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<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   Related Stories • Monday morning questions 6/23/08   CONTACT THE HERALD Mike Benbow, Business Editor benbow@heraldnet.com   Published: Monday, June 23, 2008 Air Force has to say what it wants in a tanker By Mike Benbow The decision by government investigators last week that the Air Force bungled the latest effort to secure a tanker contract provides columnists like me with a lot to write about. The question that keeps bugging me is one that I can't answer: What does the Air Force really want? It's a simple question, really. But it's one that the Air Force apparently can't answer in any simple, definitive way. In its statement upholding the Boeing Co.'s protest of the tanker bid, investigators at the Government Accountability Office had this to say: "The Air Force conducted misleading and unequal discussion with Boeing, by informing Boeing that it had fully satisfied a key performance parameter objective related to operational utility, but later determined that Boeing had only partially met this objective, without advising Boeing of this change in the agency's assessment and continuing to conduct discussions with Northrop Grumman relating to its satisfaction of the same key performance parameter objection." Those are a lot of words, but if I'm reading them correctly, they mean that the Air Force lied to Boeing about how it was doing, then kept coaching Northrop and its French buddies from EADS about what they needed to do to win. I could quote some other parts of the document, but I'll spare you that. The investigators also found that the Air Force cooked Boeing's numbers in a couple different ways so that its tanker proposal would appear to be more expensive when it wasn't, something the Air Force acknowledged before the investors' report was completed. In an interview with The Herald's aerospace writer, Michelle Dunlop, Boeing's Mark McGraw, the vice president for tanker programs, said the Air Force process was unclear. "We still do not know ultimately why we were not selected," he told Dunlop. That's a telling statement. If your 10-year-old wants a new bike, you might tell him that he needs to do his chores faithfully for a month, be nicer to his sister and maybe even do some extra work to earn part of the money that will be required. You wouldn't tell him he'd met the requirements when he hadn't. You wouldn't secretly coach his sister about what she needed to do to win the bike instead. And you wouldn't examine what he had done to earn the bike and then distort things so that it looked like he'd failed. You wouldn't do that unless, of course, you were one incredibly sick parent. So what does the Air Force really want? I can tell you what it looks like it doesn't want. It looks like it doesn't want Boeing to build the next tanker. Maybe it wants more competition in the tanker business, a field Boeing has owned forever. Maybe it wants to scold Boeing for its inappropriate actions during the previous tanker contract effort. Maybe it wants more aerospace businesses in the south, along with the support of the members of Congress there that would go with it. Maybe it wants a bigger, wore flexible plane than Boeing was offering with the 767. I'm not sure what it really wants. The Air Force hasn't told us yet. And it apparently hasn't told Boeing officials either. What it claimed was a transparent process was a very clouded and twisted one. Let's hope the Air Force uses this opportunity to get to get a new start. It needs to rebid the deal, which is worth up to $100 billion, and do it quickly. Along the way, it needs to put all the bidders on the same playing field, provide them all the same rules and give them all the same information. Obviously the contract is going to involve a lot of complex, technical language that only engineers can understand. But when it comes to talking about the basics of what it really wants, the Air Force should be able to explain it to a 10-year-old. It's time to stop playing political games and to start building planes. If the Air Force truly needs a bigger plane than the 767, the winner still might not be Boeing. But the company deserves a fair shot. Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.

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