The chairman of a key House subcommittee said on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, that he would push to divide the Air Force’s next aerial refueling tanker contract between the two defense giants that had spent years at war over it — a proposal with more riding on it in Mobile than almost anywhere else in the country.
Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, chairman of the House Armed Services Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, described the approach after delivering a speech in Washington.
“I think the most sensible thing to do is to have what is come to be termed as a split buy,” Abercrombie said. “If we do that sensibly and take into account the strategic interests involved … I think we can come to a reasoned conclusion on getting both bids accepted, if you will, and moving forward with that.”
Why Mobile had a stake
The contract at issue was worth roughly $35 billion. In 2008 the Air Force awarded it to a team led by Northrop Grumman and the European firm EADS, which proposed a tanker based on the Airbus A330 commercial airliner. That team’s plan called for a final assembly line at Brookley Field in Mobile — an industrial prize of a scale the region had not seen in decades, and one local and state officials had worked for years to land.
The award did not hold. Boeing, which had offered a tanker based on its 767, protested successfully, and the Air Force was sent back to start over. By early 2009 the Pentagon did not expect to award a new contract until 2010, and every month of delay left Mobile’s prospects suspended.
A split buy would change the calculation entirely. Rather than one winner and one loser, both aircraft would be purchased — which would mean, for Mobile, that the Brookley assembly line could proceed regardless of how the competition was ultimately scored.
The case against dividing the buy
Abercrombie acknowledged that a consensus was forming behind the split-buy approach but that meaningful opposition remained. House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., had backed the idea. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had not.
“I think the idea of a split buy is an absolutely terrible idea and a very bad mistake for the U.S. taxpayer,” Gates had told the House Armed Services Committee in January. Dozens of lawmakers agreed with him.
The objections were practical. Fielding two different tanker models would require two training pipelines and two maintenance systems, duplicating costs across the fleet’s entire service life. Critics also argued that buying both aircraft would eliminate the competitive pressure that holds development and procurement costs down, since neither contractor would face the possibility of losing.
Abercrombie’s counterargument
The chairman’s reply rested on the cost of continued delay. The Air Force’s existing tanker fleet was aging, and the service had repeatedly called its replacement the top procurement priority.
“How do we justify the costs of saying we need to have a tanker seven or nine years ago and the explosion of costs since then just by not doing it?” Abercrombie asked. “I justify everything on the basis of meeting the strategic interest of the nation. … If you have a mission and you agree that that’s what the mission is, then you pay for it.”
He also criticized the Obama administration for treating a delay of the tanker program as one option for trimming the budget.
“If you could do that in the first place, why did we go through all this?” he said. “Why did we go through this for seven or eight or nine years … and say we’ve got to have it?”
A postponement of the award was among several options on the table as the administration worked through the details of the fiscal 2010 budget, though several sources tracking the issue said such a move was unlikely.
A long fight, still unresolved
For south Alabama, the tanker competition had already become the region’s defining economic storyline. Political leaders across party lines had lined up behind the Northrop-EADS bid, and the promise of aerospace manufacturing at Brookley had shaped how Mobile talked about its own future.
Abercrombie’s remarks offered the region something it had not had in a while: a plausible path in which Mobile did not need to win the argument outright in order to get the factory. Whether the Pentagon and the White House would accept that path was, in March 2009, entirely unsettled.