Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
11/6/2015
Boeing and Lockheed Martin are protesting the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRSB) contract the Defense Department awarded last week to Northrop Grumman. The selection process for the contract, worth an estimated $80 billion, “was fundamentally flawed,” Boeing said Friday in an announcement.
“The cost evaluation performed by the government did not properly reward the contractors’ proposals to break the upward-spiraling historical cost curves of defense acquisitions, or properly evaluate the relative or comparative risk of the competitors’ ability to perform,” Boeing said. The Boeing-Lockheed Martin team’s proposal, it said, “defies the prohibitively expensive trends of the nation’s past defense acquisitions.” The nuclear-capable LRSB is set to replace the Air Force’s aging bomber fleet of B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s at a cost of $550 million per unit for 80-100 planes.
The Government Accountability Office will review the decision to award Northrop Grumman the contract and issue a final judgment on the protest.
