Hugh Hewitt: Sadly in the Tank For Boeing

Well, I sent the letter (excerpt below) to Mr Hewitt after his Mark McGraw Spinfest, and as you will see below the excerpt -- alas, it did no good.

I’ve been following this tanker competition and decision closely for a very long time and since February 29th have watched Boeing fling a stream of different complaints against the wall to see what will stick. Last week it was the ‘size’ issue. Yesterday it was ‘changes’ and a ‘Northrop Grumman model’ in the process. Today, besides a lot of misstatements that have already been slapped down in the trades (check the last three issues of Aviation Week for starters) Mr. McGraw introduced the V-22 issue (that is ‘new’ to the public BTW). It is interesting that he claims that the Boeing tanker can service anything including the V-22, when as point of fact, ALL new tankers have to be qualified to service the different aircraft and Boeing’s tanker (called ‘Frankentanker’ by some wag because it is a kluge of different 767 models that has never existed before) hasn’t even been built yet!. Mr. McGraw only believes the 767 can do the job based on analytical models and simulations. Nor has Boeing built any advanced refueling capability comparable to what is being installed on the Northrop Grumman KC-45. (interesting considering Mr. McGraw’s “critical military technology” claim eh?) Boeing took the position that if they won the contract, THEN they’d build a new system.

Boeing is playing two distinct and distasteful PR games: publicly playing the ‘grading’, ‘process’, and ‘critical military technology’ angles, while using proxies in the form of union hacks and hometown politicos to play the jobs/protectionist angle. There’s just so much wrong with Boeing’s two-pronged attack on the award, it makes me sick. I retired from the Air Force 15 years ago, and today, if I had Mr. McGraw within arm’s length I would have rubbed his nose up and down my bare sleeve so he could count the bumps that are still where my stripes used to be.

Please note, that while I have deep interests in Northrop Grumman, I’m also on record as generally preferring Boeing’s designs and products over EADS’, and that if anybody will make the EADS airframe a great plane – it will be Northrop Grumman.

For balance, PLEASE!- you simply MUST request an appearance by the KC-45 program manager. I’m sure Mr. Meyer will be only too happy to oblige. In the interim, I suggest you get a hold of some of the less ‘emotional’ trade publications for some perspective. If you are going to intelligently broadcast on the KC-45 contract,
you’re going to need more show prep.

Well I have found Hugh Hewitt generally tries to do the right thing on principle, I think this time he's standing way too close to some Boeing principals in which he has some misplaced trust. This demonstrates one of the most frustrating things about him for me: not having all the neccessary facts in hand rarely stops him from taking a position. Based upon his actions before the McGraw love-fest and after I sent the letter, I can only conclude he is obviously (and obliviously) in the tank for Boeing on this issue.

What actions are those?

Well first there's this opinion piece, that I hadn't read before yesterday's show that gives us some insight into his attitudes about the KC-45 contract going to Northrop Grumman. We see in it where he did his research: "I asked one friend within Boeing for an assessment of this argument". Gee, how biased could his opinion be? All kinds of interesting comments come afterwards. The thread starts out with echoes of Hugh and slowly over time the more factual posts start showing up.

After the interview ( I think he actually put it up before the show was over), Hugh had a red-meat post at his blog about the KC-45 tanker "not being able to refuel the V-22" but the 'Boeing tanker' allegedly can (stated as a certainty by McGraw). The comments for that post started out a little more skeptical of McGraw's claims, when a comment caught my eye: someone or something posting as 'Tankerblog' wrote:

Good Question Hugh!
Some good comments also, but some very poor ones.
The V-22 is used by SecOps folks so it operates on the tactical, operational, strategic level. Limiting a Combatant Commander's options for refueling the V-22 while not fatal is a concern as the services shrink and need more "Joint" assets.(Read about Desert One to see how bad things turn out when forced to do on-ground refueling.)
See http://www.tankerblog.com for more tanker issues.

Now the 'Desert One' reference alone could usually draw me in because I used to fly with guys who were cut out of that operation over a political decision to use Marine helos, but that's not what caught my eye this time of course: Who or what the f@$% was "tankerblog"? I visited the site (yawn) and then had to come back to HH's V-22 post to leave this comment:

Tankerblog: Boeing Protectionist Shill
See Hugh, this is exactly what I was talking about in the e-mail I sent you yesterday. Boeing has mobilized its army of 'America first' Airbus haters (on both sides of the political spectrum) as one prong of an attack, while they fling anything about the selection process they can distort or misrepresent against the wall to see what will stick as the other prong of the attack.

Tankerblog.com is just a bucket for spreading all the BS that legislators with vested interests in protecting Boeing's little tanker monopoly have set up. The 'Center for Security Policy' association at their website is a nice touch: except it is hardly unbiased. Or is "Dr. Charles M. Kupperman, Vice President, Strategic Integration & Operations, Missile Defense Systems, The Boeing Company" no longer on the board?

There's a lot of other Boeing twisted BS in some of the other posts as well. I'll just take the 'EADS hasn't built a tanker' trope for now. Y'see, this is a misrepresentation of what is actually a key advantage of the Northrop Grumman bid: The KC-45 team has already built a plane for this contract and Boeing is proposing a Frankentanker that is still on the tube (and is only PROJECTED to be able to refuel the V-22 -it is not proven). EADS is on or ahead of schedule with all it's existing tanker programs and Boeing is behind on all of theirs. Boeing didn't build a new boom system yet because they wanted to do it on the program dime - NG's boom is already flying.

People!: There's no such thing as corporate memory and the people that built the last Boeing tanker are dead or retired.

Now I guess the Boeing guy 'Kupperman' is still there, but he's now listed as a retired VP of Boeing. No matter, from the website we can tell the Center for Security Policy is obviously in league with the Boeing boys as a proxy on this issue holding the "Buy American" front.

Today's Show?
So did Hugh get another voice to provide a Boeing-free point of view on the matter as I pleaded for him to do yesterday? In a word:

HAH!

Friday HH brings in regular guest Frank Gaffney at the end of the first hour, and Gaffney starts parroting the same unsubstatiated Boeing assertions and defense technology canards: commenting on them as if they were fact. So what's Gaffney's relationship to Boeing and their proxies? Oh yeah, he's the freakin' President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy.

Gaffney Update 04/01/08: According to a HuffPo poster who doesn't like Gaffney's ties to Israel (love it when I get to use the Useful Idiot ~wink~) Gaffney is on record as being a 'Boeing Boy'. End Update.

Hugh Hewitt is living in an echo chamber that was built in Seattle and Witchita on this issue. He needs to ask a Northrop Grumman representative the same questions he opened his Thursday column with (also linked in this post's title).

New Theme Needed?

Looks like I'm going to have to add a new theme for discussion on this blog: Boeing BS Watch.

Boeing's Mark McGraw is a one front-man disinformatsia machine! Today he was on Hugh Hewitt regurgitating some of the blather he's put out earlier and just in time for Hugh's show he comes up with another topic to complain about: the KC-45 isn't projected to be able to refuel the V-22.

Hugh asked if this was acknowledged in the process and (gasp!) it was. So is Boeing's point to ridicule the AF's judgement some more, or is it to criticize the KC-45? It's getting harder to tell.

I'll post excerpts of an e-mail I sent Mr. Hewitt after the segment asking him to please get the Northrop Grumman KC-45 program manager on the show for the sake of balance. Hugh is pretty good about not just asking for responses to comments made by earlier guests and keeping the 'second guy' in the reaction mode. And if it happens, then hopefully the NG rep will get more on the offensive mode - goodness knows Boeing's handing them the ammo.

This is going to get even uglier if Boeing insists on arguing everything BUT why they lost: "We really aren't sure" is getting lame very fast.

Boeing "Surprised" in Tanker Duel? NOT!

Lockheed Martin has an internal news bulletin that summarizes a lot of the aerospace news of the day. In today’s edition was an Av Week blurb about the KC-45, titled “USAF says fencing off data kept tanker competition fair”. It was interesting enough to cause me to look up the full article titled “USAF On The KC-X Defensive A Year Ago”, which is an interesting twist on the situation in itself. My curiosity paid off because the article provided some real insight into the complaints that Boeing is using as the basis for protesting the award of the KC-X contract to Northrop Grumman.

It has the first details I’ve seen about the “Northrop-era” model used to evaluate the tankers. ‘Northrop’ as in ‘before Northrop Grumman’…as in 1980’s Northrop. A model developed for the now-defunct Strategic Air Command to help plan tanker ops in the 1980s (more about this in a second).

The Combined Mating and Ranging Planning System (CMARPS) was designed for the Strategic Air Command in the 1980s and is now used by planners in Air Mobility Command. It helps operators assess how many tankers are required for a variety of missions, where they can be based and how many receivers -- fighters and intelligence aircraft, for example -- can be serviced by the available refuelers. It is one of various modeling systems used by the Air Force.

In the article, Boeing claims difficulty in learning how to use and actually using the model. It would seem to me, that since Boeing is the ONLY tanker contractor the AF has had for years and the dominant contractor for decades, that they should have been very familiar with the model if they cared at all about understanding how their Customer was using it for any number of reasons like, oh I don’t know…maybe Product/Logistics Support and Sustainability Engineering?

Here’s another tidbit about the model, per a teleconference with reporters today hosted by Northrop Grumman’s Washington office and the KC-45 Program Manager, Paul Meyer, the model was developed by a company that Northrop Grumman BOUGHT only about six years ago (click here to listen to the MP3 file – model info @ approx 3 minutes). Mr. Meyer went further and pointed out that his team had no contact with the part of NG that developed the model, and that Boeing had a lot more experience with the model than his team. One wonders now if Boeing had communications or managerial barriers that prevented the part of Boeing familiar with the model from supporting the Boeing bid.

There was a wealth of other information provided in the teleconference that knocked down Boeing’s claims and provides some concrete cost/price numbers as well. I would encourage anyone to listen to it.

The Av Week piece also brings up Boeing’s complaints about ‘changes’ to the contract:

Two “major combat operations” scenarios were tweaked to add additional ramp space in the Cmarps [sic] model that doesn’t actually exist. This allowed for the KC-30 to gain enough access at a “priority base,” according to Boeing officials, that it otherwise would have been too large to achieve. Limited ramp space can make operations with larger aircraft more difficult, because of tight parking and ground maneuver space…Space between parked aircraft, however,was another change made by the Air Force during the competition, Boeing says. The service cut the space between parked tankers in half, to 25 ft., according to Boeing. The company says this change doesn’t accurately reflect operations in the field as articulated in the Mobility Capability Study 2005, a classified assessment of mobility needs by the Pentagon. The Air Force countered in its March 29 [2007] letter, saying that the shift to 25 ft. separation between parked aircraft “accurately reflects contingency operations at constrained employment bases.”

Hmmm. So Boeing continued clinging to the idea that they had a larger ramp space advantage than they actually did have, because they continued to view the requirement from a Standard Operational Procedures point of view and not taking into account the AF’s experience with “contingency operations at constrained employment bases” for their final proposal. –even though these changes were made BEFORE the last proposal was submitted.

The last change mentioned in the article, but one that apparently happened 4-5 months earlier than the others, involved ‘turn-around’ times:

Another Air Force shift in evaluating the criteria was the use of a “standard planning ground time,” which reflects the time needed to service a refueler on the ground, load it up with more gas and send it out for another mission. Boeing says that in November 2006, the Air Force asked the competitors to calculate ground turnaround time based on a fixed number…..

This obviously caused Boeing some consternation:

Boeing naturally saw this as a strength for its proposal, since a smaller tanker would take less time to refuel on the ground. The Air Force, however, switched that metric, implementing a standard turnaround time of 4 hrs. and 15 mins. for both proposals …..

Even though the change was made before the final proposal was submitted, and therefore clearly not in violation of contracting rules and laws, was the change warranted? Evidently so:

…“Upon review of current operations, the Air Force determined that there are many factors that impact turn time and overshadow differences in ground fuel servicing times, including, for example, combat tasking ground crew and spare parts availability [and] local constraints,” the service says. “As these examples indicate, these factors have little or no relationship to the aircraft characteristics. Because of these variables, the Air Force must use a standard planning ground time for its tanker fleet.”

So before the final proposals were submitted and over a year before source selection, the AF changed a planning factor for turnaround time based upon real world experience that reduced Boeing’s edge in tanker refuel times. From this article we can conclude that recent real-world operations gave the AF more concrete criteria for spacing and turnaround times to use in evaluating the proposals and this experience benefitted the NG proposal.
Aside from the above, we also learn that the article’s title was highlighting the point that Boeing had every reason not think this contract was a slam-dunk more than a year ago. So much for the feigned ‘shock’ and surprised indignation on their part and so much for the outrage over ‘changes’ coming out of Boeing’s PR machine.

The revelation that Boeing had concerns about how their tanker might measure up even before the final proposal was submitted also calls even more into question their decision to push the small 767 version (vs. a stretched -300 or -400). Boeing’s talk of offering a 777 if ‘they had only known’ doesn’t hold water: it’s probably TOO big "as is" and they didn’t have a shortened version on the shelf to offer by design: they consciously decided years ago to stretch the 767 instead of shrink the 777 for the relevant commercial market segment.

In a just world, Boeing’s protest is toast. Let’s hope it is a just world.

KC-X Contract Announced Today: Protest Too?

AF Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley hopes there won't be a protest by the losing bidder.

His appeal asking "...(the losing tanker bidder) to think about the country and think about the people that are flying the airplanes" carries moral authority ONLY if the Air Force really didn't pull a bonehead move -- like changing the rules of the competion AFTER the bids were submitted.

I hope the AF played this one straight.

Update @1603 Central
Well, CNBC reports Northrop Grumman/EADS won the contract. Smart money should be on a protest and 'ugliness' since Washington Governor Christine Gregoire is already demonstrating a typical modern 'Democratic' grasp of the concept of 'competition'.

Updated 20 March 08: The AF played it straight. See next post. Boeing's claims of 'changes' refer to changes before the Final Proposals were submitted.