Temper Tantrums Don’t Win Wars
You can’t win them all.
For example, those who are old enough to remember Coach Bobby Knight winning college basketball championships at Indiana are also old enough to remember that some seasons didn’t work out quite the way he’d planned. (In sports, they don’t call seasons where you lose more than win a “losing year,” they use the much more optimistic “building year.”)
Knight never reacted very well to these, and because of that he delivered one of the signature moments of his career: during a loss to Purdue he tossed a chair across the court. He goes down in history as a winner, of course, but also as a sore loser.
There is a lesson here for defense contractor Lockheed Martin. The company makes some crucial systems: planes and ships that have absolutely helped protect our country. It is a champion of American power any way you look at it. But Lockheed can also be a sore loser.
For example, the Army needs to build a “Future Long Range Assault Aircraft” to eventually replace the aging Black Hawk helicopter fleet to move and supply troops. The military has very specific requirements, of course, and it stated those in a Request for Proposals it delivered to defense contractors. After accepting competitive bids, the Pentagon awarded the $7 billion contract to Bell Textron.
But Lockheed subsidiary Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation was also a bidder, and it wanted that contract. Like a sore loser, it complained to members of Congress, hoping they might use their spending power to force the Army to change its mind, or its specifications. When that failed and lawmakers deferred to Pentagon experts – like they probably should – the company filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office, seeking to have the decision overturned.
That protest was swiftly and completely swatted away.
“In denying the protest, GAO concluded that the Army reasonably evaluated Sikorsky’s proposal as technically unacceptable because Sikorsky failed to provide the level of architectural detail required by the RFP,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in April. “GAO also denied Sikorsky’s various allegations about the acceptability of Bell’s proposal, including the assertion that the agency’s evaluation violated the terms of the solicitation or applicable procurement law or regulation. Finally, GAO dismissed Sikorsky’s additional arguments on the basis that Sikorsky was no longer an interested party to further challenge the procurement.”
After that slapdown, watch out for flying chairs at Lockheed HQ. And they haven’t given up yet! “We remain confident the Lockheed Martin Sikorsky and Boeing team submitted the most capable, affordable and lowest-risk Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft solution,” Lockheed said in a statement. “We will review the GAO’s decision and determine our next steps.”
May we suggest simply accepting that you didn’t have the best bid, and moving on to the next project, where Lockheed can continue to add value for our military?
Protests happen everywhere all the time, and everyone is entitled to speak up and speak out. Even Bobby Knight started with words: he was speaking to, then yelling at, the basketball officials before he finally threw the chair.
Lockheed and its subsidiaries are free to protest about a particular decision. In fact they already have done so, repeatedly. Those protests didn’t carry any weight with the military, with lawmakers, or with government accountants. So, the protests were dismissed, as they should have been.
The time for bidding, protesting, and appealing is long past. The military needs to get on with the FLRAA program and get those ‘copters into action.
Meanwhile our military needs to move ahead with its planning. It wins wars with the best people and the best equipment. China wants to take over the world, and now is not the time for temper tantrums. The choice for Lockheed is clear: It can continue to be a sore loser, or it can accept this as a setback, continue building its other weapon systems, and make a better proposal next time. Just call it a building year, guys.
Jared Whitley is a longtime DC politico, having worked in the US Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai.
