The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee promised to hold an open hearing on the contract for the long range strike bomber following a closed briefing on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s a classified brief, I can’t comment on it,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told reporters at the Capitol at the conclusion of the briefing. “We will have hearings on it, I promise.”
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Listed as witnesses were Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the military deputy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition; Randall Walden, the director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office and William Bailey, the system program director for the long range strike-bomber. The briefing before the Senate Armed Services aubcommittee on airland, lasted about an hour.
The long range strike-bomber, officially named the B-21 at an event last week, will replace the B-52 and B-1 bombers. Northrop Grumman was awarded the contract, estimated to be valued at $80 billion, last year and can begin work on the plane now that a protest by the team of Boeing and Lockheed Martin has been denied.
Last week, McCain said he would block the contract for the bomber over its cost-plus structure, which he said historically has been prone to cost overruns.
“It is an evil that has grown and grown and grown over the years and I will not stand for it,” McCain told reporters at a breakfast event in Washington hosted by the Defense Writers Group.
Asked if anything the Air Force officials said during the briefing had changed his mind, McCain responded: “I’ve always felt the same way about cost-plus contracts.”
The Air Force has said the engineering and manufacturing development phase would be cost-plus. The initial production of the first five aircraft would be through a firm fixed-price contract.