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2 Why
Boeing lost the $40bn tanker deal By Julian Delasantellis
the seeds of
the insurgency. According to Washington Post
writer Thomas Ricks' 2006 book Fiasco, if
you favored abortion rights in the US, no matter
how you might be otherwise qualified, (like, maybe
if you were one of the very few in the shop that
spoke Arabic) you need not have applied to work
for L Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
Authority in Baghdad.
So is the tanker
deal just another punishment of foes, and reward
to friends? Possible, but I doubt it. The air
force is saying that Northrup-Grumman and EADS
just have a better product, and maybe just this
time they're playing it straight.
You
should not think of US Air Force aerial refueling
tankers as just big flying bladders of fuel, as
just gas stations in the clouds. They're much more
than that. In reality, they are a critical
component of the entire Bush
and neo-conservative foreign policy ideology
apparatus and heritage Bush hopes to leave to his
successor.
During the American Civil War
(1861-65) naval planners of the Western world saw
the obvious superiority of ironclad,
coal-to-steam-powered warships, over the
traditional wooden-hulled wind-powered sailing
ships.
For one thing, the ironclads were
essentially impervious to anything the light
cannons of the sailing ships could shoot at them.
Also, the ironclads could serve as platforms for
much heavier and extended-range naval guns. In the
classic arms race dynamic, the obvious operational
superiority of the ironclads led all the major
Western naval powers to junk their sailing ships
in favor of ironclads by the last decades of the
19th century.
But coming along with the
benefits were drawbacks, specifically in terms of
the availability of their fuel for propulsion.
Sail-powered ships didn't have to load fuel (at
least not for the ship - for the sailors, that was
another story), they were powered by the wind,
which was, most of the time anyway, all around
them. Ironclads were propelled by coal, which
wasn't.
European naval powers soon
discovered that, if they wanted to project power
and national influence on the other side of the
globe, say in the Pacific or Indian Ocean, they
needed a reliable place where the ships could stop
for fuel - a coal-powered ship just couldn't leave
Plymouth in England or Cherbourg in France, or
Bremerhaven in Germany, with enough fuel on board
to operate effectively that far away.
Born
were the coaling stations. Since it was obvious
that God had given the white Christian men of the
West the right to just take any place on the
planet for their own uses, the search went out for
ports where supplies of coal could be stored for
use by incoming warships. While Europe itself
enjoyed the 43 years of relative peace between the
Franco-Prussian War and World War I, beyond the
horizon of the polite drawing rooms and fine fancy
dress balls of the Belle Epoque, a furious,
bare-knuckled brawl was going on all over the
world for territories, ports and power.
British naval heritage meant that it got
off to a fast start, they got, among other places,
Bermuda, Halifax, Vancouver, the Falklands, Cape
Town, Bombay (now Mumbai), Aden, Singapore,
Sydney, Hong Kong. The French mostly considered
themselves a European land power, but they still
got Guadeloupe in the West Indies, Djibouti, on
the entrance to the Red Sea, Saigon (Ho Ch Minh
City) in Indochina, and New Caledonia in the South
Pacific. With German unification occurring in
1871, it got into the game late; they had to
settle for Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika (now
Tanzania), Doula in Cameroon and Apia in Western
Samoa.
The manifest destiny of the United
States did not stop at the Pacific beaches. On
March 21, 1894, the New York Times reported that
president Grover Cleveland "is disposed to use at
least a portion of the fund of $250,000 placed at
his disposal to establish ... a coaling station in
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii". (It looks like government
officials were leaking to the Times even then.)
With Spain's defeat in the Spanish American War of
1898, America also got coaling stations in Manila,
in the Philippines, and Guantanamo, in Cuba.
Many of the coaling stations acquired in
colonialism's full flowering in the 19th century
became points of dispute or conflict in the
decolonization wave that followed World War II.
Oil had replaced coal as the fuel for naval ship
propulsion, and Germany had been crushed, divided
and left without any colonies or navy. As for the
British and the French, except for the ignominious
French effort to recolonize Indochina, nobody in
Europe had much of a stomach to travel long
distances to fight anybody for much of anything
anymore.
Now it's the 21st century. Only
one great navy, great power, bestrides the seas of
the world, that of the United States. Up until
very recently, its preferred tool of power
projection has been jet fighters and bombers
launched off its 11 long-deck aircraft carriers.
These ships do not use coal for propulsion; all
except the oldest, the USS Kitty Hawk, are nuclear
powered.
But along with the benefits are
drawbacks. The 1982 Falklands War between
Argentina and Great Britain proved that small,
cheap, essentially off-the-shelf missile
technology, as exemplified by the Argentinean
Exocet missiles that struck hard against the
British fleet, can be devastating against modern
naval assets.
To deal with these and other
threats, US aircraft carriers operating in
potentially hostile waters are accompanied by
groupings of five to 10 combat and support ships
and submarines called carrier battle groups. These
act as screens to defend the carriers.
Carrier battle groups are not cheap either
to acquire or to operate. The carriers alone cost
about $4.5 billion each, and the almost 6,000
sailors and naval aviators aboard them mean that
it costs about $300 million a year to operate one
- not including the costs that will be needed to
safely store the spent nuclear fuel for 100 years
or more. Add in the acquisition and operating
costs of the ships of the battle group, and you
can see why, even with its currently swollen
Pentagon budgets, the US can only afford to have
11 carrier battle groups in its fleet at the
present time - half of them usually in port for
maintenance of the ships and rest and family time
for the crews.
If a crisis breaks out some
place in the world and America decides it wants to
project power and influence, like if it wants to
bomb someone, there's no guarantee that, like a
cop on the beat, that there will be a carrier
battle group around when its needed.
Also,
there are inherent limitations as to just how much
power an aircraft carrier can actually project.
The relatively small flight deck area means that
planes taking off from the carriers just can't
carry a very large bomb or missile payload.
Many of these problems can be solved by
using land-based air assets in the power
projection role. The US Air Force's three main
strategic bombers, the B-52, the B-1B and the B-2
(also known as the Stealth bomber) each carry,
depending on model, between four and 10 times the
bomb payload of the carrier navy's main bomber,
the various versions of the F-18.
In
addition, in contrast to the huge effort and
expense the navy spends to protect its carrier
battle groups at sea, the modern, technological,
Western air force's assets have proven to be
essentially invulnerable once they're airborne, as
demonstrated by the relative impunity with which
the US Air Force over Iraq, or the Israeli Air
Force over Syria and Lebanon, conduct their ground
attack operations.
But the drawback of
land-based aviation is, of course, the land.
Unlike carrier-based airpower, in which the runway
essentially floats over to near where the target
is, the inherent range limitations of land-based
airplanes means that they must take off from a
fixed runway at an airbase, and then return to
land, from some point no more than a few thousand
kilometers from where the target is.
But
what if your foreign policies have alienated so
many people, like the 1.5 billion or so Muslims
living in an arc between Northwest Africa and
Indonesia and Malaysia, that no national leader in
the area would dream of allowing an American
airbase on his territory? What if, in many of the
non-Muslim countries as well, your belligerent,
unilateral "cowboy" diplomacy means you can't get
an airbase in there, either?
What if,
stripped of all the flowery rhetoric you deliver
once a year at the United Nations, the essence of
your foreign policy is simply a never-ending
search for new countries to bomb?
You need
a way to get the benefits of land-based aircraft
for power projection, without the drawbacks of
needing to find friendly countries willing to host
your local airfields.
In short, you need
really good airborne refueling tankers - the
coaling stations of the modern age.
This
is what I believe led the Bush administration to
forsake Boeing. The company's own data states that
the Northrup-Grumman and EADS contender for the
KC-45 had a fuel cargo capacity almost 25% greater
than Boeing's. How many more bombing runs over
Iran, over Syria, over Pakistan, or any other
Muslim or other country that gains investiture to
the "axis of evil" could you do with the extra
bomber flight distances implied by the added
capacities of the Northrup-Grumman and EADS
refueler?
And unlike Britain and its
coaling stations, using refueling tankers as
imperial force projection multipliers means you
don't even have to put your young soldiers' boots
down on these foreign soils, separating them from
their beloved cultural icons of Taco Bell and
flush toilets, making them susceptible to all
those yucky diseases that all "those people"
always have.
An aircrew can leave on a
mission from a base in Middle America, get
refueled a few times in mid-air, drop a few dozen
tons of ordnance on some dusty corner of the
Middle East, and still get home in time to watch
their kids' soccer game, or to vote on that
night's American Idol.
Who needs
diplomacy when you have aerial refueling? In much
the same way that Vladimir Lenin said that
communism was Soviet power plus electricity, it
now appears that neo-conservatism is jingoistic
arrogance plus the KC-45.
But this is all
little solace to poor Seattle. To paraphrase
Ernest Lawrence Thayer's famous 1888 poem,
Casey at the Bat.
"Oh, somewhere in
this favored land the sun is shining
bright, The band is playing somewhere, and
somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men
are laughing, and little children shout; But
there is no joy in Seattle - mighty Boeing has
struck out."
Julian
Delasantellis is a management consultant,
private investor and educator in international
business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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