Revised KC-X Bidding Process Starts

Revised KC-X Bidding Process Starts: The Of

fice of the Secretary of Defense rolled out the new and improved draft request for proposals for the Air Force’s belabored KC-X tanker competition yesterday (Aug. 6), saying little about the contents of the revamped document apart from its inclusion of the new 40-year lifecycle cost evaluation timeline to replace the previous 25-year one. Director of Defense Procurement and Acquisitions Policy Shay Assad told reporters during a briefing that the new RFP is narrowly focused on addressing the problems the Government Accountability Office found with the initial document. “We are addressing them in a very measured and serious way,” he said. The new plan is to discuss elements of the draft with the two competitors, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, over the next week or so, then issue a final RFP by the middle of August. Both competitors have 45 days to update their proposals, and then, from early October to late November, discussions will be held with each competitor to evaluate their new offers. OSD expects to receive each best and final offer by the first week of December and to make an award around New Year’s Eve, Assad said. He did say the department is grounding itself in the KC-X capabilities development document that spelled out the tanker’s requirements. He also said the language in the document was made “unambiguous” to reflect that extra consideration would be given to attributes in the offerors’ tanker designs that exceed minimum mandatory performance levels. But there will be no extra consideration given for exceeding the new tanker’s objective requirements—a position not all that different from the initial RFP. “It was always our intention to give positive consideration for the amount of fuel offload over threshold,” he said.

—Marc V. Schanz

8/7/2008

Verbatim

Preemptive Action
"Since the [Defense] Department's acceptance of the independent estimates last fall, we've been, in just about every respect, acting as if the program were in a Nunn-McCurdy breach. ... We've been taking all of the mitigating and corrective action that we would take as if there were a Nunn-McCurdy breach."
—Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, discussing with reporters the restructure of the F-35 strike fighter program announced in February 2010 and the probability that the program will soon exceed Nunn-McCurdy cost-monitoring thresholds that would necessitate, per US law, a program review and corrective steps, Washington, D.C., March 2, 2010.

Verbatim

Message for Grandma
"She has working for her as a citizen in the United States an Air Force Reserve that has some very talented, capable, patriotic, and willing individuals doing the business to keep this nation free. Just like her generation—the 'Greatest Generation'—was, I am very proud of the folks that we have got. If not the second greatest, then they are an extension of the greatest generation and they are ready, willing, and able to do the things that she would want them to do to make sure we keep our freedoms."
—Lt. Gen. Charles Stenner, Air Force Reserve chief, responding to a reporter's question on what the reporter should tell his 85-year-old grandmother to convey to her the importance of Air Force Reservists to the nation's security, Orlando, Fla., Feb. 19, 2010.