Senators Oppose Splitting Tanker Purchase
By John M. Doyle
More U.S. senators are lining up against a plan — mostly promoted in the House — to split the $35 billion program for the next U.S. Air Force refueling tanker between competitors Boeing and Northrop Grumman/EADS.
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top two Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) a staunch Boeing supporter, all said this week they opposed a dual buy.
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” says McCain (R-Ariz.), who successfully fought the Air Force’s first attempt to replace its aging tanker fleet with an uncompeted quasi-buy/lease deal with Boeing. “It will cost the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars,” he adds. Murray and Inhofe also cited the extra cost in their opposition.
“I, of course, want to see Boeing and an American company win this,” Murray says, “but I do not want to see a split buy that hurts our taxpayers and impacts the Air Force in a way that they don’t have the capability to do the training and the missions that they need, so I am opposed to a split buy.” Boeing is a major employer in her state.
Splitting the tanker buy, an idea floated around Washington since last summer, picked up steam earlier this spring when Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, raised it as a way to get around the political wrangling and procedural missteps that have delayed replacement of the Eisenhower-era KC-135 tankers. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), chair of the Armed Services’ air and land forces subcommittee, endorsed Murtha’s idea as a way to speed production of the replacement tanker fleet.
Company positions
Both Boeing and the Northrop Grumman/EADS team have said they could live with a split buy, although they ostensibly prefer a winner-take-all competition.
But Defense Secretary Robert Gates has adamantly opposed a split purchase, saying that it would be more expensive and burden the Air Force with two separate aircraft requiring separate training, maintenance and logistics. Similar arguments have been raised in Navy shipbuilding, where only two major primes are the last U.S. warship providers. But many of those programs, such as destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships, have come under reconsideration following programmatic problems.
“The only reason to do this is the political reason and I am concerned with getting them [the tankers] as quick as possible, as many as possible and as cheap as possible,” Inhofe said, adding: “The split buy is going to cost more.”
In the House, Murtha apparently has acquiesced over his drive to include a dual-procurement measure in the off-book war supplemental bill for the rest of fiscal 2009, but he has left open the option of including it in the FY ’10 defense authorization bill later this year.
Three other senators, including Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), have said they were not embracing the split-buy idea and were waiting to see the Pentagon’s final decision on the plan. Two of them, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), sit on related authorization and appropriations committees, respectively (Aerospace DAILY, April 29).
Photo: Northrop Grumman