Wynne: Blinded by Tanker Rage?

Just when we start to think former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne might have something important to say he comes up spouting gibberish.

Take his latest interview with Air Force Magazine's Daily Report. In it he once again shows how, at the highest levels of the service, there is an alternate tanker reality.

Wynne thinks the service should be meaner to losers of procurement competitions:

Excessively kind language, he said, leads the losers to think they only lost by a hair. In the KC-X tanker competition, “We should have been harsher on the loser,” Wynne said during an interview July 28. However, the service refrained from frank comments. Instead of writing a " 'We don’t want you memo' " to Boeing after it lost to Northrop Grumman, the service crafted a " 'We like you, but you didn’t win' memo," Wynne said. “I just don’t think the write-up was harsh enough.” Boeing was apparently emboldened by the perceived narrow miss to launch its protest, which has put the coveted tanker contract back up for grabs.

From where we stand Boeing was emboldened because they could tell Air Force procurement personnel did not follow the RFP, were duplicitous in their discussions during the competition, and some even sold their integrity to spin public opinion against a Boeing protest. Also, the GAO decision revealed the competition was close; so we wonder how harsh Wynne could have made his comments.

They say hindsight is 20/20, but in Wynne's case it seems to be blind to reality.

[Note: After 30 July the article link will be broken. You must visit the Daily Report archives and pull up the July 30th edition to retrieve it.]

Wynne Backs Tanker Split-buy

In an interview with Air Force Magazine former Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne states his case for awarding contracts for both the KC-767 and KC-30. He believes this may be the only way to resolve the legal impasse surrounding the tanker competition.

A spilt-buy has in the past been regarded impractical due to the increased cost of low rate production of 7.5 aircraft per year:

But Wynne, now out of office, said July 28 there is another way to approach the split buy: have each contractor build at the same annual rate that they would have in the winner-take-all scenario—upwards of 15. Keeping two suppliers would strengthen the industrial base, replace the Eisenhower-era KC-135 tankers “at a faster rate” and maintain competition “well into the future,” not a bad consideration since the Air Force needs to buy about 500 new tankers overall to replace its KC-135s, he said.

As for the higher costs of supporting two tankers lines, Wynne said, when asked, he would support applying some of the $5 billion in added procurement funds that the Air Force will reportedly receive in Fiscal 2010 to cover them.

We at Tanker War Blog think this might be a case of counting your tankers before they are hatched. There are no guarantees on increased funding in 2010. In fact, either candidate for President will probably cut DoD funding when they get into office. Also, if extra funding was available, are extra tankers more important than F-22, C-17, JSF, several space programs, or more ISR?

Wynne may have a point that Under Secretary John Young's solution of an expedited recompete may not get past the draft RFP stage based on the experience with the CSAR procurement:

Wynne said he hopes that the GAO will accept Young’s tack in trying to resolve the KC-X protest. “I worry because it is a very similar tactic to what I tried on the [combat search and rescue replacement vehicle program]—trying to simply address the issues that the GAO has brought forward,” he said.

The GAO did not accept Wynne’s approach to resolving the industry protests on CSAR-X and instead recommended that the Air Force reopen that competition more broadly, which USAF subsequently did.

DoD should issue the new draft tanker RFP this week or next. We will see if Mr. Young can make all sides happy enough to allow for the final RFP to be issued in mid-August without a protest.

We here at Tanker War Blog believe this will an extremely tough order to fill, but Mr. Young has the best chance of anyone in DoD to succeed. If he can't do it, no one can.

Fired Air Force Sec. Makes Wild Accusations

In today's print edition of Defense News (subscription required), fired Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne makes several accusations that show just how in denial Air Force officials are on the GAO's findings. When questioned about the GAO decision, and the fact that it appears that there were "Acquisition 101" type errors, Wynne had this to say:

"The Air Force overcomplicated it, probably based on the CSAR-X outcome. The CSAR-X outcome was a conditioning exercise. As a result, they really wanted both competitors to be almost equal."

Whether Wynne knows it or not, this statement is pretty damning. The competitor's products were not equal. The KC-30 team proposed an aircraft that was bigger than required, and only through the tweaking of grading criteria and weighting was the Air Force able to make them equal. As we have mentioned, time and time again, we believe that Air Force acquisition's goal became having a competition and not getting the best tanker for the mission.

The second part of Wynn's answer, which as previously reported, veers from damning to bizarre and bitter:

"Here's one of those cases where Boeing had probably assessed their prospects were dimming. I would say they systematically began to build a case, and I'm not sure they shared everything they could have shared with the Air Force along the way. They were essentially building a Pearl Harbor file" that they could use later."

We would like to inform the former secretary that we have never found anyone in Boeing who thought "their prospects were dimming". In fact, every Boeing supporter or person from Boeing we have come in contact with was truly shocked when it was announced that the Air Force had selected the KC-30. We would add that they had every right to be shocked because, as we now know, the competition was so riddled with errors that DoD has been forced to take the program away for the Air Force.

In the same interview and article, Wynne asserts that Boeing was unwilling to submit commercial rates on their support organizations and that he was surprised that the GAO sided with Boeing on this point:

"I was surprised the GAO did not see that for what it was," he said, "which is: bid high for the stuff that you're going to contract for and bid low on the stuff that you're not going to contract for." Pressed to say whether Boeing's alleged move was dishonest, Wynne said, "Anything that is used to acquire, that is legitimate in the eyes of the customer or the evaluator is legitimate. ... I would say that it depends on how you characterize it. It was a good business idea that seems to have sustained the protest. No different than calling a steal in baseball when the pitcher doesn't realize it."

Many of us in Washington initially gave Wynne a pass on his failures on the tanker and other procurement programs. But, given his lack of understanding of the GAO decision and his wild accusations it is impossible to do so anymore.

One of the main reasons Wynne was promoted to Air Force Secretary was to clean up the procurement mess of the tanker lease deal. In this he failed just as miserably as he did in ensuring his service accounted for nuclear weapons.

The record will show that Wynne's tenure was a complete loss. (pun intended)