NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Keeping the threat of a bid protest in his back pocket, a Boeing Co. executive said here Tuesday the U.S. Air Force can save time and money building the next generation of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles by scrapping a competition in which only Northrop Grumman is now competing.
“What I am suggesting is the Air Force pull us in a room together and say, you got 30 days to go figure out what is the right integrated baseline for the country to move forward with,” Frank McCall, Boeing director of strategic deterrence systems and Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program manager, told reporters on the sidelines of the Air Force Association’s 2019 Air, Space & Cyber conference. “Starting now. Not starting a year from now after a ‘competition.’”
Employing the international gesture for irony, McCall used his hands to make air quotes when he said competition, declaring as he did: “air quotes.”
“Today there’s no competitive pressure on Northrop Grumman,” McCall said. “So the idea that competition is going to give us the best price is not viable in the current state.”
Boeing in July dropped out of the competition to build GBSD. The company said Northrop has an insurmountable advantage under the Air Force’s current request for proposals, because the Falls Church, Va.-based company produces its own solid-fueled rocket motors via its June 2018 acquisition of Orbital ATK. Like the Boeing-built Minuteman III missiles it will replace, GBSD will be powered by solid propellant.
Treading carefully after Senate Armed Services Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said this summer he wanted no delay in replacing the 1970s-vintage Minuteman III fleet by 2030, McCall said a shotgun marriage on the potentially $25 billion GBSD engineering and development manufacturing contract would make the program better, faster, and cheaper than what Northrop and its who’s-who team of defense industry teammates could offer.
Asked to justify his assertion that letting Boeing in on the next GBSD contract would decrease rather than increase the government’s costs, McCall said the forced partnership would allow the Air Force to get the cheapest possible systems, subsystems and components by ordering a la carte from a broader menu, rather than the “narrow” options presented by Northrop.
“There are things Boeing does better than Northrop, there are things, arguably, that Northrop does better than Boeing,” McCall said. “The Air Force has the opportunity to pick the most mature solutions from both [companies’] lists in an integrated team.” McCall declined to say which Boeing options might be cheaper than which Northrop options, telling reporters the details of such technology is classified.
At the end of the hallway gaggle, McCall would not rule out a bid protest, should the Air Force stand by its current GBSD solicitation and continue its policy of noninterference with industry.
In that game of chicken, pitting the ICBM incumbent against the Air Force, the customer is not blinking.
“[W]e are very open to a variety of proposals, we are open to teaming relationships, we just don’t want to dictate,” William Roper, Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said at a media roundtable here on Tuesday. “[O]n the Air Force side, we are still waiting for the proposal period to close to see what proposals we get and then we’ll go from there.”
The Air Force issued the RFP July 16. McCall said Northrop was likely to turn in its bid in December. The Air Force then plans to award the GBSD manufacturing contract by September 2020. The service has said it will acquire more than 600 missiles and deploy about 400 into the 2080s. The spares would back up the active fleet and be used for test launches to demonstrate the system works as intended.
McCall spoke to reporters a day after Northrop publicly rebuffed Boeing’s overture to combine forces. In an announcement Tuesday that sent ripples through the assembled industry and service personnel here, Northrop announced its GBSD bid would include Boeing arch-rival Lockheed Martin, plus independent solid rocket motor supplier Aerojet Rocketdyne — a key member of Boeing’s own GBSD design team.
Notably, Northrop’s GBSD team did not include Boeing.
The GBSD contract means work for decades for at least some of its teammates. Though pressed repeatedly by media here, McCall would not say how much of the future GBSD work Boeing wants.
“We are not talking about a two-headed monster that the Air Force has to manage and integrate,” McCall said. “We’re talking about a single prime with a principal subcontractor that operate under a single lead.”
Boeing and Northrop are now in the final year of competitive, three-year GBSD design contracts awarded by the Air Force in 2017. Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems — the former Orbital ATK — worked on each company’s Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction contract.
Meanwhile, the U.S. ICBM fleet remains one of the main issues in the impending conference negotiations between the House and Senate on the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. A bicameral group of lawmakers on Thursday began conference negotiations on the annual defense policy bill. The process sometimes takes months to conclude.
Democrats who control the House of Representatives, notably House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), think the Pentagon should at least study the possibility of shrinking the GBSD procurement by extending Minuteman III into the 2050s. Inhofe and the GOP majority in the Senate are all in on starting GBSD now.
