There can be no doubt that the current multi-billion dollar proposal to acquire 100 Boeing 767 tankers is fundamentally flawed. Aspects of the deal have been exhaustively reviewed and fundamentally criticized by Senate committees; the Department of Justice; the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General; the Congressional Budget Office; the General Accounting Office; the Congressional Research Service; the Office of Management and Budget; the Defense Department’s Office of Programs, Analysis and Evaluation; the Institute for Defense Analyses, and others. Notably, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card and former Defense Department Comptroller General Dov Zakheim have also weighed in with serious concerns about various aspects of the tanker program. The truth is that the deeper one looks into the proposal, which remains the subject of criminal and congressional investigative inquiry, the worse it looks. Early this year, the Secretary of Defense prudently ordered that further negotiation for the acquisition of these tankers be put on pause until more studies are completed. One of these studies (to be issued by the Defense Science Board possibly as soon as this week) is particularly important. Its findings will go to whether taxpayers should have to pay billions of dollars more for leasing these tankers, than buying them outright. Rather than wait for these studies to come out and proceed accordingly, as I understood Boeing would do, it has regrettably chosen to, in a very public way, continue suggesting that the deal is a good idea. This is a proposition with which even some of the programs’ most strident supporters no longer agree. However, in support of its position, Boeing misstates, then attacks with carefully parsed language, various concerns raised by the authorities mentioned above. It is unfortunate that Boeing continues to be more interested in spinning the merits of the deal, instead of waiting for the truth to fully and finally come out. From the beginning, that is all that I have asked for.

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