Air Force ‘Confident’ Bomber Contract Award Is Airtight

The US Air Force is “confident” that the award of the Long Range Strike-Bomber (LRS-B) contract to Northrop Grumman can withstand the protest recently filed by losing team Boeing and Lockheed Martin, top leadership said here today.

“I am confident that we collectively — and again, 'we' the Air Force, but we had independent peer reviews, as well — that, collectively, we did a very thorough job,” Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said during a Nov. 10 press conference at the Dubai Air Show. “The evaluation was done according to the [Request for Proposal] evaluation factors.”

The Pentagon announced Northrop as the winner for the competition, which aims to provide 80-100 new bombers for the service to replace the B-52 and B-1 fleets, on Oct. 27. On Nov. 6, Boeing and Lockheed filled their formal protest with the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO now has 100 days to review the protest, examine the Air Force’s source-selection process and issue a ruling. The Air Force expects Boeing’s protest will delay the contract by that 100-day period, but no more, James indicated.

"What is now going to occur is about a 100-day period in which the GAO will be reviewing the contract award, so we expect that, after that 100 days is up, we will proceed accordingly," James said. "So that is the amount of the delay you might see, the period of the GAO review."

If the protest is successful, the GAO could force the Air Force to re-bid the contract, causing further delay to the Air Force’s decades-long effort to build a new bomber. However, James pointed out that the GAO may simply ask the Air Force to “redo” some aspects of the source-selection process.

“The GAO, if they found certain discrepancies, could ask that we redo some of the factors," James said. "It would not necessarily be an entirely new contract situation. So it really depends — it’s too early to say.”

The Air Force, clearly eager to avoid a repeat of the tanker saga of the last decade when a Boeing protest eventually reversed the original award to Airbus, has taken great pains to insulate the LRS-B award. James reiterated during the press conference that the service tasked not one, but two, independent cost estimators to evaluate the program.

“We had a very deliberate process, we took our time, it was key that we do it correctly, we believe that we did do it correctly,” James said. “It’s not just our belief, we had independent reviews at different levels within the Department of Defense to include a legal review, so I would just like to stand by and wait to see what the GAO assesses.”

But despite the Air Force's best efforts, a protest could delay the program and spark an ugly public relations battle, particularly given Boeing's clout on Capitol Hill.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin called the selection process for the LRS-B "fundamentally flawed" in a joint statement last week. Specifically, they take issue with the cost evaluation performed by the government, saying it did not properly reward the team's proposals to break the upward-spiraling historical cost curves of defense acquisitions, and did not properly evaluate the relative or comparative risk of Northrop Grumman's ability to perform, as required by the solicitation.

Northrop Grumman, maker of the stealth B-2 bomber, won the award in part because of a projected cost per plane of $511 million in 2010 dollars, well below the Pentagon's cost cap of $550 million in 2010 dollars. In fiscal 2016 dollars, those figures translate into $563 million and $606 million, respectively.

USAF leader confirms manned decision for new bomber

The US Air Force has confirmed for the first time that the Long Range Strike-Bomber (LRS-B) will be manned on entry-into-service, one of a few new details revealed about the classified programme. 

Several military experts have predicted the LRS-B programme would eventually become optionally-manned but enter service with a flight crew or a pilot, but the USAF has never revealed such details publicly.

Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley said today at a Defense Writers Group breakfast that the service will initially field the new stealth bomber as manned aircraft. "It's likely that we'll start the bomber programme as a manned programme," Donley says. "It'll have the option to be unmanned at some point and so I think that option will be protected."

Boeing

The USAF is still some distance away from awarding a contract for the new aircraft, but Donley there have been no major changes in design or requirements since the programme was launched. "We're still a year or two away from those, what I would call a downselect decision," Donley says. 

The USAF still hopes to build anywhere from 80 to 100 LRS-B aircraft which would become operational in the mid-2020s. "Cost is a major factor for us," Donley says.

Donley says he is not yet sure when the service will disclose more about the Pentagon's acquisitions strategy for the LRS-B, but he did say contract details are under review. "We are developing a contract strategy at the air force and AT&L [acquisitions, technology and logistics], that work is ongoing," he says.

"We're going to protect the capabilities of this airplane," Donley says. "I think several years down the road [we might disclose more details] because we think the capabilities that it will have represent advantages not unlike those that we have enjoyed with the [Northrop Grumman] B-2."

When the B-2 was new in the early 1990s, that aircraft represented a revolutionary leap in capability for strategic bombers. Even now, nearly two decades after the bat-winged aircraft was declared operational, the USAF is still tight lipped about the stealth bomber's exact performance and capabilities. 

"We have not talked about B-2 capabilities in great depth, we did not reveal the existence of the B-2 programme until it rolled out of the hangar," Donley says. "We're years from that."

Source: flightglobal