land war
Bell’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor won the US Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) competition. (Bell jar)
WASHINGTON – The Army and Bell Textron have been cleared to proceed with the V-280 Valor tiltrotor as the new Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) after the Government Accountability Office today rejected Sikorsky-Boeing’s price protest.
“In rejecting the protest, GAO concluded that the Army reasonably assessed Sikorsky’s proposal as technically unacceptable because Sikorsky had failed to provide the level of architectural detail required by law [request for proposal] RFP,” wrote Kenneth Patton, managing associate general counsel for procurement law at GAO, in a brief statement sent today.
A full report of that decision is not yet publicly available, but Patton explained that the Sikorsky-Boeing team questioned several areas of the Army’s FLRAA decision, including: evaluation factors related to “engineering design and development” and architecture; “argued” that the service should have considered Bell’s proposal “unacceptable”; questioned the cost/price assessment; and the best compromise decision.
“GAO also rejected Sikorsky’s various claims about the acceptability of Bell’s proposal, including claims that the agency’s evaluation violated the terms of the bid or any applicable procurement law or regulation,” Patton wrote.
“GAO’s decision expresses no opinion on the merits of these proposals,” he later added. “Judgments as to which vendor will be most successful in meeting government requirements are reserved for procurement entities and are subject only to statutory and regulatory requirements.”
Despite today’s decision, the Sikorsky-Boeing team said it still believes it has presented the “most powerful, affordable and low-risk” design and is unwilling to give up on the deal, which is valued at up to $70 billion.
“We will review GAO’s decision and determine our next steps,” the team added.
A spokesman for Bell could not be immediately reached for comment.
In a brief statement, the Army’s Program Executive Office for Aviation thanked GAO for its “thorough review” and endorsement of the service’s contracting decision.
“The FLRAA source selection panel followed a deliberate, rigorous process,” the Army added. “GAO’s decision demonstrates that we have identified the proposal that represents the best value for the Army and the taxpayer, and we look forward to reviewing the full GAO report.”
A long-awaited decision
GAO’s decision comes after it spent more than three months weighing Sikorsky-Boeing’s protest against the Army’s decision in early December 2022 to eschew the Defiant X in favor of Bell Textron’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor. The contest’s stakes: the right to eventually replace thousands of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and reshape the global military rotorcraft market.
Major General Robert Barrie, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation, said after the Valor’s victory that the service used a “best value approach” to make its decision.
“Given…the requirements the Army had for us, we then conducted an evaluation with people across the company to identify a number of factors that would provide the Army with an optimal approach,” said the two-star General.
Barrie declined to elaborate on those factors, but stressed that the service conducted a “comprehensive analysis of a variety of factors.” Based on that decision, the Army awarded Bell a deal valued at up to $1.3 billion with an initial commitment of $232 million over the next 19 months. It also hired the company to advance the aircraft’s preliminary design and to provide “virtual prototypes of a potentially model-based system,” Barrie explained.
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Bell won’t build an aircraft during this time, but if the program goes as planned, the Army can order an unspecified number of Valors in a deal worth up to $70 billion.
Given what’s at stake for this program, many analysts assumed the Sikorsky-Boeing team would appeal the decision. By the end of December, she filed an initial protest with the Government Accountability Office before filing an additional one on February 6.
“Based on a thorough review of Army information and feedback, Lockheed Martin Sikorsky, on behalf of Team Defiant, is challenging the FLRAA decision,” the team wrote in a Dec. 28 statement. “The data and discussions lead us to believe that the proposals were not consistently evaluated to achieve the best value in the interests of the Army, our soldiers, and American taxpayers.”
The team claimed that Defiant X is more like the “capable, affordable, and least risky solution.”
Ahead of today’s revelation, a Sikorsky spokesman declined to give Breaking Defense any further details about the team’s protest. In recent months, however, lawmakers from Connecticut, where Sikorsky is based, have publicly targeted the service’s decision.
“Despite working directly with the Army, we as members of Congress have not yet been able to get the answers we need as to how the Army made its initial decision on FLRAA. This is unacceptable,” seven lawmakers from the House and Senate wrote in a statement December 29, 2022. “We hope that this protest and the forthcoming trial will shed light on the Army’s decision-making and that the highest level of fidelity will be practiced throughout .”
One of those lawmakers, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, has made subsequent comments in various publications, including one on March 2 in Military.com. In it, Murphy claimed the Army still hasn’t notified lawmakers of its FLRAA selection and said it won’t do so until the protest is settled.
Way ahead
Today’s decision comes as lawmakers are conducting their first hearings on the Army’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2024. In it, the service outlines a plan to spend $622 million on research and development of FLRAA middle-tier acquisition efforts between FY22 and FY25, while allocating $958 million in FY24 to purchase FLRAA hardware and software demand that are “necessary” for the prototype.
The service plans to begin purchasing the plane in FY27 and said it would request $572 million for this year, followed by $613 million for FY28, according to budget justification documents.
It’s not clear if Connecticut lawmakers will continue to rail against the Army’s decision and potentially block FLRAA funding for years to come.
This story may be updated with new information.