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| B-21 Raider (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — Eight months ago, the Government Accountability Office shot down Boeing’s protest of the government’s decision to award the B-21 bomber contract to competitor Northrop Grumman. With the Tuesday release of its 52-page decision, the public now can read why.
The gist of GAO’s argument, which redacts all pricing and technical information, was that Northrop’s offering met the technical specifications at a price much lower than Boeing’s proposal.
“Significant structural advantages in Northrop’s proposal — specifically, its labor rate advantage and decision to absorb significant company investment — also strongly impacted the outcome of this essentially low-price, technically acceptable procurement,” the office said in its conclusion. “Northrop’s significantly lower proposed process for the LRIP phase created a near-insurmountable obstacle to Boeing’s proposal achieving best value or to Boeing’s protest demonstrating prejudice in the cost realism evaluation.”
The Air Force in October 2015 awarded Northrop the contract to develop and produce its newest bomber, now designated the B-21 Raider. Northrop beat out a Boeing-Lockheed Martin team for the two-pronged contract that covers the engineering, manufacturing and development phase of the program as well as the first five low-rate initial production lots.
According to the GAO decision, Boeing argued that the Air Force did not effectively measure the risk of Northrop’s bomber. The company contended that if the service had followed definitions set in the request for proposals, Northrop would not have met four out of seven unnamed technical capability subfactors. Boeing also stated that Northrop’s proposal was “inherently high risk” with regard to certain requirements in a way that should have rendered its offering unacceptable.
Read the full story at DefenseNews