DAR: Defense Acquisition Regulations

Aviation Week reports yet another attempt to clean up the defense acquisition mess. The system that brings us cost over runs, late delivery, outrageous costs, and $600 toilet seats.
" An effective defense acquisition enterprise must ... be trust based and founded upon ethical comportments by all parties. Today a lack of trust interferes with the relationship between Congress, the Defense Department and the defense industry. While the causes are varied, the predominant among them is the adversarial nature of the government industry relationship that has evolved over the past decades. The result is a damaging increase in legal wrangling, protests concerning contract awards and lack of candor between the government and the private sector."

Take the Air Force tanker bidding fiasco. The Air Force (my old service!) issued a vague request for quotations (RFQ). It failed to spec the size of the aircraft desired but had pages and pages of "scoring points" (so many points if the plane can do this, so many points if the plane can do that etc). Boeing bid a plane the size of the existing tanker (KC135), on the theory that fifty years of satisfaction with the KC135 means that size is the right size. Airbus bid a much larger aircraft, mostly because that's the only size they had in production at the time. Airbus won the contract. Boeing, faced with the loss of a giant contract, enough work to keep the company going for 20 years, double checked the Air Force scoring. They found the Air Force had slanted the scoring process to tip the contract to Airbus, and a court agreed with them. In short, the Air Force was not candid with Boeing. They wanted a bigger plane, but they didn't tell Boeing. Worse , the Air Force RFQ failed to spec the desired aircraft size.
Result. Years of time wasted, a number of reputations trashed, zillions of dollars down the drain, and a whole lot of angry Europeans, who think they are getting robbed by the Yankees. It doesn't get much worse than this.
In this case, the Air Force instead of running an honest competition, tried to tip the job to Airbus. And they were so clumsy that they lost in court.
Probably there were some Air Force officers with a grudge against Boeing on the tanker selection board. Nobody ever talked about it, but that's about the only explanation for such a screwup.