale for the decision before the scheduled date of March 12.
“A delay of this length in the formal debriefing is unusual,” said Mark McGraw, Boeing’s vice president for 767 tanker programs. “Consistent with past practice and recent experience, we would expect this briefing to occur within days, not weeks, of the selection announcement. Given that we are already seeing press reports containing detailed competitive information, we feel that our request is more than fair and reasonable.”
The House Appropriations defense subcommittee, whose senior member Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) has been an outspoken advocate on the tanker, will hold a hearing on the program today.
Other lawmakers are continuing to gather information and waiting to see whether Boeing will protest the award.
“Beyond all of that, Congress has to ask itself as leaders of this country if we want to have a policy that allows our military infrastructure to essentially be outsourced.
“We are looking at how we can make a decision on that, raise the question and make a determination,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a member of the Democratic leadership team.
One legislative option available to Congress is making sure U.S.-made suppliers are used in the process.
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, said he is considering mandating that a certain percentage of the content of the tankers be American the way that Congress has previously for the shipbuilding industry.
“I think there’s still a possibility of doing something like that and I’m exploring it,” Stevens said.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has no current plans for a public hearing and would not want to interfere with a pending appeal.
Levin added that it is important to maintain the nation’s industrial base and said that jobs and the economy should have been a factor in the military’s decision, but he added that he wants to fully understand the Air Force’s decision before making a comment specifically on the decision.
“I think the loss of manufacturing in this country has been shocking,” Levin said. “This administration’s failure to fight for manufacturing has been one of the major failures of this administration.”
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I/D-Conn.) said a key supplier in his state, Pratt & Whitney [UTX], was supposed to supply engines to Boeing for the tanker competition. Still, he thinks Boeing should pursue any grievances through the administrative process of filing a protest with Government Accountability Office.
Connecticut-based Sikorsky [UTX] lost two competitions in recent years–one to build the presidential helicopter, which it lost to a Lockheed Martin [LMT] team containing a foreign supplier, and another for the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter (CSAR-X). As a result of a successful protest to the GAO in the case of CSAR-X, the Air Force is rebidding the program and is expected to pick a winner this summer, which could reaffirm its initial decision to award the contract to Boeing or hand it over to either the Lockheed Martin or Sikorsky teams.
“What they’ve done is to protest within the system. As unhappy as the folks at Sikorsky are, they have never asked me to consider legislatively overriding that award,” Lieberman said, adding he has not been asked for a legislative override of the Boeing contract.
Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee during the first tanker competition, solidly supports the award. “I wouldn’t worry about it, we’re going to get this thing,” Warner said. “I’m still confident we cannot go in and rewrite that contract.”
More likely than calling on Congress to overturn the contract decision would be to threaten to withhold funding for that or other programs, said Jacques Gansler, a former Pentagon acquisition executive who is now a professor at the University of Maryland. Gansler added that the process for debriefing contractors is usually a week but that “12 days is not a catastrophe.”
The service may need time for logistical concerns like travel and to remove competitive sensitive information like pricing out of its explanation. Months before the contract award, Gansler wrote a paper advocating a competitive source selection in the tanker program. Northrop Grumman helped to pay for research assistance on that paper, Gansler said.
According to Aboulafia, the best case for Boeing at this point might be to get the Air Force to split the buy–a position the company opposed throughout the competition but one that some Northrop Grumman advocates supported.
“It would be a real reversal of fortune in a lot of ways,” he said.