The U.S. Air Force is not encouraging or discouraging a possible proposal where Boeing and Northrop Grumman team up to build the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, Air Force Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Will Roper told reporters on the sidelines of a recent industry conferece.
“We are looking for the proposal that is best value to the Air Force,” Roper said Sept. 10 at the Defense News Conference. He said the government should “always be open” to considering the best solution for a program.
“We think that we have [a request for proposals] that allows us to have a very wide spectrum of proposals and we’ll evaluate them based on the criteria laid out to those vendors,” said Roper. “We don’t know enough now to know what the right acquisition approach is. … So we’ll see what happens when the window closes.”
In July, Boeing said it would not bid on the contract to provide the next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile because Northrop Grumman had an “unfair” advantage through ownership of solid-rocket motor manufacturer Orbital ATK.
The Air Force expects the GBSD program to cost around $100 billion over the course of its life. Building and deploying the missiles would account for some $25 billion of that, according to Air Force procurement notices released this summer. The service plans to buy about 600 GBSD missiles, 400 of which it would deploy.
