New Fuel for Scandal: Boeing. John McCain, and the aging Air Force tanker
Babbin, Jed
VAT FIR FOR SCANDA FNVY THE BRITS. Their government scandals always seem to include steamy sex between a minister and some hottie the tabloids can display in dishabille. Sadly, Aunless one of the...
...In congressional hearings, McCain blasted Roche for e-mail exchanges with Boeing lobbyists, and Sambur for continuing to advocate the lease deal...
...What made a lot of it stick was Boeing's reputation...
...Waiting eagerly off stage is Airbus, the subsidized French aircraft manufacturer...
...The inevitable consequence of competing the tanker buy is to open it to Airbus...
...It created two new federal crimes...
...While John McCain plays to the cameras, John Jumper and John Handy are trying to fight a war...
...It shows how McCain's staff orchestrated the attack on the Air Force, saying that the e-mails are "organized by theme...
...Sadly, Aunless one of the Clintons is involved, our scandals are for the business page, not the front page...
...I was directly involved representing Lockheed...
...Over a decade earlier, it was heavily involved in drafting the March 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 NEW FUEL FOR SCANDAL law that made that—and Boeing's next big ethical blunder—federal crimes...
...Some in the industry wanted to try to kill the bill, but Boeing prevailed on them not to try...
...The subsidies have given Airbus enough support over the years that it now sells about 57 percent of the world's commercial aircraft...
...I'd rather open a vein than be with McCain...
...government contracts with Boeing are an equivalent subsidy...
...The KC-135 is a version of the Eisenhower-era Boeing 707...
...In the late 1980s, some Washington gumshoes were caught selling defense contractors' bids to their competitors, with the help of government contracting officers...
...Druyun, by then, was principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and management...
...CCAIN HAS BEEN WARRING against the Air Force, its leaders, and the whole idea of buying new tankers to replace the aging KC-135s...
...Does Senator McCain want to send billions of Air Force dollars and thousands of jobs to France...
...John Handy, commander of Air Mobility Command, said, "As these aircraft age out, they're not useful in any wartime scenario...
...And while she did, senior Boeing executive Mike Sears made a deal with her to work for Boeing on her retirement for a pretty fat salary...
...No tankers, no superpower...
...He added, "The first thing that happens in any contingency is that you put the tanker bridge up there...
...How much...
...U.S...
...David Jones and former Strategic Air Command boss Gen...
...these very old aircraft, the Air Force has, for years, wanted to replace the KC-135s...
...Jack Brooks (D - Tex...
...That's the motto of a new group of old Reaganites and Bush 41 supporters that are already working hard to deny McCain the 2008 presidential nomination...
...Its parent company, EADS, has been lobbying the Pentagon for a chance to bid to build any new tankers...
...As these stories always go, Sears and Druyun failed in their attempt to cover up their scam and were indicted...
...When the lease deal was dead, McCain broadened his campaign to include anyone in the Air Force he thought might have been near it...
...Next, lease opponents attacked the deal as more expensive than an outright purchase...
...When "Ill Wind" broke, then-Rep...
...Martin withdrew his nomination when it became clear McCain wouldn't budge...
...But Boeing has no domestic competitor in the wide-body aircraft market...
...AIR FORCE PHOTO BY STAFF SGT...
...The fax cover page shows their cell phone numbers...
...One theme it charts for Jehl is, "Air Force end runs OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] and other Administration channels...
...When I interviewed Air Force acquisition chief Marvin Sambur in September 2003, he told me that Boeing had been 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR March 2005 warned after the Lockheed proprietary information scandal that any further problems like that would "put them down for the count...
...Druyun grew to such power that she could—and did—often override or ignore the political appointees who supposedly were her bosses...
...After Roche and Sam-bur announced their resignations in November 2004, McCain took to the Senate floor, where he said internal Pentagon documents revealed "systemic Air Force failure in procurement oversight, willful blindness or rank corruption...
...A search of media reports on the tanker mess shows that since 2003 Senator McCain has been talking almost exclusively to CBS, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post...
...The EU now tries to justify its subsidies to Airbus by saying that U.S...
...chairman of the House Government Operations Committee, took it to heart...
...The EU subsidizes Airbus to enable it to beat Boeing and it is succeeding...
...They're about money, low politics, and media feeding frenzies...
...But this sort of legislative shenanigans happens all the time...
...That, coupled with the incredibly stupid actions of a formerly smart lady, a corrupt contractor, and a media-hungry senator proved enough to kill the lease...
...Calls to Senator McCain's office seeking an interview for this article were not returned...
...I don't know, exactly," McCain said...
...Jehl obliged with a December 6 story about "how some Air Force officials continued to press for the contracts even against opposition from government auditors, some lawmakers and some top Defense Department officials," and quoted McCain saying, "Boeing is making an effort to clean up their act, but the Air Force and the Pentagon remain steadfast in their pursuit of a massive ripoff of taxpayer dollars...
...Retired Air Force chief of staff Gen...
...As Air Force Chief of Staff Gen...
...In 2002 Druyun decided to retire just as she was negotiating the tanker lease deal with Boeing...
...McCain does have a point...
...From the outset, Senator John McCain didn't like the Boeing lease deal because it hadn't gone through all the formal Congressional processes...
...What became known as the "Ill Wind" scandal resulted in about 100 federal prosecutions...
...Pacific Command because McCain believed Martin was resisting McCain's continued investigation of the tanker deal, though Martin had no apparent connecJED BABBIN tion to anything McCain was complaining about...
...Druyun cooked the tanker lease deal to increase Boeing's price...
...One of the bureaucrats involved in the discussions was an Air Force contract expert named Darlene Druyun...
...Harry Stonecipher, Boeing's president, promised to clean up Boeing's act but Sambur—and Air Force Secretary James Roche—never followed up...
...When I interviewed Sambur again in January 2005, he didn't know what Boeing had done to correct its ethics problems...
...John Jumper explained, "We are a global air and space power because of these tankers...
...COUPLE OF YEARS AGO someone slipped a provision into a defense appropriations bill that ave the Air Force authority to lease 100 new tankers from Boeing...
...After much toing and froing between Congress, industry, and the Pentagon, "procurement integrity" became law...
...Roche and Sambur are gone, Druyun and Sears are on the way to jail, but McCain is still at war with the Air Force and preventing it from replacing even the oldest tankers...
...But it had to be in the billions...
...First, it became a crime for anyone to buy or sell a competitor's proprietary bid information...
...In October 2004, according to the Washington Post, McCain "vociferously challenged" the nomination of Air Force Gen...
...McCain and other members of Congress have indicated that any Air Force tanker buy should be competed to drive the price down...
...But McCain has opened a vein, and it's the Air Force that is bleeding...
...Second, it outlawed job discussions between government officials and companies competing on contracts under their authority...
...That, and a lot of other stuff, was thrown against the wall to see what would stick...
...Such is the melodrama now thwarting the Air Force's plans to buy essential new tanker aircraft...
...March 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21...
...Because she had arrogated power in the Air Force procurement hierarchy, by 2002 she controlled billions of dollars in contracts...
...Flash forward about a dozen years...
...Boeing, which was pushing hard with its own agenda, spent a lot of political chips on the effort...
...Since then, McCain has put a "hold" on all Air Force 3- and 4-star general promotions...
...In fact, his staff was leaking Boeing and Air Force e-mails to particular reporters known for their anti-administration bias, such as Douglas Jehl of the Times...
...Airbus now says it has a tanker it can sell to the Air Force to replace the KC-135s...
...SCOTT T. SKURKOL...
...Jumper said, "I worry about this every day" Jed Babbin is the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think (Regnery Publishing...
...Gregory Martin for commander of U.S...
...The aerospace industry was trying to get Brooks to legislate changes to some obscure government contract laws...
...Second, aircraft don't have an unlimited range...
...It's not as if Boeing didn't know better...
...The Air Force now has about 600 tankers, and some 500 of them are KC-135s...
...Though it wouldn't add up to a decent script for a soap opera episode, this mess has put at risk a key premise that distinguishes America the superpower from nations whose influence ends at their own borders...
...On January 5, 2005, McCain appeared on CBS, telling Scott Pelley that Druyun's misconduct drove up the price of the tanker...
...Russ Dougherty wrote to McCain asking him to withdraw opposition to Martin "and not hold him hostage to other actions for which he has had no authority or responsibility...
...Start with two simple facts...
...In a 2003 interview, McCain told me, "it's a perversion and an obscenity to authorize a multi-billion dollar deal without going through the normal authorization process of hearings in the Senate Armed Services Committee and [instead] putting it in a line item in an appropriations bill without so much as a hearing...
...McCain is still demagoguing the scandal, and is now blocking the Air Force's plan to retire 68 of the oldest and most unreliable KC-135s...
...From that, it's not rocket science to derive the third fact: that if tanker aircraft aren't there when you need them, fighters can't fight, bombers can't bomb, and cargo planes can't deliver troops, supplies, or relief to disaster victims...
...The beauty of it—and the problem with it—was that the off-budget financing of the tankers trespassed on jealously guarded political turf...
...America is on the brink of a trade war with the EU over its subsidies to Airbus...
...Because of the growing reliability and safety problems that are arising in BY JED BABBIN 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR March 2005 Boeing, John McCain, and the aging Air Force tanker...
...At the time the lease came up, Boeing was in hot water for illegally obtaining proprietary information on competitor Lockheed Martin's bid on a big missile contract...
...We deploy tankers to places such as Spain, Hawaii, Guam, and their sole purpose it to get large numbers of transport aircraft halfway around the world without stopping...
...In the grand scheme of things, just how important are the tankers...
...But Brooks had his own ideas, and added what is now the "Procurement Integrity" law to the bill...
...VAT FIR FOR SCANDA FNVY THE BRITS...
...Would he be content if our national security were dependent on France if Airbus succeeds in driving Boeing out of business...
...On the second page of the fax, Paul and Carillo noted they had organized the e-mails for Jehl...
...Presumably, congressional opponents of the deal would be equally shocked to find that financing a car or mortgaging a house is more expensive than paying cash for it...
...He and Roche should have wire-brushed Boeing and made sure that its problems were actually fixed, not papered over...
...According to a Washington Post report, McCain said Air Force top officials had been trying to "delude the American people" into believing that a single person—Druyunwas responsible for misconduct in the Boeing lease deal...
...I know...
...First, there is a limited number of friendly nations from which American combat and cargo aircraft can operate...
...But none of the armed services has had enough money to "recapitalize"—buy new weapons to replace old ones that are simply worn out—since the late 1980s...
...Druyun's indictment and guilty plea refueled the McCain media machine, which went into spin frenzy and hasn't stopped...
...On December 5, 2003, McCain staffers Chris Paul and Pablo Carillo faxed 45 pages of Boeing e-mails to Jehl...
Vol. 38 • March 2005 • No. 2
