Belt Auction

Should US Defense contracts be opened to European bidders?

Like the $35 billion Air Force refueling tanker fleet bidding extended today for 60 days to get Airbus bids. Making it more competitive for Boeing is the reasoning, but how about the jobs created in the US, isn't this a stimulus with results? good input, keep going, maybe we can learn something!

Public Comments

1. yes, we need to ship more jobs overseas and go deeper into debt as a nation. i'm certain, if political prostitution by foreign corporations was allowed in D.C. (can you hear the sucking sound?) that Airbus would love for you to serve on their lobbying team. http://www.constitutionparty.com
2. Only if there are no qualified US companies.
3. No one outside of the Air Force understands what's going on. Here's the cliff note version. Boeing wants to charge us twice what Airbus will. For double the cost we get 80 fewer planes and they're leased to the government (not even sold to the Air Force). If Airbus gets the contract billions of dollars will pour into Alabama as they've already built the facilities necessary to manufacture the planes. The French will only work on 20% of each plane. Boeing is union controlled in a heavily democrat state. You do the math. This isn't about national security or outsourcing jobs (which Boeing would do). This is about payback to the unions.
4. Are you implying that military spending should be some kind of JOBS PROGRAM!!!! If ONLY foreign companies could sell to the military, would we only buy the stuff we REALLY need?
5. Absolutely NOT. It's funny that you mentioned the Air Force Tanker contract. First of all, you need to know that Airbus is heavily subsided by various European Governments and therefore is already "ahead" of Boeing financially when they put there proposal for the Tanker Contract. Did you know that Airbus gets reimbursed for all it's Research and Development failures? Think about that for one second. Compare that to Boeing's situation. When Boeing decides to commit to building a new commercial airliner from scratch - a brand new program - it essentially puts entire "livelihood" on the line. If that airliner fails to get orders, Boeing goes out of business - even with it's military contracts. To put it in better perspective, lets look at Airbus. It's been in existence since around 1972 but hadn't been a "real player" in the world military or commercial aviation until the early/mid 1990's. It's first venture into the commercial/freighter airplanes was the A300 in 1974/75. That airplane had very little success in the marketplace as Boeing's aircraft had already had a huge head start and the fact Boeing and it's competitors had successfully fulfilled the need in the marketplace. Now before we make this a Boeing vs Airbus thing lets remember that Boeing had won most of the commercial marketshare competing against Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas. The A300 actually was not a very good aircraft compared to the competitors at the time - the L-1011, DC-10, Boing 707, and Boeing 747 were already flying. So what happened from the A300 to the A320? Well there is about a 20 year gap where Airbus was trying to develop aircraft that would be accepted in the marketplace. That plane would be the A320 - 20 years from the A300 to the A320. However, Airbus was not able to produce an aircraft accepted by the marketplace for 20 years not because the planes were built in Europe but because it's technology and aircraft weren't as good - the Company didn't have the experience in building quality aircraft. So all that development over 20 years - who paid for that? How did a company that produced one type of aircraft - a twin engine, twin aisle aircraft called an A300 that basically "flopped". Well it's easy to explain. In fact during those 20 years France, Spain, Germany and some of England's taxpayer dollars went to Airbus to keep the company "afloat". So Airbus basically had it's Research and Development, essentially the most expensive part of running an aircraft corporation was paid for. Airbus NEVER had to account for it's failures - and to say in 20 years they had no failures is simply absurd. In fact, the French and German Governments have agreed to support Airbus should the incur any massive losses. Basically, Airbus "can't fail" because it has unlimited funds and doesn't "need to be accountable" for anything. If what I wrote seems like "sour grapes", it's not. I had actually done a lot of research on this subject and I'm trying to tone down the specifics so this doesn't become insanely detailed. I actually was getting more and more angry as I read about how Airbus was able to stay in business during that 1970's and 1980's AND the circumstances behind the USAF Tanker bid. Don't forget that Boeing had won the initial contract in 2004 by incorporating it's 767 into a tanker BUT THEN the whole "Boeing Hiring scandal" broke and Congress/USAF put out the bids again. Well the second bid had some BIG CHANGES to the "CORE REQUIREMENTS". Changing the requirements isn't such a bad idea if "needs" change, except in this case Congress/USAF had changed the requirements AFTER the bids were made. So basically they changed the rules after the game was just about over. These "changes" were tailor made for the A330. Even Boeing acknowledge that it would of changed the aircraft used to it's 777 had they known the USAF was going ask for the changes. LOL - I mean I couldn't make this up if I tried - no wonder Boeing went nuts - besides the fact Congress' fingerprints were all over it. Airbus had promised to build a factory in Alabama and John McCain got a nice donation for his Presidency run. Beside all the "shady stuff that was going on in Washington", I was not all that happy that a foriegn manufacture was being used for a US military purposes. The fact of the matter is Boeing is a United States company that employs over 150,000 people throughout the United States AND has recently expanded it's manufacturing capacity to included a new factory in South Carolina. So to say that Airbus would "bring jobs" to places around the country really doesn't matter because that Boeing is bringing the same jobs to the South. What Boeing has been doing the last decade really has been amazing in the fact they are changing the company to be "more American" and it's moving manufacturing plants all around the country. Boeing has ticked off a lot of people in the Pacific Northwest - it's legacy home - but the Company ha