Ordinarily I stay away from non-commercial aviation subjects because they don’t interest me that much and they aren’t subject matter that I have a lot of knowledge on most of the time.  The KC-X Tanker RFP is something I’m very much interested in and I do know a bit about this one.*

 

Imagine you are a mountain climber.  Moutain climbing is difficult and dangerous work and you need the right equipment to succeed as much as anything.  Now, suppose you need an energy bar that will help you climb a particularly difficult mountain and you decide to ask for a price on products.  It turns out there are really just two energy bar makers and they do things kind of differently but both make a very acceptable energy bar depending on your requirements. 

 

Now you have to figure out your requirements.  You decide you need an energy bar that is compact so that carrying lots of these doesn’t take up all your backpack space but you need a minimum amount of calories from it so that when you have one, you don’t want another right away and consume all your bars prematurely.  You decide you need a mimimum of 200 calories from these bars and they shouldn’t be greater than 1.25 inches wide by 4 inches long by 0.3 inches thick.  That lets you carry enough bars with a margin of safety but also lets you have space in your pack for other necessary items. 

 

The US energy bar maker produces an energy bar that can be tailored somewhat.  It’s nominal size fits your requirements within tolerances and all you have to do is remove one bar from your count to make them fit and leave room.  It offers 210 calories so it meets your calorie needs too.  It’s a pretty good fit although not perfect.  The price is within reach but you need the best price possible because mountain climbing is expensive and every penny counts.

 

The French energy bar maker has a nice product too.  It’s a bit more tailored and was originally made for mountains of higher altitude than the one your climbing.  It’s size is 2 inches wide by 4.5 inches long by 0.5 inches thick.  It’s a bigger bar and you’ll have to leave out 3 or 4 bars from your count to make them fit.  Since this bar was designed originally for a different mission, the maker has increased its calories to 270 calories per bar.  There is a lot of energy stored in that bar.  It’s price is a tad higher but the French government wants to sell more to US mountain climbers so it has already subsized the cost of this bar so that it is competitive with the US manufacturers bar. 

 

On the surface, the French bar looks like a heck of a deal but you still dive into the details. You think about the climb ahead of you and realize that you might have a problem.  These bars go stale after you open them and if you don’t eat all of them, it goes to waste.  Your body can only take so much in at a time because extra contents can slow you down on your climb.  You only *need* 200 calories and you can’t cut those French bars in half because they go bad once you open them.  Then you realize that the French bars only allow you to carry a margin of safety of 2 bars whereas the US bars allow you to carry a margin of safety of 7 bars. 

 

Space and weight is at a premium in your backpack and now suddenly you realize that an energy bar that is tailored to your needs as closely as possible is probably the right choice.  More is not necessarily better if it goes to waste.  Space and weight is at such a premium that the only way to carry more French bars is to get a bigger backpack.  That means spending more money on a backpack and carrying more weight as you climb which means you may need more energy in the first place.  More requires more which requires more. 

 

You look at both selections and realize that price is, in most respects, the least important requirement.  The goal is to get up the mountain and back again quickly and efficiently.  Now that you’ve thought this through, you realize that the US bar is the best choice because it meets your specifications almost exactly without being burdensome.  The French bars meets your specifications too but it is so much “more”, there is a penalty implicit in its use for your application.  On a per ounce basis, the French bar offers the better deal.  On a mission basis, the US bar is a better deal. 

 

So you buy the US bar because it meets the mission better.  That, my friends, is what the KC-X tanker deal is really all about.  It isn’t that the Airbus is a bad tanker.  To the contrary, it’s a fine tanker made by an aircraft company that has an excellent reputation.  The problem is that it doesn’t fit the mission. 

 

The Airbus tanker does offer more nominal refueling capability and more cargo area.  No question.  But this RFP is to replace a fleet of tankers numbering in the hundreds.  No other country other than the United States projects its power through a fleet like that.  Even the really big western military powers like the UK or France only have a fleet of, at the most, a couple dozen tankers.  We can send a couple of dozen tankers on a single mission if we want. 

 

The tankers are a force multiplier but the way you really multiply your power is by being able to refuel several aircraft at once.  5 tankers takes care of a mission much better than 2 tankers because it allows the mission to refuel and carry on quicker.  On almost all missions, our current fleet doesn’t come back dry very often.  Almost never in fact.  The KC-135R tankers meet our needs just fine in terms of capacity for either cargo or fuel.  They’re just old and inefficient when it comes to operating expenses.  But they can still meet our needs fine.  We have a smaller fleet of larger tankers that fill the other needs when that occasion arises (which really isn’t often) called the KC-10. 

 

So although the Airbus carries more fuel, it isn’t carrying fuel we’ll really use.  That means extra expense for flying the extra weight of the aircraft that was designed to carry more fuel that isn’t needed. 

 

Our bases which house this current fleet were built years ago and have been fine tuned to our needs over the past 5 decades.  Again, our current fleet meets our needs so our facilities meet our needs.  The B767 basically fits the infrastructure footprint we already have in place and that means we can do a one for one replacement without needing to upgrade hard stands (concrete areas to park the aircraft on), refueling facilities, hangers, runways, taxiways, etc.  That means the KC-767 kind of “plugs in” into our existing infrastructure already.

 

The Airbus tanker requires more than 80% greater footprint in the infrastructure than the current fleet.  That means upgrading and changing our infrastructure in every location and systems changes for every part of the fleet.  As you can imagine, that adds significantly to our costs to operate that fleet as those changes will have to be done over the lifespan of the fleet and we’re not talking about changes that you can go to Sears for either. 

 

The Department of Defense cannot write requirements for an RFP that make both aircraft competitive.  These aircraft are too different from each other to be an apples to apples comparison.  Eliminating politics from the equation for the moment, they have two choices:  Buy by the ounce or buy by the mission.  When it comes to the military, buying for the mission is much more economical in the long run as we’ve seen time and again.  Remember when we had thousands of nuclear missiles?  The question was how many times did we want to destroy the Earth over and over again when a small fraction of those missiles would end civilization as we know it.  Buying by quantity isn’t always the best choice for these situations.

 

Let’s consider the politics though.  Yes, we are for free trade generally.  That said, we do a pretty bad job of enforcing fair and free trade when it comes to our political partners in the world.  France (and Europe) have massively subsidized Airbus and its aircraft development.   You know what?  That’s kind of OK to me.  They did it to redevelop an aerospace industry which is a strategic industry for any country and makes them militarily less reliant upon the kindness of others.  That isn’t a dumb move.  The problem is, they did it commercially instead of militarily because there was profits to be had.  I really don’t fall on the side of “punish the French” when it comes to these subisidies providing they stop it.  So far they haven’t.  They’ve got their industry, now they should let it sink or swim.  But subsidies are addictive (and we’re not innocent of such addictions ourselves either.)

 

Because an aerospace industry is strategically very important, we, too, should consider where this work goes.  No, we don’t want to be gouged for it but we don’t want to lose that knowledge and know-how either.  Were Airbus to win the tanker competition, that would effectively be the end of our capability to produce tankers 20 years from now.  The people who know how to do it would be retired or dead.  It would be extremely expensive to redevelop that knowledge base and it’s a knowledge base that is at the heart of our ability to project power as a country.  Stop and think about that for a few minutes.  I’ll wait.

 

Another consideration is the French and Germans themselves.  Both of these countries have some history of being non-cooperative with the US when they disagree or don’t want to participate in a conflict.   The Germans to a lesser extent but it still happens.  That is perfectly OK and their right.  However, DO WE WANT TO BE DEPENDENT UPON COUNTRIES WHO HAVE A HISTORY OF NOT NECESSARILY COOPERATING WITH US DURING IMPORTANT CONFLICTS?    What if you need spare parts from Airbus and the French government forbids Airbus from delivering those spares to us at a particular time because it disagrees with us?  That’s an important and critical consideration.

 

Airbus wants a foothold in the US.  An opportunity to build a factory here would be a huge advantage for them because they currently sell aircraft for dollars but their costs are primarily in euros.  If they builit aircraft here, their costs would be inherently less.   Add in the subisidies this company receives and that puts our own aerospace companies which have to sink or swim on their own at a dramatic disadvantage and potentially erodes our domestic strategic aerospace capabilities.  Is that what we want as a superpower in this world?

 

We shouldn’t be encouraging Airbus to compete for this stuff.  We should be encouraging another domestic company to re-enter commercial aviation.  We should re-develop that industry for our own benefit by encouraging someone like Lockheed to go back into that business so that in the future, we have healthy DOMESTIC competition for RFP like the KC-X Tanker. 

 

Is this tender a boon for Boeing now that Northrop Grumman has withdrawn?  No, not really.  Boeing can and should make a profit but let’s not forget that they’ll have opportunity costs involved in this and the current RFP requires them to offer a fixed price for a very long time.  There is a lot of risk involved in that. 

 

Will this mean an extension of life for the 767 commercially?  No, probably not.  Maybe for freignters a bit but commercial airlines depend too much on new technologies to continue with the 767 for much longer.  Does that make the 767 an outdated purchase for a tanker?  No, to the contrary.  It’s not the same 767 rolled out in the 1980’s for one.  Frankly, other than the basic design, little of that aircraft resembles the original 767s.  Not the wing, not the engines, not the avionics, nothing but the basic fuselage which was always a very efficient design.  The military is getting an extremely durable, long lived aircraft that should provide capabilities for another 30 to 40 years. 

 

*  I am employed by a first tier vendor to Boeing on this program and even work in a group that will be directly involved in the program.   However, I’m involved in military software rather than avionics or other hardware.

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