Well, no one on this side of the Atlantic would have said anything if you had decided from day one that a tanker for the USAF must be built by a nominally US company. Hey, I come from a country that just does that in order to maintain a certain degree of sovereignty over key technologies and capabilities.
What riles me, however, and other people in Europe is not even the decision of the GAO. It is the entire smear campaign that ensued the decision to award the contract to Airbus to put pressure on the administration. It is the accusation that EADS is corrupt (it is certainly corrupt as any company of this size and in this field of activity, no more no less), that EADS is half Russian, that Airbus manufactures crap products, that Airbus = Crashbush, that (as Ship and other have been arguing) the contract should be overturned because Airbus is partly French (again, no trouble with the fact that the French be excluded a priori, but to use it as an argument ex post is dishonest). It is the argument that if Europe is able to compete with the US in the aerospace industry, or at least that of the manufacturing of airliners, it is only because they are a bunch of cheats (ie airbus has become a peer competitors to Boeing only because it is heavily subsidised (which, btw, is not even correct), not because there are a few decent engineers and industrialists in Europe).
I don’t know, maybe it is the way the US democracy works with a highly confrontational approach and we are too sensitive to it, but in any case it does not go down too well this side of the Atlantic.
Not bad….but…..the US is not a democracy…..(thank god)…… it’s a constitutional republic.
Sign In
