Pentagon not keen on split-buy tanker deal
Published 2:23 pm Thursday, February 5, 2009
The Pentagon hasn’t yet pulled the trigger to restart the $35 billion tanker competition between the Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman-EADS, but a senior weapons buyer is nixing splitting the lucrative contract.
“If you split this buy now, you have to pay two sets of development costs,” said John Young, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, according to Reuters.”That totally wipes out the competitive aspects of this.”
Rep. John Murtha, who leads a House subcommittee on appropriations, has been suggesting the idea of splitting the bid between the two competitors in recent weeks.
Murtha has gained support for the split-buy from Alabama’s Rep. Jo Bonner, according to Politico. Northrop and EADS would build their KC-30 , based off Airbus’ A330, in Alabama. Bonner recently joined the House appropriations committee.
“We can go down the path we’ve been down,” Bonner told Politico, adding that a Pentagon contract award wouldn’t settle the matter. “You could easily look into a crystal ball and see more protests.”
Rep. Norm Dicks wants the Pentagon to award the contract replacing the Air Force’s aging KC-135 tankers to go to the Boeing Co., which would build their tankers here in Dicks’ state of Washington.
“From my perspective, that’s the right way to do this. Give it to Boeing and then negotiate the price,” Dicks said, adding that Boeing should have won the contract and negotiated a price in the competition last year.
