Short version: Because a single unethical act by a Boeing executive, Boeing's previously sewed up bid for 100 air refueler tankers is now open to take other bids from other companies (Airbus).
As to Mora's question, possibly, but off the backs of the taxpayers that make up EADS...keep in mind that Airbus underbids (at a loss) Boeing consistently, since it is government subsidized, in order to take business away from Boeing, but at a cost of your tax dollars. Could be the reason why EADS countries' taxes are so high? I don't know...however competition is good, since
our taxpayer dollars will be less impacted by competition.
The European military contractor EADS, the parent company to Airbus, has received a helping hand from the U.S. deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, in its efforts to compete for a U.S. Air Force aerial refueling contract that its rival, Boeing, is also seeking.
It is yet another maneuver in a political battle that has pitted the air force and Boeing on one side against critics who have raised questions and, for the moment, halted Boeing's bid to replace the aerial tankers with specially outfitted Boeing 767 aircraft. The tanker replacement contract could ultimately be worth more than $20 billion.
Writing to Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, who is the chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Wolfowitz said that once the studies under way made recommendations for replacing the tanker fleet, "we intend to require competition."
Wolfowitz prefaced this sentence with the phrase "let me be clear" and also noted that a financing plan in which the air force would lease the tankers from Boeing rather than buy them was "not an option" without congressional approval. The leasing option has faced stiff opposition in the Senate.
Wolfowitz's letter, written Friday and widely circulated in Washington on Monday, sets up a possible competition between Boeing and Airbus for a deal that Boeing once appeared to have secured. At the moment, the tanker replacement program is on hold, pending numerous studies.
Boeing has sought the contract as a way to keep its aging 767 manufacturing line alive, while Airbus, which has sold its version of an aerial tanker to other countries, has long been trying to enter the U.S. military market. Lockheed Martin, the largest U.S. military contractor, has said it may consider working with Airbus on a tanker bid.
A Boeing spokesman, Douglas Kennett, said the company would not comment on correspondence between the Pentagon and Congress but said Boeing "looks forward to the competition."
In reality, the Pentagon is studying other options for modernizing the aerial tanker fleet. Among them are leasing tankers from commercial services like Federal Express, repairing and upgrading the existing fleet of KC-135 tankers or buying a limited number of new planes from Boeing, Airbus or both.
"Any competition is good news for the taxpayer," said Keith Ashdown, a military analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group. "Even if Boeing is ultimately chosen, competition will reduce the cost Boeing will charge the air force."
The circulation of the Wolfowitz letter came after Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has long criticized the lease deal, on Friday introduced on the Senate floor e-mail messages suggesting a pro-Boeing bias at the air force, particularly on the part of James Roche, the air force secretary who resigned last week.
In the e-mail messages, Roche was shown orchestrating public relations campaigns on behalf of Boeing, talking to air force officials about how he hoped they would "torture" European Aeronautic Defense & Space, writing "Go Boeing!" and referring to "the fools in Paris and Berlin." EADS is a French-German business consortium.
Roche also talked about wanting to "quash" a Pentagon official critical of the Boeing deal and expressed animosity toward Ralph Crosby, the EADS North American chief executive, who once competed with Roche for the position of president of Northrop Grumman. Neither got the job.
The air force-Boeing tanker proposal was derailed last October after a former air force weapons buyer, Darleen Druyun, admitted to favoring Boeing in the tanker deal while she was negotiating a job contract with the company.
