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First, I wasn’t blaming anybody, I was saying it was bad for America.

Second, if I was going to blame someone, it would be the government, for being incapable of running this bid process properly.

This is the 3rd time they’ve done this contract. The first time, it sent a person to jail for fraud, and we were going to lease the planes.

The second, if you believe the stories, either they failed to apply their own requirements, or they mis-weighed the adherance to requirements, or they wrote the requirements stupidly to begin with and had to change them mid-stream. Or something. We had a bid, we had acceptance, and then we cancelled the thing.

Now the third is apparently written in a way that the only company that thinks they can make money is Boeing, my guess is either because they defined the requirements so narrowly that only Boeing has a plane that can be cheaply modified (making a company change an airframe probably prices them out of the contract), or Boeing is willing to take a loss on initial bid, assuming that once the project starts, there bought politicians will be able to get them additional funds when they inevitably complain that the requirements were too broad or that the government didn’t understand the bid and all the stuff the government wants is extra.

When a company walks away from a potential 40 billion dollar contract, it isn’t usually because they are being obstinate.

Of course, one interpretation is that Boeing really had the only airframe that was acceptable, which means the original “lease the planes sole-source” was the cheapest solution, and the last 5 years or so has been a waste (I made up the 5 year part, don’t remember how long ago that really was).

However you look at this, the whole bid has been a complete screw-up from day one, and in my opinion the EADS decline-bid is a sign that the process was still flawed.