Cry Lockheed a River

In one of the truly great modern films, “A Few Good Men,” troubled Marine Lt. Jonathan Kendrick (portrayed by Keifer Sutherland) doesn’t care much for the Navy lawyers visiting his base. “I like all you Navy boys,” he sarcastically quips. “Every time we’ve gotta go someplace to fight, you fellas always give us a ride.”

The Army, on the other hand, provides its own ride for its soldiers, both into and out of a fight.

Nowadays, that is often aboard a UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter. It’s a great piece of equipment, but its design, a product of Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sikorsky, is nearly 50 years old. The Pentagon needs to replace it with a next-generation attack and transport vehicle that can continue to support troops and provide air cover.

As it goes in such situations, the bidding was opened in 2019 to build the “Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft.” The Army wanted the FLRAA to be “…the next generation of vertical lift, assault, and intra-theater aeromedical evacuation aircraft.” In announcing the contract award last year, the Army stated it had “followed a deliberate and disciplined process in evaluating proposals to ensure rigorous review and equitable treatment of both competitors.”

After a typically fair and scrutinized review process, the Army passed on Sikorsky and went with Bell Helicopter/Textron’s bid. It’s been expected that production on the new craft will begin as soon as this year. But there is a catch: Lockheed Martin is throwing a fit over the fact that its design wasn’t chosen for the project, petulantly trying to gum up the works.

First, it seems the contractor tried to flex its considerable lobbying muscle in Congress by encouraging lawmakers to re-shape the aircraft requirements to fit its proposal. Sensibly, that effort didn’t get anywhere, because thankfully (surprisingly?) lawmakers don’t claim to have a better idea of what the Army needs, at least design and capability-wise, than the Army does.

But like an idiot kid at a dinner table, Lockheed wouldn’t settle down, filing a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saying, in effect, that it hadn’t been treated fairly. Waah. That the Army hadn’t been clear about what it wanted. Double waah. And anyway, its design would have been better…and so forth. Waah, waah, waah.

“The bottom line on Lockheed Martin’s protest of the rotorcraft competition is the claim that the Army acted in bad faith, knowing from the outset that it wanted a tiltrotor for its next assault aircraft and bending the rules to assure that is what it would get,” wrote defense analyst Loren Thompson in an excellent analysis in Forbes earlier this year. If you want the whole, detailed story beyond my quick take, read Thompson’s piece, please.

Anyway, that protest went nowhere.

“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 agency’s Kenneth E. Patton announced. Thompson, in the aforementioned Forbes piece, notes that: “Federal agencies almost always accept the recommendations rendered by GAO in such reviews.”

That respect for the GAO should go both ways. When a contractor has lost a bid, lost an attempt to lobby, and lost an accounting review, a good actor would accept the decision and move on to compete another day. But we’re talking about Lockheed Martin, which persists in insisting it submitted the ‘most capable, affordable and lowest-risk’ design and says it is determining its “next steps.” Never say die, huh?

The “next steps” they speak of should be guided by lessons we all learned in childhood. There was always some little cretin who hated to lose so much that if he was, say, behind in a board game and facing defeat, he would just flip the game board and scatter all the pieces. That kid often got a nice smack and was seldom invited back to play until he could demonstrate an ability to behave.

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Lockheed Martin is an award-winning defense contractor and an amazing company, and its systems help and have helped protect America in many ways. The company is a critical cog in our national security apparatus. However, the contractor should eschew attempts to change the rules and wreck the games it loses — and learn to behave. “Losing is an important part of winning,” basketball legend Michael Jordan once said. Whiny government contractors who sometimes don’t get their way would do well to take those words to heart.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this article credited Jack Nicholson with playing the role of Marine Lt. Jonathan Kendrick in the film “A Few Good Men.” In fact, the actor was Kiefer Sutherland. We apologize for the error.