Murtha won't add tanker provision to supplemental

House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., is abandoning efforts to attach language to the fiscal 2009 wartime supplemental spending bill that would require the Air Force to split a hotly contested contract for aerial refueling tankers between Boeing Co. and a team led by Northrop Grumman and the European consortium EADS.

Murtha has touted the so-called split buy as the only way to get new tankers to the field quickly. "Chairman Murtha remains committed to working out a plan that gets tankers in the air faster," his spokesman said Friday. "The committee will address this issue in the coming months within the fiscal 2010 [defense appropriations] bill."

Last year, the Northrop-EADS team won the contract to build a fleet of tankers, worth an estimated $35 billion. But the Government Accountability Office upheld Boeing's protest of the award and the Pentagon canceled the contract.

Murtha and others fear the new competition will have the same ending and cause more delays in replacing the KC-135 tankers. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called the idea of splitting the contract a "very bad mistake for the U.S. taxpayer."