Northrop Grumman celebrates bomber contract award

Doth Boeing and Lockheed Martin protest too much?

Maybe.

Northrop Grumman Corp. executives and Florida lawmakers expressed confidence Monday that those two companies formal protest of the Air Force's awarding to Northrop Grumman the multi-billion contract for the Long Range Strike-Bomber would fail.

Their comments came at a Northrop Grumman rally at the defense contractor's hangar at Melbourne International Airport. About 700 people, mostly Northrop Grumman employees, attended the rally where they waved flags and cheered on the lawmakers who supported the reasons why the company succeeded in winning the contract.

The contract is expected to lead to 1,800 new engineering and program management jobs in Brevard County. The lifetime value of the contract is expected to top $100 billion.

"You all won that competition hands down," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando, adding that at the end of the protest, "Northrop will be left standing."

Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, said he spoke with a four-star general soon after the award was announced  last month. The general, according to Posey, said "there is not a chance" the Boeing/Lockheed Martin protest would be successful in overturning the original decision.

Northrop Grumman wins USAF bomber contract

"He said, 'This time we have crossed every single "T" and we have dotted every single "I" and this contract will stand firm,'" Posey said.

Gov. Rick Scott also was on hand to kick off his $1 billion tax cut tour and also explain how his exemption of sales tax on manufacturing equipment helps companies like Northrop Grumman prosper in Florida. Scott said he has been to a lot of job announcements in the past several months but "I don't know of a bigger announcement than this one today," Scott said.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in its protest to the  U.S. Government Accountability Office, said the selection process for the bomber was "fundamentally flawed."

"The cost evaluation performed by the government did not properly reward the contractors’ proposals to break the upward-spiraling historical cost curves of defense acquisitions, or properly evaluate the relative or comparative risk of the competitors’ ability to perform, as required by the solicitation," the companies said in a statement. "That flawed evaluation led to the selection of Northrop Grumman over the industry-leading team of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, whose proposal offers the government and the warfighter the best possible LRS-B at a cost that uniquely defies the prohibitively expensive trends of the nation’s past defense acquisitions."

Tom Vice, Northrop Grumman's corporate vice president sector president of aerospace systems, said the contract award was based on the company's past work on the bomber and it's deep history in developing stealth technology.

The only one surprised, Vice said, "is the team that's never done this before."

Contact Price at 321-242-3658 or wprice@floridatoday.com

Boeing, Lockheed protest Northrop bomber contract