Tanker tinkering

They are about to release the latest Request for Proposal (RFP in Pentagon-speak) for the USAF tanker. This is the bungled Boeing/Airbus competition that they are doing over again. According to Aviation Week, the new RFP will favor the larger Airbus offering. There will be a scoring system giving extra points for more range, cargo capacity, fuel offload capacity and more passenger seats. Translation, for out of touch Boeing suits in need of hearing aids, the Air Force wants a bigger aircraft. If Boeing wants the job, it needs to rebid a tanker based on the bigger Boeing 777 , rather than the smaller, older, going out of production, 767. Or even the brand new, not yet in production, all plastic 787 Dreamliner.
Of course, the Air Force should have decided how big a tanker they want to buy in the first place and put that in the original RFP. That might have prevented the disaster of the previous bid, where the losing Boeing protested and GAO subsequently upheld Boeing.
Aviation week opined that switching from the 767 to the 777 would be too hard for Boeing to do in the time allotted. I don't believe that. The bid paperwork (all 50,000 pages of it) is on a computer. Someone tells the computer to go thru and change 767 to 777. The actual engineering is simple, omit the seats, add some tanks. Bolt a boom on the tail. Keep everything else the same as the civilian version so you can use the same parts, flight simulator, flight trainings and so on.
If Boeing thinks this is too much trouble, Airbus gets the job. That's not the end of the world. Airbus uses American made engines, and engines are half the price of the finished aircraft.