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.The project encompasses a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers to enable the employment of U.S.air power anywhere in the world where the nation’s security requires it.Air Force officials have designated this tanker program as the highest in weapons-buying priority.Because of the size of this program and its importance to national security, this competition has been receiving unusual attention from many sources.The larger the number of involved participants and the greater their influences, the broader becomes the spread of possibilities that require consideration.The main large contractors, the host of smaller but important sub-contractors, members of Congress pressing for awards to suppliers in their states and districts, and the media—all are in the act.Politics intertwines with national security in ways enormously difficult to predict.The impact of winning or losing the contractPrinciples of Forecasting54competition on the industry teams involved will be enormous, of course, as will be the impact of the award on the economic health of the regions where those companies are situated.Forecasters attempting to predict how the tanker competition will end will need to create possibility lists as huge as the number of billions of dollars involved.For the management of Northrop Grumman, the key possibility to ponder initially was whether its chance of winning would be high enough to justify allocating the necessary financial resources and the efforts of a large team of its most outstanding engineers that alternatively might be employed on other projects.Filling the Air Force’s tanker needs with the highest performance and at the lowest cost involved the careful selecting of the airplane itself, its engines, the apparatus for transfer of the fuel from tanker to bombers and fighter craft, and an array of equipment for control, navigation, communication, and self-protection.Study by Northrop’s engineers of the availability of suitably large commercial aircraft made it clear that only Boeing and EADS’s Airbus subsidiary could possibly provide aircraft candidates for consideration.Northrop’s analysts found themselves concluding that an existing EADS plane would be superior to any Boeing plane for the Air Force’s announced requirements for the tankers as to the quantity of fuel carried, available space for passengers and freight, costs, and potential for on-time delivery.3EADS was anxious to team with Northrop Grumman for this competition, as was General Electric to supply the engines.A possibility deserving a high probability of occurrence was that some politicians might be prejudiced against the participation of EADS because that company is based in Europe.The criticismPossibilities, Then Predictions55would especially not be surprising from those senators or representatives whose areas happen to house company facilities that would lose out if the Northrop-EADS team won.Now, it happens that the U.S.Defense Department (DoD) implemented years ago the practice of obtaining designs and manufactured parts from companies headquartered in the NATO countries and other friendly nations (for example, Australia and Israel).The U.S.Congress passed legislation making this international sourcing legal and proper, this to ensure the DoD’s filling its needs at minimum cost and encouraging military cooperation with its closest allies.4 In the past in accordance with accepted practices, the U.S.military has purchased bombs from France, helicopter equipment from Italy, and aircraft engines from Britain.The United States, however, is the leader by far in export of military gear, this constituting a very substantial part of U.S.exports.U.S.allies purchase many times more military equipment from America than America purchases from them.(Parts being made in one country for assembly in another is particularly common for civilian airplanes, each company needing to look for quality parts at the lowest cost.)5The plan to meet head-on this “foreign source” negative possibility was for EADS to become an American as well as a European company with regard to airplane production.The Northrop-EADS team boldly proposed that two new plants would be built in the U.S.state of Alabama—one in which the proven EADS commercial airplane would be assembled and the other in which Northrop Grumman would add to and modify the plane to make it a militarized tanker.(Moreover, EADS planned also to assemble in its new Alabama facility its freight-carryingPrinciples of Forecasting56commercial planes.) If the contract were won by Northrop Grumman, the number of new jobs created in the United Stateswas estimated at 48,000.6Northrop concluded that the probability of its winning the competition was high enough to justify bidding against Boeing for this tanker contract.Indeed, the U.S
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