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Military

The Cold War Long Over, Russian Firm Will Make Air Force Bid

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Russian cold warrior Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is long dead and with him the battle he fought with John Kennedy when Soviet–US military tensions were at their apex. Those times are remote enough in memory that a Russian aerospace company will actually bid for the Air Force contract to build a new tanker. For a time, it looked like Boeing (BA) would handle the project. Its major rival, Northrup Grumman (NOC), dropped out because it did not think it could profit from a government contract to design and build the new plane.

The Wall Street Journal and other media report that “United Aircraft Corp. of Russia is planning to bid on the $40 billion contract.” US is a group of firms controlled by the central government.

The bid will probably fail for the same reasons that a Northrup/EADS one did last year. EADS is a European company and many members of Congress did not want the jobs for building the tanker to go overseas. Political pressure scuttled what appeared to be a winning bid from Northrup/EADS. United Aircraft will almost certainly have to make sure that most of the work on the tanker will be done in America if it has any chance of weathering pressure on the Air Force from Congressman who have Boeing factories in their districts.

There are also security questions about whether the design specifications of an American military plane could be given to any Russian firm, so the Cold War is really not over at all.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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