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Op-Ed: An Open Tanker Competition is Wishful Thinking |
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(Source: defense-aerospace.com; published Nov. 26, 2004)
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PARIS --- However commendable it may appear, the Pentagon’s promise to require competition for the US Air Force’s tanker acquisition will remain little more than wishful thinking as long as the entire acquisition bureaucracy continues to unreservedly champion Boeing. And recent events show this favoritism is even stronger than suspected.
Even hardened Washington insiders were stunned by the scale of the malfeasance confessed by Darleen Druyun, the Air Force's former n° 2 acquisition official, when she revealed last month that she had steered several billion dollars’ worth of contracts to Boeing. After the initial shock, this revelation was largely dismissed by the Pentagon as the deviant behavior of a single official, who abused the system for personal advantage.
Until Nov. 19, that is, when Sen. John McCain made public e-mails showing how far top Air Force and Pentagon officials actually went to push through Boeing’s $23.5 billion tanker lease despite its excessive cost, doubtful necessity and dubious legality.
In a Senate speech, McCain said the e-mails exchanged by Druyun, Air Force Secretary Jim Roche, his special assistant William Bodie, and Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisitions Marvin Sambur demonstrate what “appears to be a case of either a systemic failure in procurement oversight, willful blindness, or rank corruption.” (See “McCain Exposes USAF Role in Tanker Lease” in our Word for Word section).
But the Air Force leadership was not alone in failing to exercise due diligence. McCain noted that “three out of four [Congressional] defense committees summarily approved the tanker lease as proposed [by the Air Force] without even looking at the contract. Two did so without even holding a single hearing.”
It is against this backdrop that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a Nov. 19 letter to Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, promised that “after we have selected an appropriate alternative, we intend to require competition” before awarding a tanker contract.
The Pentagon’s problem is that only two companies in the Western world – Boeing and EADS – are capable of building tanker aircraft. Ensuring competition thus requires allowing EADS to bid for the work, and the company says it is keen to participate. “We will team with a major American partner, expand our industrial footprint in the United States, employ American workers and pledge to offer the finest military capability for the U.S. Air Force at the best value to our taxpayers,” Ralph Crosby, CEO of EADS North America, said in a Nov. 22 statement.
But Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said that giving the contract to EADS would open “the door to the outsourcing of quality American jobs and the outsourcing of our national defense.” She added that “it remains in our nation's interest to build these planes and it remains in our nation's interest to build them here, not in France.”
And for Rep. Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who heads the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, “it's a non-starter to buy foreign aircraft.” Hunter told Reuters Nov. 18 that thousands of U.S. jobs were at stake, as well as the health of the U.S. defense industrial base.
Why should EADS go to the trouble and expense involved, knowing that it has no realistic chance of winning given entrenched Congressional opposition and the Air Force’s determined pro-Boeing slant?
The only way to achieve the degree of competition promised by Wolfowitz is to guarantee – explicitly or implicitly -- that EADS will get at least a portion of the work. But, if it does provide any such guarantees, the Pentagon would become guilty of rigging yet another acquisition competition, however pure its motives this time around.
That is the true irony of the position into which the Pentagon has allowed itself to be maneuvered, by permitting the excessive industry consolidation that allowed Boeing to buy McDonnell Douglas, and by failing to enforce the objectivity mandated by its own acquisition regulations.
-ends-
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