By Emelie Rutherford
With Northrop Grumman [NOC] expected to announce soon if it will compete for the Air Force tanker contract, congressional and defense officials are sizing up what would happen if Boeing [BA] remains the only aircraft bidder.
Capitol Hill supporters of the Northrop Grumman-European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS) tanker bid allege the request for proposals (RFP) issued last week favors Boeing’s smaller plane, and charge the Pentagon did not make enough changes to a draft version.
“I believe it’s a tilted, unfair process, that this administration is ignoring the needs of the warfighter, and they are determined to give it to Boeing,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told Defense Daily yesterday. If it won the Pentagon contract, Northrop Grumman-EADS would assemble its tankers in Mobile, Ala.
Shelby said Northrop Grumman officials will “have to make their own decision based on how this request for proposal was structured.”
“I don’t want them to stay in unless they deem this process to be fair,” he said. “I think it’s not a fair process.”
Boeing’s sizable crew of congressional supporters, on the flipside, have decried Northrop Grumman’s threat to pull out of the two-way contest as a last-ditch move by an underdog. The current tanker competition follows earlier thwarted Pentagon attempts to field new versions of the refueling aircraft, including a 2008 contract award to Northrop Grumman-EADS that the Pentagon canceled after the Government Accountability Office deemed the competition flawed.
Northrop Grumman spokesman Randy Belote said he could not say just when the company will decide if it will submit a tanker proposal.
“We continue to analyze the RFP and discuss the issues with our team,” he told Defense Daily yesterday. “We’ll decide after that analysis is complete, but I don’t want to speculate on when that may be completed.”
The Pentagon has made contingency plans for what to do if Boeing is the sole tanker bidder, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told reporters yesterday at a Defense Writers Group breakfast yesterday.
“The government has options…which are available to us through contracting and legal channels to protect the taxpayers’ interests,” he said.
The government has “insights” into Boeing’s costs, Donley said, and if it is the only bidder Pentagon officials “expect to negotiate a fair price,” despite the lack of competition.
Still, Donley said Pentagon officials “hope to have a good competition” for the tanker.
When they rolled out the tanker RFP on Feb. 24, he said, Pentagon leaders met with officials from both bidders. From Northrop Grumman, they talked to Web Bush, the CEO and president, and Paul Meyer, the senior vice president and general manager for Northrop Grumman Aerospace System’s Advanced Programs and Technology Division. The Pentagon had not communicated with the company since then, Donley said yesterday morning.
“Northrop indicated that they were appreciative of the changes that we’ve made on the business side of the RFP, and that they would take a careful look at the content,” he said.