From AFA:
LRS-B May Not Be Must-Win
Though some analysts have suggested there will be a shake-out of the major airframe primes based on who does—or who doesn’t—win the Long-Range Strike Bomber contract, Air Force acquisition chief William LaPlante suggested Friday there may be enough work to keep everyone in the game afterwards. “It’s a much bigger consideration than any one program,” LaPLante said at an AFA-sponsored, Air Force breakfast. “You have to look at the [foreign military sales] situation” as well as other known programs like the Navy’s UCLASS ISR/strike drone and intense prototyping that will attend the Air Dominance 2030 project. Three times, though, LaPlante noted, “There’s things going on in the classified world” that companies may either already have in-hand or could compete for. After looking at that, he said the Pentagon then looks at the situation “using game theory” and then sets up its source selections “in the context of that broader problem.” However, “it would be wrong … at the 11th hour” to make industrial base considerations a key discriminator, he said. While DOD can’t “control the behavior of companies” after a major award, he said it strives to avoid doing anything “inadvertently” that would “push someone out of the market.” Asked about how the industrial base would affect the LRS-B contract, pentagon acquisition executive Frank Kendall recently said, it would be awarded “on the merits” of the proposal
LRS-B Delays
—John A. Tirpak 5/18/2015
The choice of a contractor to build the Long-Range Strike Bomber will be delayed from the initial forecast of “late spring” 2015, but more important is “getting it right,” Air Force acquisition chief William LaPlante said. “It doesn’t matter to me if it’s done June 1 or July 1 or August 1,” as long as the contract is properly structured, he told reporters after an AFA-sponsored, Air Force breakfast in Arlington, Va. Asked why the award is delayed, LaPlante said, “it’s a lot of work. First of all, the teams are killing themselves,” and there continues to be a flurry of back-and-forth questions between the contractors and the Air Force that must be answered and checked. “It’s only done when it’s really done,” he said, adding that he thinks it was a “good take” for Congress to subtract $460 million from the program in Fiscal 2015 because the service wouldn’t be able to spend the whole amount anyway. Though LaPlante declined to call the contract as it is being structured “protest proof,” he did note that out of 140,000 Air Force awards last year, only 140 were protested, and of those, only two were sustained, with “corrective action” on just 20.