Accounts of a delay until next month on the Air Force issuance of a final request for proposals on the KC-X tanker replacement competition are “wrong,” reports Rebecca Christie of Dow Jones newswires. That word, from usually knowledgeable defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, refutes an earlier Reuters news service report. In a statement, the Air Force officials told Christie that it has no firm target date for the RFP, but intends to “take the extra steps needed to prepare the final RFP” to ensure the competition is above reproach. The Northrop Grumman-EADS team has expressed concern that the RFP favored Boeing. Talking with defense reporters in Washington last week, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), new chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Air Force has “to persuade” Congress that the KC-X program is a “real competition.”
The Air Force kicked off one of its biggest exercises this week with the latest edition of Bamboo Eagle, featuring combined virtual and live training scenarios focused on test the command-and-control “nervous system” leaders need to operate on a complex joint battlefield spread over vast distances.
