"The gift that keeps on giving" should have been the headline on the Pentagon's decision to award the Boeing Co. a $35 billion defense contract. Defense of the nation, of course, had nothing to do with it, since the end of the Cold War also ended the need for midair refueling of the nuclear-armed bombers intended to retaliate after a Soviet first strike, a scenario brought to the public eye in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove.
Indeed, at a time when drones seem to be bypassing the need for manned military bombers and fighters of any kind, and when schoolteachers and firefighters are being terminated across the country, the awarding of this long-delayed and always questionable military-industrial-complex scam is simply perverse.
There has always been vast bipartisan support for spending upward of a trillion dollars a year on the various items that claim to enhance our national security. For Republicans, their attacks on big federal spending rarely include the more than half of the federal discretionary spending gobbled up by military programs. For Democrats, defense pork has always been defended as a jobs program, and that was the theme of what the Seattle Times headlined as a "victory rally" in the historical home of Boeing operations, where the new plane is expected to create about 11,000 jobs.
At the rally, Washington's liberal Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell was cheered by the crowd when she said, "there could be no better economic news" for the region and "Boeing will maintain their superiority in making the best airplanes in the world." She and fellow Democratic Sen. Patty Murray were hailed by "workers shout[ing] `thank you' and 'my children thank you.' " There is not a word in the article quoting anyone as to why this new plane is needed other than as a jobs program.
Actually, it isn't a new plane at all, but rather a militarized retrofit of the wide-body Boeing 767, the passenger plane that is to be replaced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which has had all sorts of problems. Bloomberg News' report on the rise in Boeing stock after the Pentagon awarded the contract made the connection between defense and profit quite clear:
"Building the tanker means Boeing can continue to make the wide body 767 jet on which the plane is based. The backlog on the 767 has dwindled to 50 orders as customers await the 787 Dreamliner, the composite-plastic plane now about three years behind schedule... The news is an antidote to Boeing's struggle in recent months with the Dreamliner and the 747-jumbo jet. The passenger version of the 747-8 is a year late, and Boeing is running two years behind schedule on the freighter model."
So, faced with major problems in developing the next generation of civilian aircraft, Boeing has been blessed with a massive Defense Department contract that will allow it to use an old, about-to-be-discarded assembly line to refurbish the 767 at enormous cost to the taxpayer so that it is fit to haul fuel and serve as a gas station in the sky for planes that no longer have a pressing strategic mission requiring such refueling.
This is the same plane that Republican Sen. John McCain killed some five years ago when his staff sparked an investigation that sent to federal prison Boeing's chief executive officer and a former Pentagon official who had been given a $250,000 vice president's job at Boeing; the company also hired her daughter and son-in-law. Boeing's CEO resigned and Boeing's contract to build the plane was cancelled. The Pentagon had not asked for the refueling tanker, but top Air Force officials in collusion with Boeing lobbyists did an end run to Congress that resulted in passage of an appropriation to lease the planes.
McCain described the situation in a Nov. 19, 2004, speech: "Nearly three years ago, behind closed doors, the Appropriations Committee slipped a $30 billion rider in the fiscal year 2002 defense appropriations bill. Before the rider appeared in the bill, Air Force leadership never came to the authorizing committees about this issue. In fact, tankers never came up in either the President's budget or the Defense Department's unfunded priority list. ... The rider was, in fact, the result of an aggressive behind-the-scenes effort by the Boeing Corporation with considerable effort from [a] senior Air Force procurement official ... and others."
At that time, post-9/11 hysteria was the fuel that drove this egregious waste of taxpayer dollars. Today it is the stalled economy and the jobs and profits that military contractors spread throughout the land. But the result is the same; for all of the talk by politicians from both parties about cutting waste, the military boondoggles remain sacrosanct and hardly provide the tempting target for savings afforded by a schoolteacher's salary.
Digging holes and refilling them creates jobs too, and its a damn sight cheaper and would result in similar technology advancement for US industry.
Fine, you are paying for this boondoggle, not me.
It would be interesting to hear from an impartial, USAF guy with relevant experience, as to the merits of their differing size/fuel load. What is a typical refuel job, how many tankers required (less has to be cheaper albeit slower if refueling multiple aircraft), are bigger tankers better?, stealth? (composite dreamliner better?).
Maybe the DOD needs to decide what business it is in. The DOSubsidies perhaps?
Like I said - I dont care - just being rational from down here in OZ.
Isnt the DODs job to get best bang for the defense buck, which, as one does, requires shopping around. If they are happy with old planes, why not second hand aircraft retrofitted with fuel tanks?
I find myself warming to that argument. If the existing fleet is so old, presumably they do very light duty. Why not extend the service life of almost worn out commercial planes, no depreciation mate.
Just to run the no-fly zone over Northern Iraq a few years took roughly 10 KC-135s.
Aircraft refueling capacity for our fighters and bombers is something that still needs to be sustained, even with the end of the Cold War. While I would agree that we should never again let someone as incompetent as Bush #2 near the presidency, where he can start wars and plunge the world into a depression, but calling for a reduction in "defense" spending is not the same thing as arguing that we do not need the capability to refuel our aircraft in midair. What a silly thing to argue.
I also think it is better to buy American-made aircraft refuelers than foreign-made ones. The reason is simple. While we might, in the short term, save some money on cheaper aircraft, the billions of dollars that would then have to be spend on unemployment benefits for American workers, not to mention the billions of dollars in lost taxes, would make the foreign planes actually much more expensive than the American ones. There are few place where government spending can have such a dramatic effect on American jobs, despite the arguments of near sighted politicians like McCain.
So, it will save, even create, some jobs for the final assembly in the US. On top I suppose some engineering /R&D workplaces, but considerable parts of the US taxes are spent oversees; only not in Europe but in Japan.
Second thing is, but I can only cite one source, German Financial Times, for it: The bid Boeing placed (10 percent cheaper than Airbus) might really be ultimately too low. So I guess, the US government will end up like we Europeans did regarding the Airbus A400M: It gets more expensive as the years of development pass by but ultimately it is needed so the governments will grudgingly pay the new, higher price tag.
I've always been told that Airbus aircraft are usually cheaper to buy but more expensive to repair. The planes are inexpensive but the parts are not.
John Stuart Mill
Semper fi
Why give our taxes to a foreign corporation ?
Airbus is supported by several european governments now, they need our money too ?
This deal was a struggle between Southern States where Airbus would partly manufacture their plane vs the Northern States. The profits would LEAVE the country for the EU..
Giving the contract to Airbus could destroy Boeing ?
IF so, SO WHAT IS WRONG WITH HELPING AMERICANS RATHER THAN FOREIGNERS ?
Talk about the Dreamliner struggles? It is a step ahead.
The Airbus 380 is not. It is 747 on steroids. It is being financed with EU tax money and will likely never turn a profit. It is bigger, not a step ahead.
Our leaders are so in love with Globalist b/s they forget history and basic international economic theory. They are turning the workers in the USA into colonial subjects of foreign corporations.
Why spend out tax money to feed that fire? Why undermine our people with their own money ?
Both the European governments (namely France and our German governments) AND the US government support their side of the aircraft manufacturing duopoly, none of our sides should start pointing a finger since we only find four of our fingers pointing back at us, agreed?
A380 (I just last week had the opportunity to fly with them) and Dreamliner are different philosophies.
But where I really get mixed feelings is your last statement about "colonial subjects". I think I understand your point of view when looked through the US worker's lense. But this side of the big pond or in the BRIC, workers and national governments alike are equally resistant to become "colonial subjects" of US corporations, hedge funds or private equity money; especially since corporation play a much lesser economical role here than in the US.
I think the whole competition process regarding the KC-X will sour procurement of US technology in the EU member states (for example the BMD installments or other MoD procurements) and ultimately lead to a weaker cooperation and more taxpayer money on all sides wasted to R&D the same item just from a different brand.
This my friends is the pinnacle of pork barrel politics
Seems the government is for sale and full of extortionists.
Give me money or I'll destroy thousands of lives...
Anyway the Airbus is not as durable as the Boeing.
Boeing 767 is a better plane.
The government is full of extortionists.
Who should go to jail Boeing sales dept. for offering a gift basket
or the men who demand one ?
They are used in ways that further missions that I am pretty sure you would insist that we involve ourselves in, like tsunami, earthquake, flood and other relief efforts. They provide our president with options to project national power, both soft and hard. So yes we need them and yes we use them each and every day.
Moreover, progressives have no great desire to see US military intervention within the sphere of humanitarian ops; where US assistance is required we would prefer to see funding channeled through specialized NGOs who have expertise that the armed services lack.
This preference is shared by many in the US military community who see "meals-on-wheels" missions as beneath them and/or injurious to combat readiness; this attitude has only become more pronounced post-9/11.
Semper fi
I'll take it. Now our Senators can get back to focusing on other issues.
The 2012 budget proposal for the defense/security departments alone is $1.219 trillion.
Has anyone checked the bank accounts of those responsible?
I also believe that the current refueling fleet is in need of replacement (50 year-old flying jet fuel carriers?) - just not with a fleet the current size. Air superiority in any conflict is critical these days and these tankers provide an important role. But with the demise of these big bombers and their mission, there is no need for such a large fleet.
I also believe that the whole bid process on this issue was a mistake. Our military should have Made in America stamped all over it. It was shameful to even consider outsourcing such a contract - even if Airbus was going to do final assembly here in the states.
We've given away most of our manufacturing - a line needs to be drawn.