Bill
03-10-2008, 06:01 AM
hey, I guess they figured, Halliburton and KBR get juicy contracts and deliiver crap, why not them...
Maybe the pentagon has gotten wise to the whole croneyism angle?
Airbus built a new state of the art refueling boom on spec, and promised to deliver 2.5 times as many tankers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/business/worldbusiness/10tanker.html?th&emc=th
Boeing, the heavy favorite to win the contract, having built earlier tankers, promised a new boom but did not build a prototype. One analyst who followed the contest said that Boeing, based in Chicago, seemed arrogant and offered a plan that Air Force officials thought would deliver only 19 tankers by 2013 compared with 49 by the Airbus team.
“The Boeing team was not responsive and often was not even polite,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., based on conversations he said he had with defense officials. “Somehow that all eluded senior management,” Mr. Thompson said. “They were not even aware there was a problem.”
William Barksdale, a Boeing spokesman who attended the Air Force debriefing on Friday, said Boeing asked “whether we were hard to get along with.” He said Air Force officials had no complaints in that area.
On Capitol Hill, the blow to Boeing has set off a protectionist furor among many lawmakers. And on the campaign trail, the Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, suggest that the Boeing loss reflects other Bush administration policies that have resulted in jobs moving offshore.
But the hot rhetoric could sound overly nationalistic, and even hypocritical, once the real implications for jobs and national security become clear. Boeing, for example, would have made many of its own tanker parts overseas, and some experts say that claims of job losses to a foreign company seem exaggerated.
Maybe the pentagon has gotten wise to the whole croneyism angle?
Airbus built a new state of the art refueling boom on spec, and promised to deliver 2.5 times as many tankers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/business/worldbusiness/10tanker.html?th&emc=th
Boeing, the heavy favorite to win the contract, having built earlier tankers, promised a new boom but did not build a prototype. One analyst who followed the contest said that Boeing, based in Chicago, seemed arrogant and offered a plan that Air Force officials thought would deliver only 19 tankers by 2013 compared with 49 by the Airbus team.
“The Boeing team was not responsive and often was not even polite,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., based on conversations he said he had with defense officials. “Somehow that all eluded senior management,” Mr. Thompson said. “They were not even aware there was a problem.”
William Barksdale, a Boeing spokesman who attended the Air Force debriefing on Friday, said Boeing asked “whether we were hard to get along with.” He said Air Force officials had no complaints in that area.
On Capitol Hill, the blow to Boeing has set off a protectionist furor among many lawmakers. And on the campaign trail, the Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, suggest that the Boeing loss reflects other Bush administration policies that have resulted in jobs moving offshore.
But the hot rhetoric could sound overly nationalistic, and even hypocritical, once the real implications for jobs and national security become clear. Boeing, for example, would have made many of its own tanker parts overseas, and some experts say that claims of job losses to a foreign company seem exaggerated.