Boeing and Lockheed Martin (LM) described the selection process for the Long Range Strike-Bomber (LRS-B) as “fundamentally flawed” and a protest was filed with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). It comes a week after the U.S. Air Force debriefed the two companies on their failure to win the competition. Northrop Grumman (NG) was announced the winner of the mostly classified contest on October 27.
The statement by the two losing companies implies that NG submitted a lower cost bid, but complained that the government did not “properly evaluate the relative or comparative risk of the competitors’ ability to perform.” They said that their proposal would provide “the best possible LRS-B at a cost that uniquely defies the prohibitively expensive trends of the nation’s past defense acquisitions.”
The U.S. Air Force said that Boeing had filed the protest. A spokesman added that the service was “confident that the source selection team followed a deliberate, disciplined and impartial process to determine the best value for the warfighter and the taxpayer.” The Air Force must respond to the GAO within 30 days. Boeing and Lockheed Martin will see this report, and have 10 days to comment. The GAO may then dismiss the protest or spend up to 60 more days evaluating it, before making a decision.
In a contribution to the Forbes website, defense commentator Loren Thompson said that Boeing is claiming major errors in the selection process and its application. Thompson is the head of the Lexington Institute, a think tank that is (by his own admission) partly funded by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He is also a consultant for LM, and sometimes appears to speak unofficially for that company.
Thompson said that what he described as “Boeing’s bid” for developing the new bomber was doubled by the Air Force’s “peculiar approach to enforcing cost realism.” This approach approximately doubled the amount that the competing industry teams bid, he alleged. Boeing “got no credit” for its recent innovations in reducing manufacturing costs, nor (together with Lockheed Martin) for “supply chain innovations [and] system integration skills.” He also claimed that Northrop Grumman had bid a “rock-bottom price…divorced from likely risks.”