Boeing gets another chance at the Air Tanker
From
Bloomberg:
Boeing Wins Protest of Northrop Aerial-Tanker Award
Boeing Co. deserves another chance to bid on the $35 billion U.S. Air Force aerial-tanker contract won by rival Northrop Grumman Corp., a government agency said.
"The Air Force had made a number of significant errors that could have affected the outcome of what was a close competition," the Government Accountability Office said today in Washington. "We therefore sustained Boeing's protest."
Boeing appealed to the GAO after Northrop and partner European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co. won the contract Feb. 29, snaring a program that had been Boeing's for more than half a century. Boeing claimed changes the Air Force made during the competition favored Northrop.
While the GAO ruling isn't binding, "the outcome here now is obvious: ," Loren Thompson, an analyst at Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Virginia-based public policy research group, said in an interview. "The Air Force will have to revisit the competition and start over."
Very good news -- the problem wasn't so much that Jack Northrop's company got the bid, the problem was that E.A.D.S. was involved as well. For crucial defense applications, you do not want to become beholden to another nation for critical parts.
We are ostensibly friends with Europe now but that has changed before and it can change again. Europe has for forty years depended on cheap immigrant labor for its workforce and those people (mostly Islamists) are now becoming a palpable political force.
Posted by DaveH at June 18, 2008 1:10 PM