Pentagon panned for response to tanker lease alternative

Senate Commerce Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., continued to complain about the Bush administration's proposed lease of 100 Boeing 767 tankers in a letter Thursday to Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., and ranking member Carl Levin, D-Mich.

In the letter, McCain commended Warner and Levin for seeking an alternative to the controversial, multibillion-dollar lease plan and for calling on the Pentagon to study a number of issues related to the proposal.

But McCain rebuked the Pentagon's recent response to the committee's suggestions and accused Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz of being "nonresponsive" in his letter earlier this week to Warner and Levin.

McCain said the Pentagon response failed to refute CBO officials' earlier conclusion that the lease proposal is not properly accounted for in the federal budget, and that serious questions remain regarding the reasonableness of the price the government agreed to pay in "this noncompetitive process."

Moreover, the Pentagon inspector general's decision to formally probe the handling of the lease suggests "it would be inappropriate at this time to award a contract of this magnitude to a company that could be implicated in the investigation," McCain wrote.

McCain also attacked the Pentagon's assertion that corrosion problems plaguing the Air Force's existing fleet of KC-135E tankers could lead to a fleet-wide grounding.

"These statements, dramatic as they may be, simply are not an adequate substitute for real analysis or hard facts to spend billions of taxpayer dollars," he wrote.

In 2001, the Air Force's Economic Service Life Study, conducted by Boeing, concluded the tanker fleet was viable until 2040.

McCain also notes that the 376th Expeditionary Aircraft Maintenance Squadron is maintaining its KC-135s in the Afghanistan theater of operations at a 100 percent mission-capable rate. The Air Force claims rates for the aging tanker remain among the highest in its aircraft inventory.

"To this day, the case for urgently replacing the KC-135s remains almost entirely anecdotal and, therefore, unpersuasive," he states.

The Pentagon's response also indicated that the Air Force intends to purchase tankers at the end of the lease period, effectively conceding CBO's earlier point that the transaction is a lease-purchase, not the operating lease authorized by Congress in fiscal 2002 Defense appropriations legislation.