By Emelie Rutherford
Former Pentagon acquisition chief Jacques Gansler said Congress should not “meddle” in the Air Force’s contested tanker contract award to Northrop Grumman [NOC] and foreign partner European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. (EADS), and predicted the tanker uproar will test Pentagon procurement processes.
Speaking yesterday in The Atlantic Council’s Washington office with other advocates of increased U.S.-European defense purchasing cooperation, Gansler said the tanker skirmish “is a test for the United States in the sense that we cannot go back 100 years or more to allow our Congress to be making procurement decisions for the government.”
“We got rid of that process and it has to be not returned,” he said at the U.S.-E.U. Defense Trade discussion, co-located in Washington and Brussels. “This is a real test of the U.S. Congress and of our procurement process, I think, for the future.”
He noted Congress to date has not yet “meddle[d]” in procurement decisions, though lawmakers make “a lot of noise.”
The Air Force awarded the contract for the KC-45A aerial-refueling tanker, a pact estimated to ultimately be worth more than $35 billion, on Feb. 29 to Northrop Grumman and a team including EADS–spurring outcries from some lawmakers that the deal would send jobs overseas.
Losing bidder Boeing [BA] protested the tanker award March 11, and the Government Accountability Office is set to issue a decision on the dispute on or before June 19.
Speaking from Brussels via teleconference yesterday, Robert Bell, senior vice president at SAIC, said “there’s still a jury-is-out sort of perspective here” on the tanker decision, because Europeans know of Boeing’s protest and Congress’ concerns.
If the Northrop Grumman contract stands, he said, “then I think this will be fundamental in terms of changing perspectives.”
“And the first tangible manifestation of that will be that I think it will make it virtually impossible for the advocates within the European parliament that are now considering the directive to insert a European preference requirement, over the objections of the European commission,” he said.
Alexander Lambsdorff of the European Parliament’s Security & Defence Subcommittee said he does not know yet if the Northrop Grumman-EADS tanker award will diffuse European criticism that Americans are overly protectionist on European arms exports.
“I’d be happy if I could say that was the case at this point in time,” Lambsdorff said, speaking from Brussels. “When it comes to procurement, especially to this market, there’s little knowledge but a lot of opinion going around, and I would make a bet that not all of my colleagues are even aware of the deal.”
He added the “opinion that the U.S. is a market that’s essentially closed off to European products is pervasive.”
Gansler said there are good economic and military arguments for more cooperation with other nations on defense procurement, but “still enormous resistance to that.”
“Some people here, I think properly, have been saying that our Congress is a very excellent example of a trailing indicator, that they tend to still remain in the world of the past, which doesn’t recognize the globalized environment, and we’re going to have to hope and push for some significant changes in this area,” he said.
“From a military perspective we’re never going to go into an operation that’s not a coalition operation…[and] we want our allies to have the same systems that are interoperable with us,” he said. “And, from an economic perspective, it just doesn’t make sense, given where the technology is spreading rapidly around the world. And [so] we should share that technology and production and so forth.”
Beth McCormick, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Technology Security Administration, said she works with industry and people around the world to help increase awareness of U.S. defense procurement processes, which she said are seen as untimely and unpredictable.