Nomination for top Air Force civilian post stalls
Senator intends to put a hold on the nomination because she is concerned Defense officials have failed to recognize the "gravity" of mistakes in their efforts to acquire aerial refueling tankers.
The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday approved the nominations of two senior Air Force officers, but the nominee to fill the service's top civilian post may be stalled indefinitely.
During a closed session, the panel overwhelmingly approved Gen. Norton Schwartz to be the Air Force's next chief of staff and Gen. Duncan McNabb to become the head of U.S. Transportation Command, aides said.
But the panel bypassed a vote on Michael Donley's nomination for Air Force secretary.
A committee spokesman could not explain at presstime why there was no vote on Donley's nomination, considered the least contentious of the three nominations. Donley, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer, has served as acting secretary since Michael Wynne was forced to leave the job last month.
But the votes on the other nominations came the same day Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., wrote Defense Secretary Robert Gates to warn that she intends to put a hold on Donley's nomination because of continued frustrations surrounding the Air Force's handling of the competition for the contract to build a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers.
Air Force and Defense Department officials, Cantwell wrote, "have not recognized the gravity of the flaws in the tanker acquisition process."
Earlier this year, the Air Force awarded a $35 billion contract for the tankers to a team led by Northrop Grumman and EADS, the European parent company of Airbus. But Boeing Co., the losing bidder, filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office, which ultimately sided with Boeing after finding several significant errors in the Air Force's selection process.
Boeing has planned to build its tanker, a modified 767 aircraft, at its plant in Everett, Wash.
GAO's findings prompted Gates to reopen the contract and place his top acquisition officer in charge of the new competition in lieu of having the Air Force oversee it.
But Cantwell said she is not convinced that the Pentagon will conduct a "fair rebid" on the tanker contract that addresses all of the problems found by GAO.
In addition, Cantwell told Gates that she is "concerned that the leadership of the Air Force and [Defense Department] have not fully considered serious national security issues, including several classified matter that I was briefed on by the intelligence community," Cantwell wrote.
The issues, she added, "raise troubling questions that are much broader than the selection of a new tanker."
Cantwell's hold on Donley's nomination will continue "until such time that I feel the Air Force and DOD have adequately addressed all these issues," she wrote.
Cantwell, who is not a member of the Senate Armed Services panel, has no authority to keep Donley's nomination bottled up in committee. But she can tie up a floor vote on the nomination indefinitely.
The committee's approval of Schwartz and McNabb followed an unusually heavy vetting process during which the panel held several closed-door sessions to discuss the nominations. Schwartz's nomination, in particular, had drawn concerns from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who believed the four-star general was not forthcoming in classified testimony in the run-up to and during the early days of the Iraq war in 2003.
Schwartz, who was director for operations on the Joint Staff at the time, made a rare second appearance before the panel during a classified session this week.