Friday, February 29, 2008

KC-X Winner

Northrop/EADS has just won the Air Force tanker contract.

Boeing is, of course, expected to file a protest.

I doubt that the protest will be upheld--after the hash the USAF made of the last go-around, the procurement office no doubt dotted every i, crossed every t, and minded every last p and q.

1 comment:

Harold said...

True, the last round was fouled up - largely because we should have spent the 1990s buying the KC-135 replacements (more KC-10s would have been perfect).

So, the Air Force decided to go for good and fast. It was a reasonable effort, but there was a big mistake.

But have we made a penny-wise but pound-foolish decision? We're now committing to as many as 179 tankers from France, a country who we've had some not-so-good relations with in the recent past. There were cases where foreign companies had stuff held back (one case involved components for JDAMs that were held up in the wake of the start of Iraqi Freedom).

It's a mess. To think we were more worried about Microsoft's monopoly when the Boeing/McDonnell-Douglas merger was the real big story...