TANKER USAF - Appels d'offres

Northrop Vice President Paul Meyer said Tuesday that his company needs pricing information on Boeing's failed tanker bid from last year. Because Boeing was given prices on the bid Northrop made in partnership with Airbus, "it is fundamentally unfair, and distorts any new competition," Meyer said.
Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, dismissed an earlier complaint from Northrop in comments he made last week, saying the data in question were outdated and didn't pertain to the new contest. Northrop said Tuesday it expects to hold discussions with Defense Department officials to resolve the issue.
A Boeing spokesman said Boeing was satisfied that the Air Force had dealt with the pricing-information issue.

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U.S. Air Force
Boeing says a potential 777-based aerial refueling [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] would be able to offload 30 percent more fuel than a rival Airbus A330-based tanker. But the Air Force's draft tanker criteria would give it no credit for that extra capacity.
The Air Force's draft [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] requires tankers to offload at least 94,000 pounds of fuel at 1,000 nautical miles. It then gives extra points for extra capacity, up to a maximum of 10 extra points for offloading at least 147,000 pounds of fuel at 1,000 nm.
According to [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien], its 767-based tanker offloads 97,000 pounds of fuel at 1,000 nm, meeting the mandatory requirement but qualifying it for no extra points. The 777-based tanker offloads 199,000 pounds of fuel at 1,000, which is substantially more than the 153,000 pounds Boeing says the Northrop-EADS Airbus A330-based tanker can offload, but qualifies it for no more bonus points than its rival.
The bonus points would only come into play if the prices for competing proposals were within 1 percent of each other, after adjustments to account for how many of each tanker it would need to meet demand on the worst imaginable day and day-to-day cost of ownership factors.
Boeing has touted the extra fuel capacity as one of the big advantages a 777-based tanker would have over the A330-based rival.
On Tuesday, Boeing tanker spokesman Bill Barksdale declined to comment on the issue, saying company officials had not yet finished reviewing the draft request for proposals

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has given Boeing Co. an "unfair" advantage in the latest competition for a troubled $35 billion tanker contract, a Northrop Grumman Corp. executive said Tuesday.
The Pentagon shared Northrop's pricing data from its previous bid with Chicago-based Boeing, but did not reveal Boeing's cost estimates to Northrop.

"It is fundamentally unfair, and distorts any new competition, to provide such critical information to only one of the bidders," Paul Meyer, a Northrop Grumman vice president, said in a statement. "The company will continue to work with its customer to fully resolve this issue."

Los Angeles-based Northrop and partner Airbus parent European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. N.V. are competing against Boeing for the third time to replace the aging refueling tankers.

The Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, Ashton Carter, told reporters last week the department found "no competitive disadvantage" following its examination of Northrop's claim. Carter said the information in question was inaccurate, outdated or not relevant to the new competition.

The Pentagon declined further comment Tuesday.
"The Air Force clearly and definitively dealt with this issue and we look forward to our first meeting with them in this competition,"

Boeing spokesman Bill Barksdale said in a statement.
The Air Force has failed twice to award a contract to replace its Eisenhower-era fleet of 179 tankers. Northrop won the deal in February 2008. Boeing later successfully protested the award after congressional investigators found the Air Force failed to evaluate both proposals on the same merits.

The 2004 award to Boeing was undone by an ethics scandal that resulted in prison terms for a former company executive and a former Air Force official.

The service has said it will be "crystal clear" in its requirements for new tankers that refuel military planes in flight in order to avoid errors from previous selection processes.

WASHINGTON, 29 septembre (Reuters) - Le gouvernement américain a donné à Boeing un avantage "particulièrement injuste" dans le marché des avions ravitailleurs en négociation, a estimé mardi son concurrent Northrop Grumman , allié à EADS pour la circonstance.
"Northrop Grumman est grandement préoccupé par le fait que les informations sur ses prix lors d'un précédent appel d'offres aient été divulguées à son concurrent par le gouvernement", écrit Paul Meyer, vice-président de Northrop, dans un communiqué.
"En mettant un tel accent sur le prix dans ce nouvel appel d'offres et alors que Northrop propose à nouveau son ravitailleur KC-45, de telles informations sur les prix ont une importance plus grande encore."
Cet appel d'offres constitue la troisième tentative en huit ans visant à remplacer les avions ravitailleurs KC-135 de l'US Air Force, dont l'âge moyen dépasse aujourd'hui 50 ans.
L'an dernier, l'attribution du contrat, estimé à 35 milliards de dollars (24 milliards d'euros) à Northrop et EADS, qui présentaient un appareil dérivé de l'Airbus A330, avait été annulée après un recours de Boeing, les autorités de contrôle ayant jugé la procédure "trop subjective".
Ce même contrat avait été attribué une première fois à Boeing mais une affaire de conflit d'intérêts avait abouti à le lui retirer

Jeannot a écrit:
....Je n'avais pas envisagé la possibilité pour EADS de ne pas répondre. Dans ce cadre le combat des lawyers reprendrait.

Jeannot a écrit:Cela ne va pas aider l'USAF à régler son problème de ravitailleurs....

Two competitors vying a second time for the $35 billion KC-X contract have responded to the US Air Force's draft request for proposals in stridently different tones.
After successfully protesting the Northrop [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien]/[Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] North America team's victory in February 2008, [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] has adopted a co-operative tone as it considers whether to offer the KC-767, KC-777, or both.
Northrop, however, has already complained that the new acquisition process is "fundamentally unfair", because the Department of Defense briefed pricing details only to Boeing during the last round.
But Northrop officials so far have stopped short of filing an official protest with the Government Accountability Office, saying instead they will "continue to work with [their] customer to fully resolve this issue".
In response, DoD officials say the basis of Northrop's complaint is irrelevant, as both competitors must adopt new pricing formulas to respond to the [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien]'s new framework for evaluating requirements.
"We've made many more requirements mandatory," deputy secretary of defence William Lynn said as the draft RFP was released on 25 September. "The offerings are going to have to be different to meet those mandatory requirements."

In comparison with the first round of bidding, the USAF has not fundamentally changed requirements for a new tanker to replace the Boeing KC-135R. But it has changed how they will be evaluated.

Rather than imposing 808 requirements, with only 37 labelled "mandatory", the new acquisition strategy establishes 373 mandatory and 93 non-mandatory requirements.

Although the number has fallen, few previously stated needs have been dropped. Instead, several requirements listed separately in the previous round have been consolidated and clarified, USAF officials say.
Price will be the determining factor if both proposals meet all the mandatory requirements. If the proposed prices are equal, the USAF will score how each proposal meets the non-mandatory requirements. The service is willing to pay up to 1% of the overall value of the contract more for an aircraft that exceeds its baseline performance requirements.

The differences between mandatory and non-mandatory factors are sometimes very subtle. For example, the air force still requires the KC-X aircraft to offload 42,600kg (94,000lb) of fuel after taking off from a 3,050m (10,000ft) runway and flying 1,850km (1,000nm).

A corollary on the non-mandatory list includes providing the same offload and range performance after taking off from a 2,130m runway. It is not immediately clear if such a strategy favours any particular aircraft, since all potential bids apparently meet the non-mandatory criteria for fuel offload.

Unlike the previous round, the bidders now can also receive up to 10 bonus points for exceeding the minimum fuel offload requirement. This approach appears to neutralise the KC-777's roughly 30% greater payload capacity than the KC-30.

The USAF will award 10 bonus points for the ability to offload 66,750kg of fuel at 1,850km range. According to Boeing data, the KC-777 and KC-30 exceed that standard, so both aircraft would receive equal points.

Another new twist in the KC-X contract involves a new formula for compensating the contractors. In the last round, the DoD followed recent custom by reimbursing the contractor's costs during the development phase, plus adding fees to cover profit margin and incentive payments.
The new KC-X competition, however, requires the bidders to commit to a firm price during the development and production phases. The change shifts the risk burden for cost overruns from the US Treasury to the contractor.

This change reflects a recent trend in acquisition reform to rely more on fixed-price deals for "off-the-shelf" products. Boeing is considering offering the KC-767 and KC-777, and both tankers would be derived from existing models sold to airlines. The rival KC-30 is based on the [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien]-derived multirole tanker transport design already sold to several foreign countries.
"Here, you're talking about aircraft that are derivatives of commercial aircraft made in great numbers of a kind that have been operated for decades," a senior defence official says.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., moved Thursday to block funding for new Air Force aerial refueling [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] until the service gives a Northrop Grumman-EADS team price information about rival Boeing's bid in last year's tanker contest.
The move came two days after the Air Force [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] to hand over the equivalent data that the Air Force divulged to Boeing about the Northrop-EADS bid. The Air Force stood by its contention the disclosure to Boeing was in accordance with regulation and that the information given was inaccurate, outdated and not germane to the new tanker contest.
"This issue goes directly to the fundamental fairness of the tanker competition," Sessions said in a [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien]. "How can we expect the playing field to be level if one company was given sensitive information about the other's bid? If that is the case, the best way to rectify the situation is to demand that information be shared in both directions. I applaud the willingness of the Northrop Grumman/EADS team to bring this issue to the Pentagon's attention."
Sessions, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, offered an amendment to the annual defense spending bill that would block spending of federal funds on the tanker program "until the Secretary of the Air Force releases comparable pricing data to both offerors" from the last competition. The Northrop-EADS team would assemble its tanker in Alabama.
Northrop-EADS won the previous tanker competition, but the Pentagon threw it out and declared a new contest after congressional auditors found serious flaws in the process. Debate on the defense appropriations bill is expected to continue into next week.

The Pentagon's former acquisition chief is questioning the Air Force's methodology in the new aerial refueling [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] competition.
"My impression is they are trying to avoid a protest instead of trying to do the best thing for the warfighter," [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] who now directs of the University of Maryland's Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise, [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien]. "You can't treat a sophisticated item like a tanker as though you are buying Kleenex."
Specifically, Gasler said the new draft request for proposals that the Air Force [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] last week was wrong to grade 373 requirements on a simple pass/fail approach and award the contract to the lowest bid, adjusted for certain factors, if it is at least 1 percent below the other bid.
Aviation Week quoted an unnamed "official familiar with the Northrop/EADS team" as saying the methodology favors a smaller, less expensive aircraft. Boeing's 767-based tanker is smaller than the Northrop-EADS Airbus A330-based plane.
Gansler suggested having the Pentagon fund both development programs up front and then hold annual competitions for production lots.
Gansler also told Aviation Week that he was surprised that the Air Force gave pricing data for the winning Northrop-EADS bid to Boeing, given that Boeing was expected to challenge the award. The Pentagon declared a new contest last year after congressional auditors found serious flaws in the previous process. Northrop [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] the same information about Boeing's bid that Boeing got about its.

Sep. 28--The Air Force procurement office is once again being accused of soaring off into the wild blue yonder.
It's not a compliment this time.
It's that $35 billion to $100 billion tanker competition.
The one that won't go away and can't seem to get resolved.
The one that has lawyers for both competitors, European Airbus and the United States' Boeing, trotting through various revolving courthouse doors like airline passengers late for a flight.
With such a huge contract at stake, everybody in Congress and the European Union seems eager to get involved.
They'd better.
The last go-around, the Air Force award of the contract to Airbus instead of Boeing caused so much national heartburn that the secretary of the Air Force and the four-star chief of staff both lost their jobs. That was under George W. Bush's administration. There were other contributing factors to the ousters, but the contract snafu was a big part of it.

Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the Air Force would put off rebidding and awarding the contract until the new administration came in.
The new administration is here, and Gates is too, in the same job.
You can bet the procurement office realizes the pressure it is under.
If not, Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Rep. Norm Dicks, and other members of our state's congressional delegation are sure to remind them. In fact, they're already doing it.
This time the procurement office says it will not factor in a preliminary finding by the World Trade Organization that Airbus received $5 billion in help from European treasuries to help keep its prices down.
Unfair, say Boeing backers.
Of course, Boeing got into trouble in an earlier round over an aerial tanker contract. During then-president of Boeing Phil Condit's negotiations with the government, Boeing's chief financial officer, Michael M. Sears, violated procurement rules by allegedly offering an Air Force procurement officer a job. The scandal led to Condit's resignation.
Questioning each others' ethical standards could come out a wash for the two industry giants.
But Congress is on alert.

As Herald Washington, D.C., reporter Les Blumenthal wrote last week:
"This time, the Pentagon is aware of the WTO litigation and is monitoring the case," said Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Platt. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said last week, however, that, "At this time we see no need to make adjustments" in the draft request for bids.
To Boeing backers, that's unacceptable.

"The Department of Defense is well aware of how I feel," said Murray, who first raised the Airbus subsidy issue in 1994. "Everyone knows the seriousness of the impact of this. Pentagon leadership has said they plan to conduct a fair and open competition, but a truly fair and open competition needs to start with competitors who play by the rules."
Noting that Airbus received $5 billion in development subsidies, Rep. Dicks said it was "no wonder they can bid lower. The Department of Defense is looking the other way. We hope Boeing wins, but there will be ramifications if it doesn't."
If Boeing wins, there will be thousands of jobs in Washington.
Airbus has promised to build parts of its plane in the United States too.
But in the end, we cannot forget an argument Sen. Murray advanced that has never, to our knowledge, been refuted.
It is at the heart of this matter.
In drawing up the specifications for the new tankers, the Air Force at first put out requirements that it turned out only the Boeing plane could meet.

It then rewrote the specifications specifically so Airbus could compete. But it would have to compete with an airplane so large, taking so much runway and enlarged hangar space that the Air Force would have to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure changes.

All that at air bases where the Boeing tanker could land right now.
Maybe the Air Force procurement officers should explain what's wrong with Murray's observation before they rush off to spend $35 billion to $100 billion.

Editorial board members are Rufus Friday, publisher; Chris Sivula, editorial page editor; Ken Robertson, executive editor; Matt Taylor, contributing editor; Lori Lancaster, editorial writer; Shelly Norman, editorial writer and Jack Briggs, retired publisher

Just days after relaunching a multi-billion dollar competition to [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] and insisting it would be a model of impartial procurement, the Pentagon has come under attack for “unfair” practices.

On Friday the department of defence released its draft request for proposals (RFP), the first step in the acquisition process. It assured Congress and the media that the contest would be played “straight down the middle”.

[Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien], the US aerospace company, is competing against a [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] and Airbus team for the first slice of the programme. The USAF has described it as its highest priority, and follow-on contracts could bring the total value to $100bn.

Northrop is already worried that the focus on the price of the aircraft places it at a disadvantage.
The company has long complained that its rival was given access to its sensitive pricing data after losing the last tanker competition, while it had not received similar information about Boeing.

Paul K. Meyer, a vice-president with Northrop, said that with Northrop proposing the same aircraft as last time, “such competitive pricing information takes on even greater importance”. He said: “It is fundamentally unfair, and distorts any new competition, to provide such critical information to only one of the bidders.”

Northrop said it was reviewing its options and would work with the customer to resolve the issue.
Last week, the DoD said it had examined the concerns and found the disclosures “created no competitive disadvantage because the data in question are inaccurate, outdated and not germane to this source-selection strategy.”

A Boeing spokesman said: “Our position is that the USAF clearly and definitively dealt with this issue and we look forward to our first meeting with the Air Force in this competition.”

Despite the controversy, Scott Hamilton, an aviation industry consultant, said that RFP had proved a mixed bag for both teams. The USAF ignored demands from Boeing supporters that it penalise Airbus for receiving “illegal” subsidies.

Conversely, Airbus and Northrop had hoped that the procurement would focus on the capability of the aircraft rather than their price, giving its larger aircraft an advantage. But in the end it too was disappointed. The two teams now have about 60 days to comment on the RFP after which the Pentagon will release a final RFP. The government expects to take up to 120 days to evaluate the bids, and aims to award a contract in summer 2010.
The Northrop claims threaten to embroil the contest in the type of controversy that derailed two previous attempts to let the contract to replace 179 of the air force’s 50-year-old tankers.

In 2004, the first effort to replace the tankers using a $20bn lease-and-buy combination [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] which saw Boeing’s former chief financial officer and a top Air Force procurement official sent to prison.
In 2008, the EADS and Northrop-Grumman team unexpectedly won the contest [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] leading to widespread accusations of US protectionism.

Previous failures have placed Pentagon officials under enormous pressure to create a competition that is free of controversy this time round.
“[The US] cannot afford the kind of letdowns and parochial squabbles and corporate food fights that have bedevilled this effort over the last number of years,” Robert Gates, defence secretary, said recently.
But the warnings appear to have fallen on deaf ears, said Mr Hamilton, the industry consultant. “This is shaping up to be another ugly contest.”

Commentator: giving Boeing tanker contract would be criminal

[/b]If it's possible to amp up the politicization of the U.S. Air Force's aerial refueling [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] contract any more, the conservative American Spectator just did so.
"The Pentagon is playing dirty pool on behalf of the already-dirtiest pool players from Boeing, with regard to the huge (179-plane, about $40 billion) air refueling tanker contract that Northrop Grumman Corp. and EADS won fair and square last year before it was stolen away from them," Quin Hillyer, a senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator, [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] on the latter publication's Web site Thursday.
Revisiting the aftermath of last year's Northrop-EADS win, Hillyer asserted that "Boeing launched an unprecedented and underhanded political-hardball campaign" against the award.
Continuing with Hillyer's version of events, congressional auditors upheld only Boeing's least-serious allegations about problems with the previous award process, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates seized on this "reed-thin basis" to call for a new contest "on the same day that Gates and other Pentagon brass dined at the Boeing table for a major 9-11 memorial dinner."
Gates' conspiratorial ties deepen with the revelation that he "just so happens to have a house, where he plans to eventually retire, just outside of Seattle, where he also has family ties and where Boeing rules the roost," Hillyer notes, adding, parenthetically: "How much do you want to bet that Gates ends up as a Boeing 'consultant'?"
But Hillyer's real point is that the new draft tanker request for proposals that the Air Force [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] last month tweaked requirements to favor Boeing.
"Most disturbing of those tweaks were ones that actually de-emphasized the importance of a plane's greater capabilities in the name of focusing only on price," he wrote. "Because it was those greater capabilities of the Northrop plane that made the biggest difference for Northrop last time, this change clearly helps Boeing -- at the expense, perhaps, of the safety or capabilities of America's airmen."
Hillyer also howls at the Pentagon's giving Boeing pricing data from Northrop-EADS' last bid -- a standard disclosure to the losing bidder, by all accounts. The Pentagon has maintained that the disclosure was in accordance with regulations and that the data is irrelevant to the new contest.
Before I get to the exciting conclusion, I should note that Hillyer favors splitting the contract between Boeing and Northrop-EADS as a way to get more planes faster and at less long-term cost.
Hillyer ends his column by expressing fear that the fix is in to give Boeing the contract.
"I'm here to say that if, after all this, Boeing gets the whole contract, the stench of corruption will be so asphyxiating that nobody involved should expect anything other than to have prosecutors knocking at their doors," he fumes. "With handcuffs. For just cause."

The U.S. Air Force is already on the defensive about its plans for the KC-X competition, with a former top procurement official questioning the source-selection methodology and Northrop Grumman/EADS asserting it has been put at a disadvantage by the disclosure of its pricing data to rival Boeing.
The Pentagon last week dismissed complaints from a Northrop Grumman executive on the pricing data claim. But the issue is already festering, potentially spoiling the Air Force’s hopes to have a KC-135 replacement on contract by mid-2010. Discussions continue between Northrop Grumman CEO Ronald Sugar and top Pentagon officials, according to Randy Belote, the company’s vice president for strategic communications.
In its Sept. 29 statement, Northrop Grumman says it is “greatly concerned” that pricing data from the 2008 competition was divulged during a debriefing to Boeing on its loss.
“With predominant emphasis placed on price in this tanker re-competition and Northrop Grumman again proposing its KC-45 refueling tanker, such competitive pricing information takes on even greater importance,” the statement says. “It is fundamentally unfair, and distorts any new competition, to provide such critical information to only one of the bidders.”
Northrop Grumman won a $1.5-billion development contract for the Airbus A330-200-based tankers, then named the KC-45 by the Air Force, in February 2008; a Boeing protest led to termination of the contract in the summer.
The Pentagon counters that the disclosure was “in accordance with regulation and, more importantly, that it created no competitive disadvantage because the data in question are inaccurate, outdated and not germane to this source-selection strategy.” Northrop Grumman officials have requested that the playing field be leveled by releasing the pricing data on Boeing’s 767-based tanker in the 2008 competition, though the Pentagon has signaled no willingness to do so.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), however, is forcing the issue with a new amendment to the Fiscal 2010 defense spending bill to block KC-X funding unless the Air Force hands over the data.
Jacques Gansler, Pentagon procurement chief from 1997-2001 and now director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise, is surprised about the disclosure. “They were wrong knowing there was a protest [coming] to give out the pricing data,” he tells Aviation Week. He says with a winner-take-all strategy for such a large program—estimated at $35 billion for 179 tankers—another protest should be expected from the loser of the forthcoming duel. “My impression is they are trying to avoid a protest instead of trying to do the best thing for the warfighter,” he says.
Boeing is apparently trying to remain on the sidelines. “The Air Force clearly and definitively dealt with this issue,” says William Barksdale, communications director for Boeing’s tanker team.
Gansler, who has no affiliation with either team, also criticizes the source-selection methodology. Each bid will be judged on a pass/fail basis on 373 mandatory requirements, and thereafter the remaining bids will be priced, with cost adjusted based on two other “non-price” factors, according to Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn. These factors are wartime effectiveness, or how the aircraft will operate during a surge operation, and peacetime efficiency, based on the KC-135’s 489-hr.-per-year average rate.
According to Gansler and some industry officials, this not a true “best-value” approach. “You can’t treat a sophisticated item like a tanker as though you are buying Kleenex,” he says. “It is not a commodity. . . . The idea of simply awarding something so important and sophisticated to the lower bidder is not the way to do it.”
One official familiar with the Northrop Grumman/EADS team says the Air Force’s source-selection methodology favors a smaller and less expensive aircraft. “Every gate is a price gate,” the official says.
During the last competition, Northrop Grumman/EADS made a similar argument, threatening not to bid. The Air Force then devised the Integrated Fleet Air-Refueling Assessment (Ifara), a modeling tool used to judge effectiveness and flexibility of the aircraft in various war scenarios. This was weighed equally with cost last time around.
Gansler says the approach most likely to deliver tankers in a timely fashion would cost the government more upfront but save money in the long term. He suggests funding both developments and conducting annual competitions—with the best-performing team winning the lion’s share for each year. Saying “history is on my side,” he notes that choosing a single supplier for a system does not take advantage of competition to maintain pressure on price.
Meanwhile, Boeing is considering offering two proposals in order to clench the “must-win” program, according to officials close to the company’s planning. They say they are looking at the 767 and 777 as platforms for the design. One of the officials says the cost of proposing two bids is not prohibitive for Boeing in comparison to the amount of money spent to date on this campaign.

U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, on Thursday ripped top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for their handling of the Air Force tanker competition, accusing them of tilting the selection criteria in favor of Boeing Co.

"One would think that our Air Force's top priority would be to ensure that our men and women in uniform have the best, most capable equipment. Clearly that is not the case," Shelby said in a speech on the Senate floor.

Shelby and other Alabama political leaders are pressing the Pentagon to release pricing data from Boeing's bid in the last round of competition with rival Northrop Grumman Corp., which is proposing to assemble its tankers in Mobile.

Los Angeles-based Northrop won the potential $40 billion contract last year, but the deal unraveled when the Government Accountability Office, acting on a protest filed by Chicago-based Boeing, found problems with the way the Air Force made its selection.

Boeing, under standard procedure in government contracting, received details of Northrop's winning bid soon after the decision was announced in February 2008.

After the GAO issued its ruling that June, Gates canceled the deal with Northrop and ordered a rematch.

The Pentagon released its proposed bidding guidelines last month, and has rejected Northrop's requests to see details of Boeing's losing bid.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, proposed an amendment to the 2010 defense spending bill that would have blocked funding for new tankers, the Air Force's top priority, until the Pentagon released the pricing data to both bidders.

But the amendment was not included in the Senate's version of the bill approved late Tuesday.

Mobile Mayor Sam Jones called on Gates to release the Boeing data, saying the failure to do so "would undermine public confidence ... (and) invite further protests and delays."

"Unfortunately, the competition appears to be tainted from the start," Jones wrote in an Oct. 1 letter to Gates. "To the same extent that Northrop's pricing information was compromised, Boeing's should be made available also."

Shelby criticized Gates for pulling the plug on the 2008 deal with Northrop. That decision, he said "placed politics and business interests over the interests of the warfighter."

"While Secretary Gates may have characterized this decision as a 'cooling off' period, it sent the clear message that only a Boeing tanker will be acceptable," Shelby said. "The defense acquisition policy was unmistakable: No Boeing, no tanker."

Pentagon officials have said the Boeing pricing data is outdated and not relevant to the current contest. They have proposed sweeping changes to the Air Force's selection criteria, simplifying the list of requirements for the new planes and placing a heavier emphasis on price.

The companies are about two weeks into a 60-day period, during which they can submit comments about the Air Force's proposed guidelines. Military leaders said they hope to issue a final request for bids later this year and pick a winner by summer.

The new tankers are needed to replace the Air Force's aging fleet of KC-135 Stratotankers, which average nearly 50 years in service. The workhorse KC-135s are used to refuel fighter jets, cargo planes and other military aircraft in flight.

Boeing's bid for the Air Force's $35 billion aerial refueling [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] contract is the clear choice for investing in American workers, knowledge, security and future, the presidents of 10 AFL-CIO state federations said in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week.
"Given the current state of the U.S. economy, taxpayer dollars shouldn't be funding the economic growth of European countries. This money should be invested at home," the labor leaders wrote, according to an [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien]. "The U.S. military and the American citizens it protects should not be put in a position where any foreign government has control over our nation's military capabilities."
Boeing's rival is a team of U.S. contractor Northrop Grumman and Europe's EADS. Awarding the contract to Northrop-EADS would hamper efforts to revive the U.S. economy, jeopardize the U.S. industrial base and endanger security by giving EADS and its foreign suppliers the technological specifications of every military plane that the tankers refuel, the letter says.
AFL-CIO Washington leader Rick Bender signed the letter, as did state leaders Rebekah Friend (Arizona), John Olsen (Connecticut), Michael Carrigan (Illinois), Andy Sanchez (Kansas), Edward Gorman (Maine), Mark Gaffney (Michigan), Hugh McVey (Montana), Tom Chamberlain (Oregon) and David Newby (Wisconsin).

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, commonly AFL-CIO, is a [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien], the largest federation of [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] in the [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] and [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien], made up of 65 national and international unions, together representing more than 10 million workers. It was formed in 1955 when the [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] and the [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] merged after a long estrangement. From 1955 until 2005, the AFL-CIO's member unions represented nearly all unionized workers in the United States. The largest union in the AFL-CIO is the [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] (AFSCME), with more than a million members, since 2005 when several large unions split away from AFL-CIO.

Boeing is posing questions to the U.S. Air Force to clarify the draft aerial refueling [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] and is open to suggestions for what else to ask, spokesman Bill Barksdale [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien] Friday.
"Our United States Tanker team has spent a great deal of time studying the draft RFP. Remember this is the main document we'll be using to decide which member of our KC-7A7 'family of tankers' to offer, or whether to offer both," Barksdale wrote. "But we can't just make decisions on what's written in the document alone. Our main focus as we drive toward some key internal decisions is clarity. We must clearly understand how the service's requirements are defined and prioritized, and how our proposal will be evaluated."
Any potential bidder can submit questions to the Air Force and have them answered online at the [Vous devez être inscrit et connecté pour voir ce lien], Barksdale noted. "We began submitting questions earlier this month and look forward to seeing the answers posted on the public website soon. While some of that Q&A may be administrative in nature, you might gain some interesting insight into how the process works by checking out the site. Feel free to tell us what you'd ask."

WASHINGTON — Le patron d'EADS, Louis Gallois, a accusé mardi les Etats-Unis de favoriser son concurrent Boeing dans la bataille pour les ravitailleurs de l'armée de l'air américaine, en ayant fourni à Boeing le prix de l'appareil conçu par Northrop Grumman et EADS.
"Bien sûr c'est pratique pour Boeing d'avoir le prix de notre ravitailleur" alors qu'EADS ne connaît pas celui de Boeing, a déclaré M. Gallois, interrogé au cours d'une conférence à Washington sur des accusations semblables formulées récemment par le partenaire américain d'EADS, Northrop Grumman.
Le dirigeant du groupe européen d'aéronautique et de défense a rappelé que les deux concurrents dans cet appel d'offres présentaient "globalement le même" appareil.
"C'est une question de confiance" entre EADS et le Pentagone, a encore considéré M. Gallois, président exécutif du groupe européen.
Northrop Grumman avait lancé la même accusation en septembre, en expliquant que cette information sur le prix avait une "importance particulière" dans la compétition.
Le ministère de la Défense américain a annoncé le 24 septembre qu'il rouvrait la compétition pour le renouvellement de la flotte d'avions ravitailleurs américaine, qui oppose le constructeur américain Boeing à l'alliance EADS/Northrop Grumman.
Ce contrat de 35 milliards de dollars portant sur 179 avions avait été attribué par le Pentagone en février 2008 à EADS et Northrop Grumman. Mais Boeing avait contesté la décision et obtenu que la Cour des comptes américaine (GAO) ordonne un redémarrage du processus d'appel d'offres.