By Merrill Cook
Published: 08-11-08
A recent report by the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) devastatingly critiques one of the Pentagon’s critical procurement processes.
The July 2008 report demonstrates that the government botched contracts for an urgently needed new generation of aerial refueling tankers not just once but twice. With years of delay and billions in budget overruns in many of the Department of Defense’s top programs many observers are asking just how deep the Pentagon’s procurement problems run.
They want to know what the Pentagon’s new chief Defense Secretary Robert Gates will do about it.
The problems have been building for years. DOD has allowed squabbles between defense contractors to maroon several key acquisition priorities into a bureaucratic no-man’s land. This at a time the armed forces are in great need of quick turnarounds on life-saving systems like the armored MRAP vehicles for troops patrolling dangerous streets in Iraq.
Unfortunately few in Washington seem to have learned the lessons of past procurement mistakes. Exhibit A: The Pentagon is trying for the third time to complete a fair competition for a $35 billion contract to replace our fleet of tanker-refueling aircraft. These are the oldest aircraft still flying and some date back to the Eisenhower administration. Few question that they pose a serious safety threat to pilots.
Woeful mismanagement of a sole-source contract hamstrung the first control while the Government Accountability Office (GAO) rejected the second as an obsequious effort to award Northrop Grumman and EADS — a subsidized European contractor under criminal investigation — a lucrative defense contract for a more expensive and less capable tanker aircraft.
Now under the gun from Congress to produce quick results Gates has promised that he and his deputy Undersecretary John Young will personally oversee the new tanker competition. But instead of simply re-evaluating the previous competition’s bids according to the rules the Defense Department seems to be engaging smoke-and-mirrors tactics.
Undersecretary Young hinted that the Pentagon may now ignore the specifications originally laid out in the contract — specifications that flowed from studies by RAND and Defense Department experts — and jerry-rig new specifications in the contract so that the Pentagon can once again throw the deal to the more expensive less experienced foreign contractor. The new version of the contract would give extra credit for a larger tanker aircraft an action that the GAO report specifically highlighted as a critical flaw of the earlier tanker competition.
This is a mistake.
For starters the expert analyses which defense planners traditionally rely on all show decisive disadvantages for larger tanker aircraft. They are less efficient can land at fewer bases and therefore can service fewer in-flight fighters and cargo planes simultaneously. In fact the main advantage of larger craft — that they carry more fuel — is rarely an advantage in real-world missions since the smaller tanker aircraft rarely offload more than 50 percent of the fuel they carry.
Boeing’s KC-767 fits the requirements of a medium-sized tanker much better than the foreign competition’s offerings do.
According to several independent reports Boeing KC-767s could save taxpayers as much as $50 billion can deliver more fuel to more of our fighter and carrier aircraft can land on more runways and are less vulnerable to attack. An award to Boeing would support 44000 jobs.
Most experts believe that the only way defense bureaucrats can commandeer this deal for EADS and Northrop is to give their KC-30’s larger size a decisive advantage in a slap-dash list of new contract specification.
The GAO found nothing at all wrong with the basic integrity of the original contract specifications. Rather the GAO gave these Pentagon officials reprobate status because they failed to abide by the specifications when they bent over backwards to effectively sole-source the contract to EADS and Northrop.
If Gates and the Defense Department now decide to ignore the clear reasoning of the GAO decision and instead concoct a new rationale to sole-source this contract to the foreign vendor by quixotically favoring a larger aircraft the Bush administration should prepare for a bipartisan revolt.
— Merrill Cook is a former Republican congressman from Utah.
