Newsweek has a piece about US Sen. John McCain and the KC-X tanker competition, quoting an unidentified Pentagon official about McCain’s involvement. This is the first article we’ve seen quoting a Pentagon official.
As readers know, we were in Washington, DC, when the GAO announced its decision upholding the Boeing protest of the award to Northrop Grumman. We’ve been told by a Boeing partisan of something that, if true, will create a procurement scandal if not quite equal to the illegal activities surrounding the first tanker award to Boeing in 2004 will at least rock the Air Force to its procurement core. This may or may not come out in the 69-page GAO report that is being sanitized for proprietary information before its release, perhaps as early as this week. If what we’re told is true and it’s not in the report, it should be, or certainly should become the subject of Congressional investigations of the thoroughness and aggressiveness undertaken by McCain following the Boeing tanker award in 2004.
If what we were told is true, not only was the process examined by the GAO flawed but it was outright subverted.
Meanwhile, fired Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, on his last day in office, said a rebid is likely and suggested that a fly-off between Boeing and Northrop might be worthwhile. This Reuters story may be found here.
New, Monday, June 23, 1030 PDT: An interesting twist to the GAO decision. Readers will recall that we’ve previously mentioned that there was a “shadow group” looking over the shoulder of the Air Force the whole way during the evaluation process. It turns out that the GAO was a member of this shadow group. Now if one presumes that the role of the shadow group was to keep the USAF on track and not to simply look over the shoulder and not say anything or raise questions about whether there were irregularities, then one has to ask: just where was the GAO itself during this process? Perhaps the 69-page report will say.
New, Monday, June 23, 315 PM PDT: Loren Thompson has a fresh commentary on the tanker fiasco here.
New, Tuesday, June 24: Politico reports the Air Force is considering a KC-767/KC-30 flyoff. The Hill reports the Defense Department acquisition group may take over the rebid process from the Air Force in this report.
New, Tuesday, June 24, 945 AM PDT: Here’s an amusing piece from the United Arab Emirates about the tanker program. It’s amusing because it takes a shot at CNN’s Lou Dobbs, a once-fine financial reporter who has gone off the deep end on anything not US. The piece also has some interesting facts in it.
In the meantime, JD Crowe, the cartoonist with the biting wit for The Mobile Press-Register, inked this one today:
The Press-Register’s Washington reporter has this look at the current situation in the wake of the GAO protest.
If memory serves, the last fly off the USAF conducted with logistic aircraft was the YC-14 & YC-15. When it was over, they didn’t buy either!
I am skeptical that a fly off would accomplish anything other than to delay the program by a few more years. The model KC-767 that Boeing bid is not even flying yet, so any putative fly off would involve a significant wait even if they didn’t go with a completely new rebid. A new RFP + fly off would confound this process to the point where they might as well jump straight to KC-Y. I can’t understand why this was floated by the outgoing AF Secretary, when anything of this magnitude will need to be approved by the new administration.