Honest conservative partisans from either side of the KC-X
“tanker war” should concede that there were no perfect choices in
awarding the contract for the in-flight refueling aircraft earlier
this year.
Ruling in favor of European-owned EADS opened the Air Force up
to legitimate national security criticisms, not to mention
rewarding a foreign state-owned and operated business for unfair
practices. Ruling in Boeing’s favor would have both enraged free
trade purists (with long histories of antipathy toward the
Washington defense giant) and re-fired old controversies in the
Senate.
The just-released Government Accountability Office report should
end the tanker controversy — at least within the conservative
commentariat. After all, the “free market” opinion, expressed by,
among others, the Wall Street Journal and several
contributors to National Review, rests on the assumption
that the tanker competition was fair.
They assumed that the Air Force chose the best refueling tanker
for its needs. If a majority-foreign tanker was selected on the
basis of its merits, all the better victory for the principles of
laissez faire trade.
This is a sympathetic case for many conservatives, who’d sooner
die than look like protectionists and strange bedfellows with John
Murtha, Patty Murray and the AFL-CIO. Of course, today’s liberal
democrats and unions (as well as Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan) are
forthrightly protectionist. However, there’s plenty reason to favor
Boeing in the “tanker war” that has nothing to do with
jingoism.
Here, the GAO report describes why:
We find that the agency’s selection… as
reflecting the best value to the government was undermined by a
number of prejudicial errors that call into question the Air
Force’s decision that Northrop Grumman’s proposal was technically
acceptable…. In addition, we find a number of errors in the
agency’s cost evaluation that result in Boeing… as the
offeror with the lowest evaluated most probable life cycle costs to
the government.
The report could read as a primer on the tanker row thus far
(admittedly, though, a dry one), from the initial request for
proposals to unlocking the criteria on which the decision should’ve
been based.
In detail, it refutes most conservatives’ assumptions about the
tanker process in two ways. First, it makes clear — embarrassingly
so, to the Air Force — that the process was corrupt. Whether by
accident or design, procurement officials misled Boeing regarding
the basic criteria on which the award would be given.
The report shows that the tanker decision was rife with
irregularities and questionable decisions.
SECONDLY, THE REPORT should go a long way toward correcting the
rumors and propaganda disseminated by EADS in the days following
the announcement of the award.
In an effort to hurriedly establish talking points to leverage
the debate, whisper-campaigns from unnamed sources leaked
misleading information to the press about a so-called lopsided
victory on the part of the EADS tanker, including that, in the eyes
of the Air Force, Boeing was beaten “by a mile.”
The GAO contradicts these talking points, and then some. While
most of the proprietary information is blacked-out, the report
contends that the Air Force assessed the Boeing and Airbus tankers
very differently.
Not only were the two proposals “very similar” in quality, but
there’s reason to believe the Air Force overlooked several of the
primary requirements in the case of the EADS tanker — which
possibly would make it ineligible for the award — including the
fact that the proposal failed to prove the tanker could actually
refuel all currently compatible planes using Air Force
procedures.
A key requirement for the KC-X tanker is its ability to meet,
among others, overrun and breakaway performance standards. This has
to do with a plane’s dive speed and ability to refuel in complex
situations and at high speeds. After admitting the Airbus tanker
was unable to pass this threshold without an additional “fix,” the
GAO report found that the Air Force made no effort to verify that
the “fix” would work at all.
Another assumption shattered by the GAO report is just as
damaging to the free market case: that the Airbus A330 tanker was
chosen because it was a larger than Boeing’s K-767 and, hence,
offered more room for cargo and personnel.
While this is undoubtedly true, the report makes clear that the
Air Force’s intention was to look for a replacement for a
medium-sized tanker first, with two procurements for the larger
planes just over the horizon. In other words, the chief criterion
on which the Airbus tanker was selected was irrelevant to the
request for proposal at hand.
WE CAN NOW SEE that, by awarding EADS/Airbus with the tanker
contract, the Air Force didn’t select the best plane for the job.
Even professional earmark fighters, long suspicious of Boeing,
should be able to make peace with a re-evaluation based on a very
clear and disinterested reading of the original criteria.
After all, there’s no virtue in choosing the
wrong $35 billion product just to show
your free trade bona fides.
The GAO report on the Air Force’s KC-X tanker decision ought to
put to rest the “tanker wars” for all but the most entrenched,
bitter partisans. Independent pork-fighting groups — or
conservatives concerned with the integrity of competition in
government procurement — should re-evaluate their stance based on
this new information.
