thedrifter
10-17-04, 07:53 AM
10-14-2004
From the Editor:
The Real Victims of the Aerial Tanker Scandal
By Ed Offley
As someone who has associated with the U.S. military for most of a lifetime, I have always had a special affection and respect for the tanker guys (and today, gals), those unsung heroes who operate the ungainly aerial refueling aircraft without which the Air Force would have neither global reach nor global power.
Living in Bermuda as a young Air Force dependent during the early 1960s, I’d spend weekend afternoons gazing skyward as a fleet of Kindley-based KB-50s flew in a spread “V” formation at max safe airspeed – each plane with “four turnin’ and two burnin’ ” (four Pratt & Whitney radial engines and two GE J-47 turbojets) – while sleek F-105s and workhorse F-100s took turns nestling into the refueling drogues to take on gas for the trans-Atlantic hop to Europe. On summer evenings as well, the warm ocean breeze would suddenly carry the eerie, back-of-the-neck tingling shriek of wheel brakes from dozens of aircraft as the entire dedicated SAC squadron of KC-97 tankers scrambled from the guarded tarmac for a mass takeoff under simulated combat conditions.
Years later as a military journalist, I had the opportunity to witness this prosaic but elegant ballet from a skybox seat viewpoint in many locales: A radio-silent mass refueling of six C-141B Starlifters in the midnight sky over Alaska; a one-on-one between a KC-135 and a C-5B Galaxy over the eastern Pacific; an evening rendezvous between tanker and transport over the Spanish coastline; a late-afternoon rendezvous over the Antarctic ice between a KC-10 and a C-141B en route to airdrop supplies to the South Pole scientific base camp.
From major campaigns such as Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom to small and focused operations like the rescue mission to free Capt. Scott O’Grady in the Balkans, aerial refuelers have always played a major supporting role in the projection of American military power. Without the day-in and day-out contributions from these professionals, the United States could not have dispatched its military force in 1990-91 to force the Iraqi army from Kuwait, or to dispatch Saddam Hussein’s regime for good 12 years later. Without the refuelers, something so tight and focused as the Marine Trap Team that rescued Scott O’Grady in 1995 would have been forced to go into enemy territory without CAP cover.
Even today as I write this, scores of KC-135s and KC-10s are aloft orbiting in refueling tracks from the U.S. west coast to the Arabian Sea, servicing the near-empty fuel tanks of Navy fighters, Air Force transports and other military aircraft. I would like to think of them as the selfless professionals that they are, but unfortunately, another term comes to mind after recent news events: victims.
When Congress voted on the 2005 National Defense Authorization Act last week, it finally did the right thing, slamming the door closed on a crackpot plan by which the U.S. Air Force had sought to pay over $21.5 billion to lease a new generation of aerial refueling tankers rather than purchasing them outright. Of course, the reason Congress did the right thing was that after spending the past four years diligently trying to do the wrong thing – bailing out the Boeing Co.’s B-767 production line in a leasing scheme that experts warned would end up costing the Air Force nearly twice as much money as simply buying the planes – the entire affair was halted by a criminal investigation.
What made the leasing ploy ultimately impossible to carry out was not the fact that it suborned the Pentagon’s acquisition rules (arcane and bureaucratic though they be), but that, in fact, it was worse than idiotic – it was the end-product of a criminal enterprise.
As principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and management, Darleen Druyan was responsible for oversight of major procurement programs such as the replacement of the aging fleet of KC-135 aerial refueling tankers that have served so well for the past four decades. And it was Ms. Druyun who cooked the books in favor of the Boeing Co. when it came up with the scheme to lease (“No down payment! Easy monthly payments!”) a fleet of tanker conversions of the B-767 jetliner.
As we have read over the past few months, Ms. Druyun, in collusion with a key Boeing official, manipulated the contract award process to favor Boeing over other aerospace firms interested in bidding on the tanker replacement. She also managed, court records show, to inflate the estimated unit price of each K-767 from $120 million to $215 million – a cozy “parting gift” (her own words) to Boeing of about $9 billion given the 100-plane package that Congress had approved several years back. In turn, Boeing secretly agreed to hire Ms. Druyun for a $250,000-per-year job and threw in other small change, such as keeping her daughter and daughter’s boyfriend on the company payroll.
Fortunately for the American taxpayer and the honest aerospace firms doing business with the Soviet economy – oops, I mean the Defense Department – Ms. Druyun was ultimately caught out. The tanker lease deal is dead, despite the attempts of Boeing bobbleheads in the Illinois and Washington state congressional delegations to argue otherwise.
To date, her criminal ambitions have forced the resignation of Boeing’s top executive and the manager who collaborated with Ms. Druyun; led to the withdrawal of Air Force Gen. Greg Martin (a longtime colleague of hers in the Air Force acquisition bureaucracy) as commander of the U.S. Pacific Command; and prompted the Defense Department Inspector General to review a number of other major defense contracts that she oversaw.
If you want to feel sorry for anyone in this sordid affair, aim your condolences at the overworked KC-135 aircrews and maintainers. It is they who will have to shoulder the burden of keeping their aging aircraft airworthy for additional years to come as Congress and the Air Force struggle to restart the now-derailed effort to provide them with the new aircraft they so desperately need.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=55&rnd=393.2064736440606
Ellie
From the Editor:
The Real Victims of the Aerial Tanker Scandal
By Ed Offley
As someone who has associated with the U.S. military for most of a lifetime, I have always had a special affection and respect for the tanker guys (and today, gals), those unsung heroes who operate the ungainly aerial refueling aircraft without which the Air Force would have neither global reach nor global power.
Living in Bermuda as a young Air Force dependent during the early 1960s, I’d spend weekend afternoons gazing skyward as a fleet of Kindley-based KB-50s flew in a spread “V” formation at max safe airspeed – each plane with “four turnin’ and two burnin’ ” (four Pratt & Whitney radial engines and two GE J-47 turbojets) – while sleek F-105s and workhorse F-100s took turns nestling into the refueling drogues to take on gas for the trans-Atlantic hop to Europe. On summer evenings as well, the warm ocean breeze would suddenly carry the eerie, back-of-the-neck tingling shriek of wheel brakes from dozens of aircraft as the entire dedicated SAC squadron of KC-97 tankers scrambled from the guarded tarmac for a mass takeoff under simulated combat conditions.
Years later as a military journalist, I had the opportunity to witness this prosaic but elegant ballet from a skybox seat viewpoint in many locales: A radio-silent mass refueling of six C-141B Starlifters in the midnight sky over Alaska; a one-on-one between a KC-135 and a C-5B Galaxy over the eastern Pacific; an evening rendezvous between tanker and transport over the Spanish coastline; a late-afternoon rendezvous over the Antarctic ice between a KC-10 and a C-141B en route to airdrop supplies to the South Pole scientific base camp.
From major campaigns such as Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom to small and focused operations like the rescue mission to free Capt. Scott O’Grady in the Balkans, aerial refuelers have always played a major supporting role in the projection of American military power. Without the day-in and day-out contributions from these professionals, the United States could not have dispatched its military force in 1990-91 to force the Iraqi army from Kuwait, or to dispatch Saddam Hussein’s regime for good 12 years later. Without the refuelers, something so tight and focused as the Marine Trap Team that rescued Scott O’Grady in 1995 would have been forced to go into enemy territory without CAP cover.
Even today as I write this, scores of KC-135s and KC-10s are aloft orbiting in refueling tracks from the U.S. west coast to the Arabian Sea, servicing the near-empty fuel tanks of Navy fighters, Air Force transports and other military aircraft. I would like to think of them as the selfless professionals that they are, but unfortunately, another term comes to mind after recent news events: victims.
When Congress voted on the 2005 National Defense Authorization Act last week, it finally did the right thing, slamming the door closed on a crackpot plan by which the U.S. Air Force had sought to pay over $21.5 billion to lease a new generation of aerial refueling tankers rather than purchasing them outright. Of course, the reason Congress did the right thing was that after spending the past four years diligently trying to do the wrong thing – bailing out the Boeing Co.’s B-767 production line in a leasing scheme that experts warned would end up costing the Air Force nearly twice as much money as simply buying the planes – the entire affair was halted by a criminal investigation.
What made the leasing ploy ultimately impossible to carry out was not the fact that it suborned the Pentagon’s acquisition rules (arcane and bureaucratic though they be), but that, in fact, it was worse than idiotic – it was the end-product of a criminal enterprise.
As principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and management, Darleen Druyan was responsible for oversight of major procurement programs such as the replacement of the aging fleet of KC-135 aerial refueling tankers that have served so well for the past four decades. And it was Ms. Druyun who cooked the books in favor of the Boeing Co. when it came up with the scheme to lease (“No down payment! Easy monthly payments!”) a fleet of tanker conversions of the B-767 jetliner.
As we have read over the past few months, Ms. Druyun, in collusion with a key Boeing official, manipulated the contract award process to favor Boeing over other aerospace firms interested in bidding on the tanker replacement. She also managed, court records show, to inflate the estimated unit price of each K-767 from $120 million to $215 million – a cozy “parting gift” (her own words) to Boeing of about $9 billion given the 100-plane package that Congress had approved several years back. In turn, Boeing secretly agreed to hire Ms. Druyun for a $250,000-per-year job and threw in other small change, such as keeping her daughter and daughter’s boyfriend on the company payroll.
Fortunately for the American taxpayer and the honest aerospace firms doing business with the Soviet economy – oops, I mean the Defense Department – Ms. Druyun was ultimately caught out. The tanker lease deal is dead, despite the attempts of Boeing bobbleheads in the Illinois and Washington state congressional delegations to argue otherwise.
To date, her criminal ambitions have forced the resignation of Boeing’s top executive and the manager who collaborated with Ms. Druyun; led to the withdrawal of Air Force Gen. Greg Martin (a longtime colleague of hers in the Air Force acquisition bureaucracy) as commander of the U.S. Pacific Command; and prompted the Defense Department Inspector General to review a number of other major defense contracts that she oversaw.
If you want to feel sorry for anyone in this sordid affair, aim your condolences at the overworked KC-135 aircrews and maintainers. It is they who will have to shoulder the burden of keeping their aging aircraft airworthy for additional years to come as Congress and the Air Force struggle to restart the now-derailed effort to provide them with the new aircraft they so desperately need.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=55&rnd=393.2064736440606
Ellie