Posted on 06/10/2009 9:42:29 AM PDT by jazusamo
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a congressional panel Tuesday he’ll decide in the next week whether the Air Force or senior Pentagon officials will pick the winner of the controversial competition to build new midair refueling tankers.
The decision is expected to spark renewed political wrangling between congressional supporters of Boeing and the team of Northrop Grumman and EADS North America, competitors who have fought for months over a contract worth more than $35 billion.
Gates told Senate defense appropriators that he’ll make his decision in the next seven to 10 days.
“Part of the process I’m going through right now is — is to try and structure this in a way that puts the best people on this program and that provides a supervisory role,” Gates said at a hearing on the 2010 defense budget request. “I’m going to clearly ask the deputy secretary [of Defense] to take a very close interest in this process.”
Gates also promised lawmakers that they will be able to see a draft request of proposals before the Pentagon restarts the competition for the Air Force’s top acquisition priority.
“We will fulfill the commitment that we have made to you all to share the draft RFP [request for proposals] here in the Congress as part of being a transparent process,” Gates said.
Gates indicated that the request for proposals will likely be issued by midsummer, and no earlier than July.
Sharing the Pentagon’s requests for bids and criteria on the competition for the tanker is likely to spur an intense lobbying and political debate over a contract already marred by controversy and delays. Lawmakers solidly in Boeing’s corner from Washington state, Kansas and Missouri have squared off against members of Congress from Alabama, which is in the corner of Northrop Grumman and EADS.
The Air Force selected the Northrop Grumman-EADS team as the winner of the contest in February 2008, but rival Boeing successfully protested the contract award with the Government Accountability Office. Gates took away the Air Force’s authority over the tanker program and attempted to handle the issue at the highest Pentagon levels.
In September, he decided to punt to the new administration the decision on how to proceed with a renewed competition for the lucrative contract. A few months later, Gates accepted an offer from President Obama to stay on as secretary of Defense.
Gates has been adamantly opposed to splitting the contract between Boeing and Northrop Grumman-EADS, though several veteran lawmakers suggested that was the only way out of a political quagmire. On Tuesday, Gates reiterated that he wanted to see one “winner take all.”
Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee, and Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Armed Services Air and Land Forces panel, earlier this year suggested that the contract should be split between the two bidders.
Gates called a split contract “bad public policy and bad acquisition policy” and “a bad deal for taxpayers.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told Bloomberg News on Monday that he is not ruling out directing the Pentagon to split its purchase of aerial-refueling tankers between Boeing and Northrop Grumman-EADS. Inouye cited industry reports that suggest splitting the contract would achieve significant savings.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Inouye also expressed unease over some budget decisions Gates made for fiscal 2010. Inouye said he was concerned that some program terminations “may send the wrong signal to our friends and our potential aggressors that we are reducing our capability.”
“It may diminish our capacity to provide deterrents and reduce our strength that we provide to our allies. We hope that this is not the consequence, but some of us are concerned,” he said.
Inouye expressed concern over the terminations of Boeing’s C-17 cargo aircraft program and Lockheed’s F-22 fighter jet program, as well as the cancellation of the manned-vehicle portion of the Army’s Future Combat Systems and the curtailing of the Navy’s next-generation destroyer program.
Very hard to believe.
Come on Northrop!
Smells of obama
I honestly don’t know but think it may a Murtha/Dem thing vs Gates.
Murtha was shot down by Gates on the split contracts and now Inouye jumps in with this savings thing with a split contract, I think it smells.
After all they will be the ones to live (or die) with the tanker finally chosen.
If we can throw billions down a rat hole, then we can certainly ... not split the contract ... but double it ... two fleets, double what anyone thinks we need.
After all, it’s just taxpayer money. We’ll print more money to pay for it. Voters won’t realize inflation is a tax. And we won’t have any vote on record to raise taxes.
Better yet, since we don’t need double what we need, we could pay them to NOT BUILD the planes. We could then create global warming offsets from not building them ... and not flying them ... we could then claim that our environmental policy is working.
I agree and they should already have the specs on paper after this ongoing fiasco.
Say again? :)
Well, they had better get busy, most of the tankers are almost as old as I am - and that is pretty old.....
I hear ya, was in my teens when the first one was built.
Ditto.
My granddaughter came up to me the other day, and in a very solemn voice told me “that you are very, very old”.
Took me a while before I could stop laffing. I love children, everything old is new again.
LOL!
I’ve got five and have been down that road with three of them. Same as you, the wife and I get a big laugh out of it.
Lucky you. I just wish my sons would get off the dime and ‘get busy’
Have a good one
out here
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